“If the poison wasn’t in my ring, where was it?”
There’s a thoughtful silence as he spreads butter on the outside of the bread. “I keep thinking about the cup.”
“Me too,” I admit, plucking a potato chip out of the bag Felix set in front of me. “It’s a lot harder to tell when something’s a clue in real life.”
He nods while dropping a pat of butter into the hot pan.
“What if we’re grasping at straws because otherwise we have to face the fact that we hit a dead end?”
At first, I’m not sure he heard my mumbled worry over the spatter of cooking sounds, but as soon as he flips the sandwich, Felix turns to face me. “Or maybe this is the point in the investigation where we know all the things, but we haven’t figured out how they fit.”
He lets me sit with that while he slides the first sandwich onto a plate. I know exactly which moment he’s talking about, because it’s one of my favorite parts of any mystery. The problem is that from the outside, it looks like magic. There’s no seven-step guide to triggering anaha!moment when your own brain is doing the work.
Once the other sandwich is done, Felix brings both platesto the table, and I carry the chips and two glasses of water. I’m about to take a bite when he pops up again, detouring into the living room.
“Maybe this will help,” he says, placing a small chessboard between our placemats.
I shove the sandwich in my mouth, stalling for time. After I chew and swallow, wipe my mouth, and take a drink, I decide to be honest. “I don’t play chess.”
“Me neither,” Felix admits. “My grandpa tried to teach me when I was little, but it didn’t stick. We’re starting over from zero this summer.”
Before I can ask how we’re going to play a game neither of us understands, he extends an arm and carefully sweeps all the pieces off the board and onto the table.
“Let’s start with the king,” he says, wiping his hands on a napkin. “This is Claude.”
Felix moves a tall white piece with a crown on top to the center of the board, glancing at me to make sure I’m with him so far. “That’s not where you would put it to start an actual game,” he informs me, in case I’m tempted to try this at home.
“I assume you also don’t give them names.”
He shakes his head. “You have to use the proper terminology. Like this is one of the horsey guys”—he makes a neighing sound, trotting it up and down in the air—“and these ones are the castles.” Felix arranges four shorter pieces with tops like jack-o’-lantern teeth around “Claude.”
“What about these?” I put one of the smallest pieces with the round tops on a corner square.
“Peasants. Highly expendable.”
The sandwich sits heavy in my gut. “Is that what Bradley was?”
“No,” Felix says after a beat of silence. “I don’t think so. He had a lot of power, like one of these.” He taps a piece that looks like a worm with a dot on top. After another hesitation, he lays it on its side near the center of the board.
I try to swallow, but it takes a drink of water to ease the tightness in my throat. It’s not that I’ve forgotten what we learned about Bradley from Sofia, or how he made my skin crawl. But he’s still dead, and murder is an extreme punishment.
“What about this one?” Even I know it’s the queen, mostly because Felix already IDed the king. The question is who he thinks it should represent on our nerdy murder board.
“It pains me to say it, but I think it has to be Bernie. She’s at the center of the web.” Felix picks up the queen and uses it to nudge the king off to a corner. “Otherwise, it would be your grandmother.”
“I know.” And not only because she inherited Claude’s spangly baton. I never had to ask what “charisma” meant, because I’d seen it firsthand in Grandma Lainey. It’s more than being the funniest, or the best-dressed, or the person who knows the most, though it’s a bit of all those things. When my grandmother is in a room, every eye is drawn in her direction.
And if someone like that thinksyou’remagical? It’s a good feeling.
But she would understand the strategic choice we’re making here, because solving the mystery is the most important thing. And as Grandma Lainey often says, true confidence doesn’t require a billboard in Times Square.
I add two of the small pieces to the board. “We’re the peasants,” I inform Felix.
“Because we don’t have a car so it’s hard to cover a lot of distance?”
“I was thinking more like lurking in the background, observing everything.”
“Also easy to underestimate, until we come in clutch and save the day?”
