“Yes, any suggestions would be great.”

“No problem,” Erik said. “Believe it or not, I do remember what it was like starting out in this game. It’s a steep learning curve, but it’s mercifully short.”

After I’d written a quick piece for online posting—two sentences about the body; there was virtually nothing to say—I had enough time before my meeting with Steve to do a little online research into crime rates in Ridgedale, background for the longer print article I was formulating in my head.

I was surprised by the amount of minor crime in Ridgedale—simple assaults, automobile thefts, robberies—but there had been only two murders in the past twenty years. Esther Gleason had shot her elderly husband in apparent self-defense, and an ex-convict from Staten Island had been killed in an off-campus student apartment, a Ritalin deal gone wrong. It was in reading about the second case that I came across the mention of another death, this one accidental, near the Essex Bridge.

Simon Barton was a high school student who’d died when he tripped and fell during a high school graduation party just south of the Essex Bridge. Now there were four dead bodies in twenty years, and half of them had been found in the same spot? Simon Barton, I wrote at the top of my pad.

My phone buzzed with a text. Package delivered, Justin had written. She’s more than fine, I promise. Now get back to work.

I was looking at my phone when the door to the office swung open. When I looked up, Stella was standing in the doorway in a short white tennis skirt and matching fitted sweatshirt. Her dark brown hair was in a high ponytail, and her regal face—strong jaw, long elegant nose—looked beautiful, as usual.

Stella strode into the office, pausing to eye the darkness. She stepped back toward the panel of switches for the overhead lights, flicking them on all at once with a hard swipe of her palm. “Why the hell are you sitting here in the dark?”

Stella was more flamboyant than my friends typically were, but she was exactly what I needed these days: someone to forcibly drag me out when I said I’d rather stay home, someone to make me talk when I was convinced I couldn’t breathe a word. We’d known each other since Justin and I had moved to Ridgedale in August, not even a year. But it felt like we’d been friends much longer.

“Oh, I guess I forgot to turn on the lights. What are you doing here, Stella?”

“I saw Justin at drop-off. He seemed stressed.”

I shrugged. “He can’t miss class.”

“He said that you got called in on some big story. Then I was driving by—because now I have to go to Target to buy a stupid purple sweatsuit—and I saw your car. Thought I’d try to get you to come to The Very Hungry Caterpillar with me. You know how I hate to face the mommy brigade alone.” She looked over at the papers covering my desk. “Not happening, is it?”

“Can’t, sorry,” I said. “I have an interview in half an hour.”

“All right, I won’t stay and distract you.” But instead of heading for the door, she started fishing through the pencils in the cup on my desk, sorting out the dull ones, discarding one that was missing an eraser. “Provided you tell me what the big story is.”

I raised an eyebrow at her.

“You know, people used to trust me to keep secrets worth millions.” She shrugged nonchalantly. “Discretion is one of my strengths.”

Though Stella loved to gossip, so far, she had seemed to know better when anything important was involved. I’d trusted her enough to tell her about the baby, my depression, even what had sent me to Dr. Zomer. She’d handled all those confidences respectfully, with a comforting nonchalance: Hey, we’re all crazy, honey.

“They found a body up by the Essex Bridge, a baby,” I said. “But, Stella, you really can’t tell anyone about it until my story is posted. The police will kill me.”

“Oh my God.” Stella’s eyes got instantly huge. She teared up as she clasped a hand over her open mouth. “That’s horrible.”

“I know,” I said, feeling a little thrown by the intensity of her response. But had I really expected her to make it less bad by laughing it off? A dead baby was a dead baby, even when you’d never had one of your own. “It’s completely awful.”

She closed her eyes and reached forward, grasping my hand. “Are you okay? Of all the stories for you to get.”

“I’ve got to be honest, it’s not great,” I said. I regretted telling her. Already, I felt worse. “I’m hoping it might be therapeutic.”

Stella raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure about that?”

“No, but every time I think about passing it off, I feel worse. Much worse.”

Stella frowned, considering. “Then you should stay on it.” She turned toward Elizabeth’s desk and began plucking the dull pencils out of her cup, too, leaning over to use the electric sharpener. I watched her jam in each pencil until it was ground to a bright point. I was pretty sure she’d start sharpening her fingers if I didn’t get her to stop. I reached forward and tugged the remaining pencils from her grasp. “Stella, what’s going on?”

“Shit, is it that obvious?” she said, her voice cracking. Then she dropped her face into her hands and began to sob.

“God, Stella.” She was not a woman who cried. “What’s wrong?”

“Jesus, I’m sorry. I don’t even know where that came from,” she said with a teary, manic laugh. She sniffled and sat upright, wiping her eyes. “Aidan got into some fight yesterday at school. An actual fight, with his fists.” Aidan was big on threats; he wasn’t usually big on making good on them. “And then I had this absurd run-in with Cole’s mother, Barbara, at drop-off this morning.”

Barbara was someone I avoided. She was the supermom to end all supermoms, and after a year and a half of profound maternal subsufficiency, I was fighting hard just to be a decent one.

“About what?”

“I told her Will didn’t like going to other people’s houses. And Barbara said in that judgmental-bitch way of hers: ‘Well, that’s just not normal.’ Like she’s some almighty arbiter of psychological stability.”

“That is kind of mean,” I offered tentatively. Because it wasn’t the nicest thing for Barbara to say, to be sure, but Stella was also overreacting.

Stella wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Christ, what does a girl have to do to get a damn tissue around here?”

“Oh, sorry.” I grabbed a box off Elizabeth’s desk.

Stella snatched a handful of tissues, wiped her face, then pressed her lips together. “This is what teenagers do—turn you into a sobbing lunatic But what the hell does Barbara know about normal?”

“Nothing,” I said, and that much was true. “People are only wound that tight when they’re about to fly into a million pieces.”

“See, I knew you would make me feel better,” Stella said with a smile. She wiped at her eyes as she stood, then pulled me into a hug. “Now I’ll leave you alone so you can go win that Pulitzer.”

I parked just off the lower end of the green near the old stone city hall. To the right, in a smaller but equally quaint colonial building, was the police station. I stood on the edge of the square, staring at it, unable to get myself to move. It had been a long time since I’d been inside a police station.

But the Butler, Pennsylvania, police department had once been like a second home. It was the place where I’d had my first soda, an orange Crush, sitting barefoot in my faded unicorn nightgown at the desk of a friendly, chubby police officer named Max while two other officers interviewed my mom.

They’d found us walking along Route 68 in the middle of the night, trying to find my father. He was off—as he was so often in the months before he filed for divorce when I was ten—with Geraldine, his then girlfriend, now wife of twenty-five years. Her house was two miles away, and my father had taken our only car.