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lives like some corny soap opera filled with jealousy, gossip, and betrayal from which she felt excluded.
    “My dad thinks that Ed Staton’s murder was some sort of gay revenge killing,” Amanda told her grandfather before he left.
    “What’s he basing that theory on?”
    “On the baseball bat shoved—you know where,” Amanda said, blushing to her roots as she thought of the video she’d seen online.
    “Let’s not jump to conclusions, Amanda. There’s still a lot we don’t know.”
    “Exactly. Like, how did the killer get in?”
    “Ed Staton was supposed to lock the doors and set the alarm when he started his shift,” said Blake. “Since there was no sign of forced entry, we have to assume the killer hid in the school before Staton locked up.”
    “But if the murder really was premeditated, why didn’t the guy kill Staton before he drove off? He couldn’t have known Staton intended to come back.”
    “Maybe it wasn’t premeditated. Maybe someone sneaked into the school intending to rob the place, and Staton caught him in the act.”
    “Dad says that in all the years he’s worked in homicide, though he’s seen murderers who panicked and lashed out violently, he’s never come across a murderer who took the time to hang around and cruelly humiliate his victim.”
    “What other pearls of wisdom did Bob come up with?”
    “You know what Dad’s like—I have to surgically extract every scrap of information from him. He doesn’t think it’s an appropriate subject for a girl my age. Dad’s a troglodyte.”
    “He’s got a point, Amanda. This whole thing is a bit sordid.”
    “It’s public domain, it was on TV, and if you think you can handle it, there’s a video on the Internet some little girl shot on her cell phone.”
    “Jeez, that’s cold-blooded. Kids these days are so used to violence that nothing scares them. Now, back in my day . . .” Jackson trailed off with a sigh.
    “This is your day! It really bugs me when you talk like an old man. So, have you checked out the juvenile detention center, Kabel?”
    “I’ve got work to do—I can’t just leave the drugstore unattended. But I’ll get to it as soon as I can.”
    “Well, hurry up, or I might just find myself a new henchman.”
    “You can try! I’d like to see anyone else who’s prepared to put up with you.”
    “You love me, Gramps?”
    “Nope.”
    “Me neither,” Amanda said, and flung her arms around his neck.
     
    Blake Jackson buried his nose in his granddaughter’s mane of frizzy hair, which smelled of salad—she washed it with vinegar—and thought about the fact that in a few months she would be off to college, and he would no longer be around to protect her. He missed her already, and she had not even left yet. He flicked through fleeting memories of her short life, back to an image of the sullen, skeptical little girl who would spend hours hiding in a makeshift tent of bedsheets where no one was admitted except Save-the-Tuna, the invisible friend who followed her around for years, her cat Gina, and sometimes Blake himself, when he was lucky enough to be invited to drink make-believe tea from tiny plastic cups.
    Where on earth does she get it from? Blake Jackson had wondered when Amanda—aged six—first beat him at chess. It could hardly be from Indiana, who floated in the stratosphere preaching love and peace half a century after the hippies had died out, and it wasn’t from Bob Martín, who had never finished a book in his life. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” said Celeste Roko, who had a habit of showing up unannounced, and who terrified Blake Jackson almost as much as the devil himself. “Lots of kids are precocious at that age, but it doesn’t last. Just wait till her hormones kick in, and she’ll nosedive to the usual level of teenage stupidity.”
    But in this case the psychic had been wrong: Amanda’s intelligence had continued to develop throughout her teenage years, and the only impact