The Long Way Home by Andrew Klavan

guys know? How did you know I would come here?”
    “Josh knew,” said Rick. “He figured it out.”
    Josh touched his own shoulder with a finger and made a sizzling noise to show just how hot he was.
    I answered with a gesture of my own: raising my shoulders and lifting my hands in an enormous shrug as if to say, What’s the story?
    “I saw you on TV,” Josh said. “The whole thing about how you were in the library and the librarian called the cops and the cops showed up and started chasing you and everything.”
    “Yeah?”
    “And I thought, well, the last time anyone heard anything about you, you were escaping from the cops all the way over in Centerville. So I knew you were heading this way. I figured you must be coming back to Spring Hill.”
    “Sure, but . . .” I gestured around me at the big empty parlor. The room—the whole feeling of the house—was growing less and less dismal as the sun poured in through the windows. “The Ghost Mansion. How did you figure I’d come back to the Ghost Mansion?”
    Josh gave an almost modest tilt of his head. “I just tried to think the way you’d think. I figured if I knew you were coming to Spring Hill, the cops would know too. That meant it would be dangerous—more dangerous here than anyplace else.”
    I nodded. He was right. Spring Hill was probably the most dangerous place I could be right now, the place where I was most likely to get caught.
    Josh went on: “And if you were coming to the most dangerous place you could be, then you’d have to have a really good reason for it. There’d have to be something really urgent you had to do, something you had to do whether it was dangerous or not. So I thought, Well, what could that be? What could you do here you couldn’t do anyplace else? And then it came to me: you were coming back here to try to prove your innocence, to try to show it wasn’t you who killed Alex.”
    “That’s right,” I said. “That’s exactly right. I am.”
    Josh stood a little straighter, proud of himself. “So then I thought, well, if you were gonna prove your innocence, it might take some time, so you’d need a place to stay. Your parents moved to Stanton, so you couldn’t stay with them. And I knew you wouldn’t come to us because you wouldn’t want to get us involved; you wouldn’t want us to get in any trouble.”
    I nodded slowly. “That’s right too.”
    “So where else was there for you to go?” said Josh finally. “What other place did you know around here that was empty and secluded, where you could get shelter during the day, and get into town pretty quickly at night?”
    I nodded, impressed. Geeky as he was, Josh had always been the smartest guy in our group.
    But as I listened to him, a little of my happiness at our reunion started to fade. I moved to the window. As I passed Josh, I punched him lightly on the arm.
    “Good going, Josh,” I said softly. “That was really good thinking.”
    “I guess I’m not as dumb as I look,” said Josh with a goofy laugh.
    “No one could be as dumb as you look,” said Miler.
    I stood at the window and looked out. The day had now dawned fully. The bright, pale sky gleamed down through the naked branches of the autumn oaks. The branches swayed in the morning breeze. On the ground below, dead leaves blew through the old McKenzie graveyard. They covered the bases of the stones and the obelisks. They danced around the base of the statue.
    She was still there. The cowled, mourning woman. Still staring blankly with her stone eyes, still reaching out in grief as if to stop the soul she loved from departing. She was just as eerie as I remembered her too. Creepy and weirdly alive. It still made me shiver a little to look at her.
    I stared down into the graveyard, thinking, troubled.
    “What’s the matter, bro?” said Rick behind me.
    I turned to them. The three of them stood together, looking at me.
    They had changed, I could see. A year does a lot to you when you’re