Chapter Text
The tree house sat in a mature oak behind the Tanaka house, built solid the way Tom Tanaka built everything: level, square, and meant to last. Plywood walls, a peaked shingle roof, a trapdoor with a rope ladder that swung in the breeze. Kenji had given it to his little sister with a handshake and a straight face, like he was signing over a piece of real estate. Allie had taken it seriously. Simone had taken it personally, and over the course of three weekends had transformed the interior into something that looked less like a fort and more like a very small, very pink living room.
A woven rag rug covered the plywood floor. Old bedsheets, tie-dyed in Simone's garage in a mess of purple and teal that had stained the concrete for weeks, hung as curtains over the two windows. A string of battery-powered fairy lights wound around the ceiling beam, though the batteries were mostly dead and they only flickered dimly now. Three cushions arranged around a wooden crate that served as a table. Stickers on the crate: a cat, a unicorn, a soccer ball. In the corner, a stack of faded Nancy Drew paperbacks, dog-eared and spine-cracked, passed between three pairs of hands so many times the covers had gone soft. A piece of paper was tacked to the wall above the crate, the YGDA logo drawn in Simone's purple gel pen: a smiley face, a rainbow, and a magnifying glass with a glint on the lens. It had been there for two weeks. Simone was proud of it.
The air inside smelled like warm wood, old paper, and the faint sweetness of Simone's grape-scented marker set, which was currently open on the crate, six caps off, because Simone never capped anything.
All three girls were eight years old and in the third grade at Millbrook Elementary. They had become friends in the first grade when they discovered they all loved the same Nancy Drew books, the yellow hardcover ones with the spines that cracked when you opened them too wide. The friendship solidified over two years of sleepovers, bike rides, shared lunches, and one very memorable incident involving a stolen lunchbox and a plan to catch the thief that did not work but was, all three agreed, "a very good effort." They were the kind of friends who finished each other's sentences and had inside jokes nobody else understood. They were the kind of friends who had already solved a case together.
Two weeks ago, Mrs. Haverty, a widow who lived four houses down from the Tanakas, had come to the tree house in tears. Her cat, Miss Purry, was missing. Miss Purry was a fat gray tabby with a torn ear and a bad attitude, but Mrs. Haverty loved her, and Mrs. Haverty was the kind of old lady who gave full-sized candy bars on Halloween, so the girls took the case seriously. Allie drew up a case file. Simone made "MISSING" posters with a surprisingly good likeness of Miss Purry. Drew interrogated the Henderson boys, who were known cat-botherers, with enough intensity that the older one cried.
The case was solved in three days. Miss Purry had not been stolen. Miss Purry had been in Mrs. Haverty's garage the entire time, living behind a stack of old National Geographics, because a stray tomcat had found his way in through a gap in the siding and Miss Purry had decided the garage was preferable to the house. Miss Purry was not a missing cat. Miss Purry was a cat in love, or at least in lust, which at eight years old the girls understood vaguely as "Miss Purry really liked the boy cat and did not want to come inside." Mrs. Haverty was really, really happy to get her back. She gave the girls ten dollars each and a plate of lemon bars, and she told them they were "the smartest girls she had ever met," which made Allie's ears go pink and Simone cry a little.
Allie wrote up the case in her notebook: "Case File #1: The Case of the Purrloined Pooch. No, the Purrloined Purr. Status: Solved." She crossed out "Pooch" and wrote "Purr" above it, because she realized partway through writing that Miss Purry was a cat and not a dog, and "pooch" meant dog, and she did not want to get it wrong. Simone drew a picture of Miss Purry on the case file page, fat and happy, with a heart next to her. Drew said the case was "too easy" but she was smiling when she said it.
The business cards had been printed the same week. Drew brought the blank cards to the tree house in a ziplock bag, two hundred of them, because her dad bought in bulk. Simone designed and printed them on Tom Tanaka's printer in his home office, carefully arranging the logo so the smiley face was centered, adjusting the margins three times until Allie said they were "aesthetically optimal," which Simone did not fully understand but nodded at anyway. Allie laminated them with clear contact paper she found in mom’s craft drawer, pressing each one flat with a ruler, trimming the edges with scissors. The cards read:
YGDA
Young Girls Detective Agency
No Case Too Small
(smiley face, rainbow, magnifying glass)
Simone put a stack of cards in her pink purse, the one with glitter on the strap that she carried everywhere. Allie put two in her back pocket. Drew pinned one to the inside of her backpack, between a soccer patch and a library card. The agency was official. They had solved a case. They had a satisfied client. They were real detectives.
Now they just needed their next one.
Allie sat cross-legged on her cushion, her kitten-covered notebook open in her lap. She had written "Case Files" on the first page two weeks ago, in her careful, precise handwriting, and underlined it twice. Beneath that: "No case to small." She had considered the spelling. It looked right. She was not entirely sure about "too" versus "to" but she was not going to ask, because asking meant admitting she did not know, and Allie did not like admitting she did not know things. The first case file, "The Case of the Purrloined Purr," was already filled out and closed, with Simone's cat drawing paper-clipped to the page. The second page was blank except for "Case File #2" written at the top. She had been staring at that blank page for a week.
Her hair was long, black, and lustrous, pulled into a ponytail with a green scrunchie. Straight and heavy, it fell past her shoulders when she let it down, which she rarely did because it got in the way of thinking. Her glasses, wire-rimmed and slightly too large for her face, kept sliding down her nose. She pushed them up with one finger, a gesture she performed roughly forty times a day. Her eyes behind the lenses were dark brown, almost black, and they narrowed when she was concentrating, which gave her a serious look that adults found charming and other children found unsettling. Her face was delicate and fine-boned, high cheekbones, a small nose, slightly almond-shaped eyes. Her skin was a warm, pale tone. She was Japanese-American, second generation. Her mother, Yuki, packed her rice balls for lunch with little faces drawn on them. Allie pretended to be annoyed by this but ate every one.
She was thin and narrow. Small shoulders, flat chest, slim waist, slight hips. Her white t-shirt was a size too big because her mother kept buying clothes she would "grow into," so the neckline kept slipping toward one shoulder. Jean shorts. Slim, pale legs with knobby knees. She looked like what she was: a smart, slight eight-year-old girl who spent more time reading than running. She already knew some algerbra because she had found Kenji's textbook in his room and taught herself during a weekend when her parents thought she was watching cartoons. She read at a sixth-grade level and did long division in her head. But she still slept with a nightlight and had cried during a thunderstorm last month, and she did not want anyone to know either of those things.
Simone was sprawled on her stomach on the rug, her notebook open, sketching with a purple gel pen. Her tongue poked out of the corner of her mouth. Her blonde hair, the longest of the three girls', fell past her shoulder blades in a messy tangle that she had not bothered to pull up. Blue eyes, round sweet face with dimples that appeared when she smiled, which was often. She was thin and smooth, no muscle definition, just the lean frame of a kid who rode her bike and played tag but did not do organized sports. Slim waist, tiny wrists, legs slim and pale. Her sundress had butterflies on it that she had drawn herself with fabric markers, each one a different color, because store-bought patterns were boring. Her sandals had rhinestones glued onto the straps, also her doing, also imperfect, the gems clustered unevenly. Her pink shoulder purse sat on the rug beside her, glitter on the strap catching the light through the window. Inside: pen collection, notebook, lip balm she was not supposed to have, a bag of gummy worms, and the stack of YGDA business cards.
Drew leaned against the wall with her arms crossed and one foot propped up against the plywood. Her pixie cut was messy, flattened on one side from her bike helmet and sticking up on the other. She was blonde, tanned, and angular in a way that made her look older than eight from a distance, all sharp jawline and slightly upturned nose. Her body was lean and firm, every bit of baby fat burned off by soccer and running and the push-ups she did every morning because she had seen it on a fitness show and decided it was important. Small shoulders, flat chest, slim waist, and legs with visible definition in the calves. Scabs on both knees, fresh from a slide tackle at practice Tuesday. She wore a tank top and biker shorts that clung to her like a second skin, the spandex digging into the crease where her firm little ass met her thighs. When she shifted against the wall, the shorts pulled tight across her cunny in front, the fabric outlining the puffy split of her hairless slit. She did not notice this. She never thought about her body as anything other than a tool for sports and fighting.
She was known on the Millbrook Elementary playground as someone you did not mess with. This reputation was earned in the first grade when she shoved a boy into the dirt for pulling Allie's ponytail. But the story that cemented it, the one every kid knew, was the Tyler Morrison fight. Tyler Morrison was a fourth grader, nine years old, a head taller than Drew and at least twenty pounds heavier. He had called Allie a nerd, and then he had called her something worse, something Drew did not repeat. Drew had walked up to him, looked up at him, and headbutted him in the stomach. When he doubled over, she pushed him down and sat on him until he apologized. He apologized. He also cried, which Drew did not feel bad about. Tyler Morrison never bothered any of them again, and neither did anyone else who heard the story. Drew was forty-five pounds of muscle and attitude, and she was the reason Allie and Simone could walk the hallways without being bothered.
She had rolled her eyes at the fairy lights when Simone first put them up. She had rolled her eyes at the curtains. She had rolled her eyes at the rug. But she had done all of this behind Simone's back, because Simone's feelings got hurt easily and Drew did not have the patience for crying.
"YGDA," Allie said. She closed her notebook and held it against her chest. "We need a new case. It has been two weeks since the Haverty case and nobody has come to us with anything."
Drew uncrossed her arms. "We solved the Haverty case in three days. We are good at this. Someone will need us."
"Someone needs us right now," Allie said. She opened her notebook to the blank second page. "Okay, so you know those stories going around school? About the middle school art room?"
Simone looked up from her drawing. "The ghost? With the paint?"
"Yeah, the ghost. Every year the eighth graders tell the sixth graders about it, and the sixth graders tell everyone else, and by the time it gets to us it is all messed up. The story is that Mrs. Delgado's art room is haunted by a ghost that knocks over paint cans at night. But Derek’s big sister is in art club, and she told me Mrs. Delgado's paint cans have been knocked over, but only the red ones. Every time. Just the red paint."
"That is weird," Drew said, straightening up slightly.
"That is what I thought. So I started thinking about other weird stuff. The stories do not stop at the art room. You know what else kids have been talking about? The old tire plant on Milton Road. Kids on the bus go past it every day. And for the past two weeks, kids have been saying they see lights in there. Not salvage lights. Like, inside lights. Electric lights."
Simone's pen stopped moving. "I heard Jason Kim tell Marcus they saw a truck go in there last week."
"Jason Kim is a liar," Drew said.
"He is, but other kids saw it too. Three different kids on the bus told me." Allie pushed her glasses up. "I have been thinking about this all week. I went back and forth on whether to bring it up, because it is exciting and also scary, and I am not sure which feeling is winning." She pushed her glasses up again. "So I checked it out myself. I snuck out last night and rode my bike there and saw a bunch of trucks going through the gates. They were taking things into the building. Then later, they were taking stuff out."
Simone looked up from her drawing. "The creepy one?"
"Yeah."
"What was all the stuff?" Simone asked.
Allie looked embarrassed. After I got a little closer, I thought I heard footsteps behind me and took off on my bike." She laughed, a short, nervous sound. "I might have even been faster than you, Drew."
"What did you actually see?" Drew asked. "When you got close."
Allie put her glasses back up. "Trucks. Two of them, white, no logos or anything on the sides. They backed up to the loading dock and the men inside opened the big doors. They were moving stuff in and out."
"What kind of stuff?" Simone asked.
"Boxes. Crates. Like cardboard boxes, but also plastic tubs, the kind with the snap-on lids. And there were these brick things."
"Brick things?" Drew tilted her head.
"They looked like bricks. Like, the size of bricks, but wrapped in black tape. The gray duct tape kind. The men were carrying them in stacks, like, six or seven at a time. They put them in the plastic tubs and snapped the lids on." Allie shrugged. "I do not know what that is. Maybe they are building something?"
Simone was already drawing a little brick shape in the margin of her notebook, wrapping it in scribbles to represent tape. "Maybe it is insulation? My dad had insulation bricks in our attic. They were wrapped in plastic."
"These were not wrapped in plastic. They were wrapped in tape. Tight. Like, really tight. And the men were careful with them. They did not throw them or drop them. They put them down slow."
Drew frowned. "What else?"
"Behind the trucks, inside the dock, I could see a table with tools on it. Little tools, like screwdrivers and stuff. And there were metal plates, like little rectangles, sitting on the table. Some of them had numbers stamped on them." Allie paused. "I do not know. It was dark and I was far away and I was scared. But they were definitely doing something in there. It is not salvagers. Salvagers do not wrap bricks in tape and stack them in tubs."
"Did they see you?" Simone asked.
"That is when I heard the footsteps. I do not know if it was one of them or just an animal or something, but I took off." She looked at Drew. "I was really fast."
Drew's eyebrows went up. "You snuck out at night? By yourself? That is pretty brave, Allie."
"I was scared, though."
"Brave people get scared," Drew said. "That is what makes it brave. If you are not scared, you are just stupid."
Simone looked at Drew saying that to Allie and felt a rush of love for both of them so sudden it made her throat tight. Drew was tough but she was kind underneath it, like a candy with a hard shell. Allie was smart but she needed people to tell her she was brave, because she did not believe it herself. Simone loved them both. She loved this tree house. She loved this club. She tapped her feet on the rug, the excitement bubbling up through her sandals.
"So when do we go investigate?" Simone asked.
"I was thinking Saturday. During the day. There will probably be nobody in there."
"I can do that," Simone said.
"I have got soccer in the morning," Drew said. "But I will meet you here after. About Eleven-thirty."
"Eleven-thirty," Allie repeated, writing it down. She wrote carefully, "Case File #2: The Mystery of the Creepy Warehouse. Status: Active. Investergators: Allie, Simone, Drew." She did not notice the misspelling. Simone, leaning over to look, did notice. She saw "investergators" and thought it was wrong, but she did not say anything because Allie was proud of her filing system and Simone did not want to hurt her feelings.
Allie looked up. "We will wait for you, Drew. We will not go without you."
"We could start without her and she could catch up," Simone suggested.
"No," Allie said. "We go together. Detectives work as a team."
Drew nodded. That was one of the things she liked about Allie. Allie took things seriously. Allie did not cut corners. If Allie said they would wait, they would wait.
Simone drew a picture of the warehouse on the case file page. It came out looking like a monster face, hunched and frowning, with lightning bolts behind it for atmosphere. Allie looked at it and said it did not look like that. Simone said it was artistic license. Drew said artistic license was not a real thing. Simone said it was too. They argued about it for ten minutes, the way they argued about everything: loudly, with conviction, and no actual anger. This was how they operated.
Saturday arrived, hot and bright, the kind of June morning that smelled like cut grass and sunscreen.
Drew's soccer game was at nine. The field was at the park on Elm, twenty minutes from her house, and the game was against the Riverside Rockets, a team that had beaten them twice already this season. Drew hated losing. She hated it more than anything. She played midfielder and she ran the whole game like she was trying to outrun the idea of losing, her pixie cut soaked with sweat, her biker shorts dark with it, her firm little legs pumping. The score was tied at the end of regulation. Overtime. Drew's heart was hammering. She could hear her coach yelling something about spacing but she was not listening. She was watching the ball.
It came to her at midfield. She trapped it, turned, and saw the forward making a run up the left side. She hit the pass sharp and low, right to the forward's feet. The forward slotted it in. Game over. Drew's team won! She jumped, pumped her fist, and hugged the nearest teammate, a girl named Priya who smelled like sweat and orange Gatorade.
The competitive energy was still buzzing through her when her parents said they had errands. Grocery store. Pharmacy. Post office. Drew sat in the back seat of the car, bouncing her knee, watching the clock on the dashboard. Twelve-fifteen. Twelve-thirty. Twelve-forty-five.
Four-year-old Dalia was in her car seat beside her, holding a stuffed rabbit named Bun-Bun by one ear. Dalia's chubby face was flushed from the heat. She looked at Drew and held up Bun-Bun.
"Draw wants Bun-Bun?"
Drew softened. She always softened for Dalia. "Yeah, Dalia. Bun-Bun wants to play peekaboo."
She covered her face with her hands. Pulled them away. "Peekaboo!"
Dalia shrieked with laughter. "Again! Again!"
Drew did it again. And again. And again. She looked at the clock. Twelve-fifty. The warehouse was waiting. Allie and Simone were waiting. She was missing it.
"Mom, can we go home now?"
"Just one more stop, honey. The pharmacy."
One. They pulled into the driveway. Drew was out of the car before her father turned the engine off. She ran inside, kicked off her cleats in the hallway, and hit the shower. A real one, not the kind where you stand under the water and pretend. She scrubbed the sweat off in two minutes flat, the water running hot enough to turn her skin pink. She toweled off, pulled on a tank top and biker shorts, laced up her sneakers, and grabbed her bike from the garage, a ten-speed with a scratch down the side from when she crashed into the Hendersons' mailbox, and pedaled hard.
The tree house was four blocks away. She made it in two minutes, legs still warm from the shower, thighs burning pleasantly. The trapdoor was open. She climbed the rope ladder two rungs at a time.
Empty.
Simone's grape-scented markers were out on the crate, six caps off, because Simone never capped anything. Allie's kitten notebook was not here. The fairy lights were off. A folded piece of paper sat on the crate, held down by a purple marker.
Drew picked it up. Unfolded it. Simone's handwriting, purple gel pen, the letters round and loopy:
"Dear Drew,
It's already after twelve. Where are you? Allie and I are going to the warehouse. We'll park our bikes behind some bushes to the right of the gate. Join us if you can make it.
Love,
Simone"
Hearts and stars surrounded Simone's name. Drew blew out a noisy breath through her nose. Why did Simone always have to sign her name with hearts and stars? It was a detective agency, not a birthday party. She looked up at the plywood ceiling, annoyed. The annoyance faded after a moment. There was no way for Simone and Allie to know when she was getting back. They had not abandoned her on purpose. They had just gone ahead, which was exactly what Drew would have done.
She dropped the note, climbed down the rope ladder, mounted her bike, and pointed it toward Milton Road.
The warehouse was about a mile from her house. She made it in four minutes, pedaling hard, the warm June air pushing against her face. She could smell cut grass and asphalt and something sweet from the bakery on Fifth. Her legs were still buzzing from soccer. Her heart was beating fast. Not from exertion. From something else. She was about to join a real investigation. Case number two.
The warehouse came into view and Drew slowed, coasting the last fifty yards. She cut behind the bushes and dropped her bike next to Allie's and Simone's.
The Milton Tire Company plant sat back from the road behind a chain-link fence, eight feet high, topped with barbed wire that had rusted orange and was sagging in the middle like a tired eyebrow. The building was corrugated metal and concrete, stained with decades of industrial grime, oil streaks running down the walls in dark tributaries, water damage blooming in brown patches near the roofline. Weeds grew through cracks in the pavement, some of them waist-high, going to seed in the June heat. The loading dock faced the road, its roll-up doors rusted half-open, showing darkness inside. Muddy tire tracks cut through the dust near the dock, fresh enough to still hold water from last night's rain. A faded sign on the fence read "MILTON TIRE CO. - EST. 19" and then nothing, because the rest of the letters had fallen off or been stolen.
Drew looked at it and thought: this is exactly what a villain's lair looks like. Chapter three. The detective finds the hideout. She was not scared. She was not. She tested the padlock on the gate. Solid. She pulled it. Nothing. She looked at the fence. Eight feet. She had climbed tougher things in playground dares, barefoot, with no handholds.
She gripped the chain-link and climbed. The metal was warm from the sun, almost hot, the diamonds pressing into her palms and the soles of her sneakers. Her athletic arms and legs made easy work of it. She reached the top, carefully threaded herself between the rusted barbed wire, and swung over. Her biker shorts snagged on a bolt for a second, yanking tight against her cunny, the fabric pressing into the split of her hairless slit before she yanked free. She dropped down the other side and landed in a crouch on the cracked pavement. Her knees stung where the scabs cracked.
She ran to the building, keeping low, moving the way she moved on the soccer field when she was trying to lose a defender. Quick, quiet, angled. She noticed the muddy tire tracks near the loading dock. Fresh. Multiple vehicles. Different sizes. Someone had been here. Recently. Maybe last night. Maybe this morning. Her heart was beating in her throat now. This was real. This was what Nancy Drew did. This was what detectives did.
She crept along the side of the building, trying doors. The first was locked, a heavy industrial deadbolt that did not budge. The second was rusted shut, the hinges orange and crusted. The third, around the back corner, was slightly ajar. A broken brick was propped against it, holding it open three or four inches. The gap was dark. The air coming through smelled like dust and oil and something faintly chemical, like machine lubricant, something that sat in the back of your throat.
Drew slipped inside, flashlight on. The beam cut through darkness, catching dust motes that swirled and settled.
The warehouse was cavernous. Shafts of daylight cut through holes in the corrugated roof, illuminating columns of dust that drifted in the still air. The floor was concrete, layered with years of grime, old oil stains darkening the surface in irregular patches. Tire manufacturing equipment sat in shadow: presses, molds, conveyor frames, all rusted and silent, the machines of a dead industry hunched in rows like sleeping animals. Wooden pallets were stacked against the far wall. Broken crates littered the floor. The space smelled like old rubber and machine oil and damp concrete, the smell of a place that had been closed up for a long time but not empty. It was cool inside, cooler than the June heat outside, and Drew got goosebumps on her bare arms and legs, the fine hairs standing up.
She could see shoe prints in the dusty floor. Large ones: work boots, heavy treads. And two pairs of smaller ones. Sneakers. She crouched and looked. The treads on the smaller prints matched Allie's sneakers, the ones with the star pattern on the sole. And Simone's, the ones with the worn-down heel from dragging her feet. The sneaker prints looked the freshest. They led deeper into the building, past the rusted machinery, toward a doorway on the far side.
Drew followed them. She moved fast, flashlight beam tracking the prints, her sneakers quiet on the concrete. She was happy to be on their trail. She felt like a real detective. She had her flashlight. She had her wits. Her friends were somewhere ahead. She was going to find them and they were going to solve this together, and then they were going to write it up in the case file and it would be the best Saturday ever.
She followed the prints through the main floor, past the presses and the conveyor frames, through a doorway into a hallway. The hallway was darker, the flashlight beam narrowing to a bright circle on the dirty floor. More doors, all closed. The prints continued. She could hear something now, faint, coming from below. A humming sound. Mechanical. Low and steady, like a machine running somewhere in the basement.
She turned a corner.
The flashlight beam did not even reach the wall before a hard hand clamped over her mouth and another arm snaked across her belly and lifted her from the ground.
Drew kicked. She thrashed. She tried to scream but the hand was too tight, pressing her lips against her teeth, crushing the sound. The man was strong. Stronger than Tyler Morrison. Stronger than any kid she had ever fought, any adult who had ever tried to grab her in a game of tag. Her legs swung in the air. She grabbed at the arm across her belly, tried to dig her nails in, but the angle was wrong and her fingers scraped uselessly against a thick, hairy forearm.
The man carried her down a stairwell. His grip shifted as he descended, the arm across her belly sliding lower. His fingers slipped under the waistband of her biker shorts, pushing beneath the spandex, and his hand settled against her kitty. That was what her mom called it when she was little, kitty, and Drew still thought of it that way even though she was eight now and too old for baby words. Drew went wild. She thrashed harder, her hips bucking, her legs kicking. She squealed into his hand, a high, muffled sound. His fingers pressed into her, sliding along the split of her hairless slit, one thick finger pushing between her lips and pressing against her hole. The touch was hot and dry and wrong, and Drew's body did something confusing: her kitty clenched, a quick tight pulse that she felt in her belly, a tingle like a static shock but deeper. She fought harder. She fought because of the tingle, because it scared her more than the hand itself.
The man's finger pushed lower, past her kitty, pressing against her butthole. Drew knew what a butthole was. Everybody knew what a butthole was. But nobody touched it. Ever. His finger slipped in, just the tip, and Drew screamed into his palm, her whole body going rigid. It felt weird. It felt tingly. It felt like the static shock had moved inside her and was sitting there, warm and wrong.
"Do not worry, little girl. You will soon get all you want there," the man laughed. His voice was deep and rough. He smelled like motor oil and Old Spice, the kind her dad used.
They reached the bottom of the stairs. The man pushed a door open with his foot. Light flooded in, harsh and fluorescent. Drew blinked, her eyes watering, adjusting.
The room smelled like coffee and motor oil and warm metal.
Her eyes focused.
And she saw her friends.