"This one story," I continued, seeing I had his full attention, "was about you, I think."

"Me?"

"Yeah. Well, you just have to listen to my theory, all right?"

He sat back like he was getting ready to watch a ten-hour movie marathon. Instead of looking totally comfortable, though, I could see some dull, anxious glow in his eyes.

I started. "I've been reading the papers I pulled from the trunk. I want to go back and get more of them, but I'm beginning to think that whoever wrote them was . . . sort of . . . studying people. I mean, there's the one story that kind of sounds like it's about me, right? And then I read one about a really big girl who sounds a lot like the Ham. There are stories about other kids, but I can't tell if they're about certain people because I don't know many of them from school."

"Are they all about kids?"

"No. That's what I was getting to." I chewed my tongue, trying to think about the best way of wording the next part. There was no best way. I just had to say it. "There's one about your dad. Or, at least, I think it's about your dad."

"My . . . ?"

"Yeah." I looked at the floor. I didn't want to see his face. He never talked about his dad—couldn't even mention his name. To hear me doing it probably wasn't too fun. "It's the story of a guy who disappears one night. He has a wife and a kid. They didn't say who the kid was . . . just that it was a boy. But the man didn't go on purpose. Supposedly, he went because he was summoned on a quest—you know, like for the Holy Grail or something. Except it wasn't the Holy Grail. It doesn't say why he had to go, just that somebody called him. Like God or something. I don't know who. It's not a very long story, Adam. It spends more time talking about the water-colored night sky and the sleeping town. It goes into all these details about how things look, the boy in his bed, the wife smiling in her sleep, you know. It's about three pages, and all it ends in is this guy getting some urge in him to walk through the fields and head off into the moonlight, or some junk. The main reason I think it's about you is because . . . well, that's what happened, right? You woke up one morning and . . . and your dad—"

"Stop," whispered Adam, his gaze plastered to the rug.

So I stopped. I held my breath. The world held its breath.

He didn't go any further. He closed his eyes and curled back up on the sofa. Why was he being so weird? "Do you want me to show it to you?" I chanced asking.

"No."

I stared at him blankly. "Well . . . do you want me to go?"

"I don't care."

"Ok . . ." I got to my feet. If he was going to take a nap, I wasn't going to sit there and wait for him to be done with it. "Look, I'm sorry I brought it up. I just . . . thought you might want to know."

Adam didn't answer.

Sighing, I headed back up the stairs and exited through the basement door. I could hear Mrs. Nyler messing around in the kitchen with bowls and things, so I walked over there. "Thanks, Mrs. Nyler. I'm leaving now."

She turned around. "Oh! Are you already? You don't want to stay for dinner?" She grinned. "I'm having tacos . . ."

That was certainly tempting. I bet my mom wasn't making tacos. Still, I had the impression that I'd just ruined Adam's day, or week, maybe, and I didn't think he'd want me around for dinner. "No, but thanks. I don't think Adam's real cheerful right now."

Mrs. Nyler nodded her head. "He's been sulking like his dog died for the past few days. Don't ask me why! I'm just his mother." Her sarcasm was clear.

I smiled and said goodbye, wondering if my mom talked that way about me to Adam when he came over. Then I went on my way out the front door. I took a different route home that afternoon, trying my absolute hardest to avoid coming within a mile of Dylan Doyle's doll-infested yard.

I kept reading, but I didn't call Adam about what I read. I waited for him to call me. Adam went through times when he just got in weird moods, like he didn't want anybody to remember that he was alive. Some people were depressed when people didn't think about them, but Adam kind of got upset when he was too thought of, if that makes any sense. I think that he sometimes just wanted to crawl into a hole and be entirely alone for a while. I can't say I ever felt that way. If I was mad, I wanted to crawl into bed and take a long, refreshing nap. Adam liked to sit and simmer in his frustration like a slowly-boiling potato. Or carrot, in his case. String bean, maybe.

Anyway, the more I read, the more I became convinced that those stories were about real, live people—people right with me in Goldenrock. And the weird thing was, as I read about people, I started to feel different about them. Of course, I didn't always know who exactly they were about, but take the Abominable Ham, for instance. Her story was called, "Attack of the Bullied Bull." I knew right away that it was about her by the way the writer described the bull character. Piggy eyes, lumbering stature, cropped blonde hair, cut-off T-shirts and jeans—that was definitely what the Ham always looked like. The story was weird, though. It didn't talk about the monster that the Ham was. It talked about how she cried in a cave in the woods when she thought about herself and how she hated that kids ran from her. She had some instinct to scare, the story said, and she didn't know what to do about it. It was the strangest story. I had no idea if it was true; personally, I couldn't picture the Abominable Ham crying or being sad. But it was clear that whoever had written it had based the main character on the enormous girl I went to school with.

And it started me thinking.

Every story I read after that, I tried to figure out who it was talking about. For most of them, I couldn't guess, but here and there, figures seemed to pop out. There was one about a guy who always wore Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirts because he was always thinking about vacation: That had to be Mr. Norris, the guy at the local grocery store. And there was another about a set of twin girls who had some telekinesis powers—like, they could read each others' minds and all—and a grade ahead of me there were some strange girls who were twins that acted like they'd come from Mars. Seriously, they communicated in their own languages and stuff. They made up alphabets and actually talked to each other in them and never looked at anybody else. Weird, huh?

So some things were easy to pick out, but most of the stories didn't give away enough information to let me know who they were talking about. The names were all different. They weren't normal. Real names were only used once in a while. For the most part, the papers didn't give me all the right clues. Still, I was sure they were about people in Goldenrock, and that made me even more curious to know where they'd come from.

I knew Adam would want to read them after he came out of his basement. He couldn't be down there forever. When he did want to know all about the stories, I'd be able to tell him everything I'd been reading. Plus, there were still a lot of other papers in that trunk; I'd only grabbed about half of what was in there, but I wasn't going back to that tree house by myself. I no longer believed some criminal was hiding out there. I had no idea who it belonged to. On one hand, I figured nobody was using it because it was dusty and dirty and the papers were real old-looking. Then again, some of the stories were about people my age, so they had to be written within the last few years. When I thought about it, no ages of people were mentioned in the stories, so I couldn't tell exactly when the writer had done them.

For about a week and a half, I didn't even talk to Adam. Like I said, I was waiting for him to call me, because I knew he would when he felt like it. Those flowers and then my reminding him of his dad leaving had really set off something. I couldn't blame him for getting reclusive.

Still, I was pretty bored sitting at home. Corey wasn't even there to talk to; he had more friends than he knew what to do with. I kicked balls around in the backyard, watched T.V., played video games, and just kept reading those stories. My mom wouldn't have liked the T.V. and video games, but she knew I was going to summer school in several days and I guess figured it was all right to allow me some vegetable time. I actually talked to her about Adam once, during those days when he hid in his house.

My mom was pretty good to talk to, for a grown up. I mean, she listened, and even though she sometimes said things I didn't want to hear, she was usually right. Moms are like that, I guess. She was vacuuming, and I decided to walk into the room and shout over the roar, "Can I ask you a question?"

"Excuse me?" she shouted back.

"Shut it off!"

She shut it off, then looked at me like she was kind of irritated. "What is it, Cole?"

"I just want to ask you a question."

"All right. Shoot." She wiped her forehead. Vacuuming was hard work. A real calorie-burner.

"Do you know much about Adam's dad?"

I could tell it threw her off because she let go of the vacuum handle and sat down on the couch. I sat down across from her. She'd gone to high school for a year with Mrs. Nyler, but they hadn't really been friends or anything because my mom was three years older. I knew that much, but I let her retell it to me. "Dave Nyler wasn't from here," she went on, remembering back to the days she'd been young. "I didn't know him, but Anne started dating him late high school. He was older. He'd been to college already and had a bachelor's degree in something to do with landscaping and maps. He was here to look at property for a relative, and he stayed for more months than he'd expected because he met Anne. The two of them were married within half a year of knowing each other." My mom's eyes glazed funny. "Anne was nineteen. Dave was twenty-three. They were real young.

"I didn't go to the wedding. I can't remember much about it, but you know this place. It isn't so big. All of Goldenrock knew about it. Their engagement was in the paper. For some reason, I want to say that Anne's parents weren't too happy with their marriage."

I was starting to get impatient. "I don't care about their wedding. Why did Adam's dad leave?"

My mom looked at me like she'd forgotten I was there. She smiled like she always did—the smile that made me remember that part of me was her. "I can't say why. I don't know. I didn't really know them. I got married myself, and life just moved. I had you and your father and that was all I thought about for some time. Anne and Dave had Adam. Then one morning it was like Dave had just disappeared. Gossip goes around in small towns, but no one could say for sure why or where he'd gone. I'm not even sure Anne knows. I'm certain it wasn't easy for her, being left alone with a little boy to bring up. She didn't show much emotion about it that I recall, but sometimes people hurt more on the inside than they wear on the outside."

"Yeah," I murmured. "Adam doesn't know why his dad left either, but he shows it on the outside."

Mom put her hand on my shoulder. "Of course he does. He's only thirteen. I wouldn't expect you to keep everything in." Then she stood up and, grabbing the vacuum, flicked the switch and continued her mission to suck up the dust mites.

In the drone of the vacuum, my skull vibrated with questions. Stuff had gotten weird, lately.