Disclaimer: All belongs to Rob Thomas. I'm just borrowing them and promise to return them at some point.

Logan's response was fast and predictable: "Not a chance."

"Look, Logan –"

"What part of 'not a chance' are you having trouble understanding, Mars? No, no way, no chance in hell, I'd sooner dance on a cafeteria table in my lucky boxers."

If that was the way it was going to be – "Okay, then. I quit. Good luck."

A moment of silence, then, "You know why I don't want her brought into this."

"I do," I said. "And I understand. You're being protective of her."

"After all those years with the Legendary Aaron Echolls," he said, "Mom certainly needs it. I told you why Daddy would have never hit on you. That's one of the reasons he married my mother. Mom's smart, but she was never a fighter, even when I was young. Now –"

"I get all this. Now, tell me this. Do you think I'd hurt her?"

"I think you'd do whatever you had to do get the truth out," Logan said. "You've never cared who you hurt along the way."

The words were insulting; the tone wasn't. Logan was telling the truth as he saw it. For once, he wasn't trying to hurt me. Knowing this was what let me restrain myself from a return shot. "Only when people are trying to hide something from me. Your mom's not a suspect here, or a hostile witness; she's a potential victim."

Logan said, "Did you mean it when you said you'd quit if you didn't get to talk to her?"

"Yup."

Another moment of silence. "Then I'll try to arrange it. If she says no, I'm not going to push it."

"Thanks. As far as the poolhouse goes –"

He laughed without a trace of humor to the laugh. "You'd better come over now. If the place is wired I'm going to burn it to the ground. I don't want the Aaron Echolls Playhouse to become another feature on the nightly news. You might want to get here before I figure out what I can use for accelerant."

I wasn't sure he was kidding and didn't want to take the chance. "I'll be right over," I said, and hung up.

A never-ending madcap whirligig of fun, that's my life.

I'm glad the Neptune Sheriff's department seemed to have taken the day off – okay, they took most days off, but you know what I mean. I must've broken a dozen traffic laws and two laws of physics getting to Logan's. Along the way I called Duncan's doctor and set myself up for an appointment for later in the week. I would figure out what was wrong with him.

When I got there, there were still a couple of reporters camped out by the front gate. One of them was the guy who'd "warned" me back when I stalled their pursuit of Lynn Echolls. They both gave me dirty looks as I went through the gate.

I smiled and waved right back. This seemed to make them more irritated, for some reason.

Logan saw me coming and, with a mocking bow, waved me inside and through the house.

I'd been in the poolhouse before, of course, for the big poker game right before Aaron Echolls had gone and gotten himself killed. I'd never been in the bedroom, though.

(And again it occurred to me how very different the 09'er life was from the lives of ordinary people. The Echolls' poolhouse was bigger than the apartment dad and I and Backup shared.)

Logan stood in the doorway, unwilling or unable to actually enter the room. "If you want a drink, though, a spare key to the liquor cabinet's in the vent."

"You learned that from Lilly," I said, smiling a bit at the memory.

"Lilly learned that from me," he said.

I saw the wire as soon as I looked for it. The camera took a little longer; it was buried in the fan. No two-minute job, this. I scoured the room for other cameras; there was one more, in the statue at the head of the bed. Using my own camera, I started taking pictures.

"What are you doing?" Logan demanded from the doorway.

"Look. It has to look to Vanessa like I'm doing my job here. She'd want photographic proof on the chance that you did indeed decide to give this place the Towering Inferno treatment. Don't worry, she's never actually going to get to keep any of these things."

I followed the wire across the ceiling and into the wall behind a bookcase. I fiddled with the bookcase until it slid apart.

Son of a bitch. There were two monitors in there and drawers and drawers full of videotapes. This confirmed, at least partially, Vanessa's story, but then neither Logan nor I had ever doubted her about sleeping with Aaron Echolls. I took a couple of more shots.

Everything seemed to be chronological. I picked one of the later drawers at random – the beginning was sometime in mid-2003, the end sometime at the end of the year. There were a couple of tapes missing somewhere towards the middle. Interesting, but not what I was looking for. I took a close-up picture of the drawer's contents – more "proof" for Vanessa – and closed it and moved down a drawer.

Bingo. Late June 2004, there were three tapes labeled with the right dates. I pulled them out and started to play them. There was Vanessa Mencken, all right. "You might not want to—"

"Eyes averted, trust me." I stopped the playback and looked at him. "Logan?" His back was towards me. "Logan, if you'd rather not see or hear any of this, I can take it with me."

"Wise decision," he said.

I pulled out the tapes and, walking over to him, said, "I'll let you know what I find."

He turned and looked at me. "I appreciate that, Mars, but I already know you won't find my mother and I'm not interested in tips from dear old dad on my technique in the sack. I haven't had any complaints so far. I just have better things to do with my time." Sure, Logan. And I'm the WWE's newest diva. I can tell you're starting to get a little concerned that maybe, just maybe, Vanessa Mencken's story was true. All of it. We started to walk out.

"For complaints about your technique," I said innocently after a few minutes, "Don't there have to be complainants?"

His eyebrows raised. "You want proof, Machiavelli? I'm happy to oblige."

I batted my eyelashes, calling his bluff. "Oh take me, take me, you big strong hunk of man, you."

He muttered something under his breath; when I asked him to repeat himself, he said, "Never mind, Mars. I have to go find some gasoline," and left me alone in the middle of the house.

It had sounded like he'd said, "Don't tempt me."

That couldn't be right . . .

X X X X X

I didn't get a chance to watch much of the tapes of the next couple of days; I was preoccupied by the case against Mr. Rooks, which involved, among other things, my dad trapping his safe in the expectation that I would sneak into it, the frantic scrubbing of said trap (ink, indelible) off of my face, and shaming my dad into giving me some information from Carrie Bishop's diary. It wasn't until after a conversation with both Mr. Rooks and Carrie – proving she was lying using some of the information from her file (Vanessa's, incidentally, had been no help at all – she didn't have a track record of things like this).

When I finally got some time to myself that night, I watched as much of them as I could stand and fast forwarded through the rest.

Lynn Echolls didn't appear once. Not in voice, not in person, not at all. Now I had to go scrub my eyes out with Clorox.

So why would Vanessa have told me to look for them if she knew Lynn wouldn't be on them? I had several possibilities and didn't like any of them.

The next day, Logan finally got back to me as I was on my way into school and told me I could see his mother that day immediately after school.

A bit later, Mr. Rooks told me that his meeting with the school board was that day immediately after school.

I've always been able to juggle multiple priorities. Now they're both crashing to the ground and I only have time to catch one of them.

But which one?