Police detectives are a lot less interesting in real life than on TV. The ones who showed up at our house weren’t quirky, they didn’t drop smartass one-liners, and their khakis and polo shirts made them look an awful lot like accountants with guns.

After spending maybe five minutes alone in the back house, they came out and told us someone from the medical examiner’s office was coming to assess the scene. Then Dad raised the umbrella on the table at the pool, and the six of us—Mom, Dad, James, the detectives, and I—sat around it. The detectives asked easy questions: What time did the construction crew show up? How long did they stay? When did I see the body for the first time? Stuff like that. They didn’t even seem upset that James and I had opened the tarp and touched the gun and the brick and the actual body. I mean, I knew it was a cold case, but the way they acted, the skeleton might as well have been a forgotten ice cube at the back of the freezer.

Really, the only time things got a little tense was when the woman detective asked Mom for the contractor’s contact info. Mom recited it from memory, but said that since the body looked as if it had been there a long time, and since the construction workers had taken off right after they found it, she hoped there wouldn’t be any need to track them down.

The detectives traded a look. They understood perfectly well that Mom was asking them to leave the workmen alone. Then the man said they had to investigate every potential homicide thoroughly. He seemed nervous about it, though, watching Dad to see his reaction. And Dad cleared his throat and said basically the same thing Mom had, but in his I-know-a-lot-of-important-people voice. The detectives looked at each other again, only longer, and the man cleared his throat and repeated his line about being thorough, adding: “Of course, we aren’t really interested in pursuing unrelated legal infractions, Mr. Chase. I can assure you of that.”

Which, roughly translated, meant that since Dad—the guy whose family name was on a building downtown—had asked them to lay off, they would.

Funny how that worked.

The rest of their questions went quickly. Mom kept her word and made sure James left for work on time. A stubby man from the medical examiner’s office showed up around eleven, smelling like Sonic onion rings and wearing what I sincerely hoped was a ketchup stain on his shirt. He snapped a few pictures, filled out some forms, and announced it was a case for the forensic anthropologist. “I’ll call Genny Roop,” he said. “This is right up her alley.”

After the ME guy left, Dad told the detectives he’d appreciate it if they’d keep things low-key and out of the local news. They made us promise not to mess with the skeleton. We promised we wouldn’t and that was pretty much the end of things.

So my very first interrogation by the police was basically a snoozefest. Or at least it would have been if James and I hadn’t lied our faces off about whether or not we’d taken anything from the body.

“Oh, no, sir,” I’d said when the detective asked, thinking all the while about the rectangle of leather I’d stolen from the skeleton’s pocket, and how glad I was that it wouldn’t end up forgotten at the bottom of a police evidence box.

“We put the gun and the brick back. Right where we found them.”

The thing was a wallet, cracked and covered in mildew, with rotted-out stitching on one side of its change pocket. I’d figured out that particular little detail earlier, when I’d run upstairs to get dressed, paused just long enough to see what my contraband actually was, and tossed it under my bed. Even before the wallet landed, loose coins clinked and rolled across the hardwood floor, giving me one of those oh shit moments, worrying Mom would hear the noise from the kitchen underneath me and use her powers of maternal omniscience to figure out I was up to something.

Lucky for me, either she didn’t hear or she’d tapped out her powers for the day catching James and me with the skeleton. Still, I waited until after the detectives were gone and Mom and Dad had left for work to gather up the coins.

Honestly, being bad felt kind of good. James and I could be obnoxious when we wanted to, but underneath our snarky outer shells we were basically rule followers. Good kids. Nerds. Enough so that guilt kept me from looking at the wallet closely. Until I got to Utica Square, at least.

Utica’s a shopping center—high-end, close to our house—where the flowerbeds are perfect and the luxury cars roam free. James made fun of me for liking it there, but he was at work, and I only had eighteen hours left before my summer of forced laboratory servitude started. I deserved a little treat.

The azaleas were in manic bloom in Woodward Park. I slowed down, watching a photographer snap pictures of a couple on the rocks above the pond. Everyone does their engagement shots at Woodward; it’s practically a city ordinance. Just past that, at the emergency room entrance to St. John’s, the usual cluster of worn-out hospital workers hunched over their cigarettes, sucking in tar and nicotine. I rolled up my window against the smoke, turned into Utica Square at the next light, and found a shaded parking space underneath a magnolia.

I snagged a spicy tuna roll at the grocery store where gray-haired ladies can still get their groceries carried out by bag boys, walked over to Starbucks, and sat down with an iced coffee at one of the shaded tables outside. It was a good day to watch people: tiny blond ex–sorority queens with perfect makeup, doctors in scrubs getting their afternoon caffeine, kids zoning out on iPads while their moms texted and sipped skinny iced lattes. Everyone was always so comfortable with themselves there. So confident.

Across the courtyard, two little girls chased each other around the fountain I fell into when I was three. Mom had taken me to sit on Santa’s lap in the warm little cottage they set up there every year, then walked me down to the fountain to make a wish. I remember eating the cookie Mrs. Claus had given me, and Mom digging around in her purse for pennies. Then the purse was on the ground, and business cards and stray sheets of folded paper danced away like one-winged butterflies on the chilly Oklahoma wind.

“Stay put,” Mom said, dashing after them. And I had, until the wind pushed a silver tube of her lipstick toward the flat edge of the fountain.

I loved that lipstick because Mom had dotted my lips with it once as I watched her get ready to go out. “Rub them together like this,” she’d said, showing me how. I’d done the exaggerated little-kid version, smearing deep red pigment all over my face. She’d told me I looked beautiful anyway, and made me feel special. There was no way I was going to let that tube roll into the fountain.

And I caught it, too—right before I tripped and went into the water headfirst. Mom caught the back of my sweatshirt, yanked me out, and rushed me to the car to get warm. My teeth chattered and my fingers went numb, but I could feel the thrum of her heartbeat and the panicked strength of her arms. That was the first time I’d ever seen my mother scared, and the memory of it has stuck with me in high-res living color ever since.

I laid two dollars and sixty-one cents in coins from the wallet out on the table. They were tarnished, and stamped with dates ranging from 1916 to 1921. Other than that, the wallet was empty. It wasn’t much to go on, but at least I knew the skeleton’s owner had been alive in 1921. Maybe a few years after that, too, but ’21 was a good baseline.

I sipped my coffee (two pumps of sweetener, room for cream) and caught the hipster at the next table staring at me over his laptop. My phone vibrated against the metal table.

Hipster dude smiled through his beard. I smiled—just a little—and texted James back.

I swept the coins into my hand, picked up my sushi, and crossed the courtyard to my car. Hipster dude gave me a curled-finger wave as I drove past. I waved back, knowing that even though James wasn’t into romance, I’d take hanging out with my best friend over flirting with a bearded lumberjack wannabe any day. And twice on Sunday.