The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Glasgow, Kathleen and Lawson, Liz. The Night in Question. Delacorte Press. 2023. Kindle.

This is the second novel in The Agathas series. In the first novel, teenagers Iris Adams and Alice Ogilvie teamed up to solve the murder of Alice’s former best friend, Brooke Donovan. In this novel, the teens go to the Sadie Hawkins dance at Levy Castle, which Brooke’s great-grandfather, Charles Levy, built in the early 1900s. After his wife passed away, Charles had an affair with Mona Moody, an actress who fell to her death from the balcony of the castle in 1949 when she was just 20. Alice has been fascinated with Mona Moody for years, so she decides to sneak off to look through the castle. After breaking up a fight between Helen Park and Rebecca Kennedy, Alice goes into the library and finds a secret passage that leads to a closet. She goes through the dresses and then heads into the study where she finds Rebecca on the floor, covered in blood, with Helen standing over her holding a bloody letter opener. Helen runs away, but Alice follows her and traps her in a storage room where she keeps her until the police arrive. Meanwhile, Iris rushes up to care for Rebecca until the medics arrive.

Rebecca is rushed to the hospital, and Detective Thompson scolds Alice and Iris for interfering with a crime scene. However, he takes Helen into the station to be interrogated. Iris and Alice leave the castle and spend the night at Alice’s house. Iris reveals that she discovered part of a note in the study by Rebecca. The note asked Rebecca to meet in the study at 9:30. The girls check the yearbook and note that Helen’s handwriting is not a match for the writing on the note, so they surmise that someone else wrote the note. Their mutual friend, Raf, who works as an intern at the police department, tells them that Helen has been arrested for the attack and that Rebecca is in a coma at the hospital.

Once Helen gets out on bail, Alice and Iris go to her house and explain that they think she is innocent and that they want to prove it. Helen tells them that she went upstairs looking for Helen, but she heard two people fighting in the study and slamming down piano keys before she opened the door and found Rebecca on the floor. Alice and Iris believe her story, so they enlist their friends to help go through all the suspects who were in the castle. Their first suspect is Reed Gerber, who was Rebecca’s date to the dance. However, they find out that he had a bathroom accident that involved the guidance counselor, so they cross him off their suspect list because of his solid alibi.

The friends decide to go to the historical society to look through the castle’s blueprints to see if there is another way out of the study. They discover that a cater-waiter named Alex Schaefer looked through the same blueprints the week before. Together, they go to the Waves Motel where Alex lives to interrogate him. They learn that his father owns the dilapidated motel that Rebecca’s father is attempting to develop into a luxurious resort.

Alice goes to school and works on a genealogy project with her biology partner, Ashley Henderson. After, she and her friends go to the castle and discover a secret room accessed by slamming down the piano keys down. They find a bedroom with a bathroom that has a sink full of dried blood. They look out the window and find a bloody cater-waiter jacket. The police arrive and arrest Iris for trespassing, but they let the other teens go.

Alice goes with Iris’s mother to pick Iris up from jail, and then Alice conspires to steal a diary that the police found in the cater-waiter jacket. Iris’s mother tells her she must stop spending time with Alice because she is a bad influence. Alice examines the diary and discovers that it belonged to Mona Moody, and that the actress was kept locked in the secret room in the castle while she was supposed to be in a sanitorium receiving treatment for tuberculosis.

The police arrest Alex, but he claims that he only went up to the study to steal an expensive necklace from Rebecca with Helen, but Helen attacked Rebecca on her own. Iris and Alice go back to Helen’s house, and she tells them that she met Alex that night when he spontaneously kissed her and asked her to meet him upstairs later. She agreed, but when she got upstairs she heard the voices arguing and then walked in on Rebecca covered in blood on the floor.

Alice and Iris call Lilian Levy, who they became close with after solving her granddaughter’s murder the year before. She tells them that her father, Charles Levy, had moved Mona into the castle after her mother passed away. Mona was always sick, though, so Rebecca’s great-grandfather, Eugene Kennedy, treated Mona, and stole one of her expensive necklaces, then handed it down to his granddaughter, Rebecca. Lilian also reveals that Mona spent a lot of time with Eugene’s brother, Clifford, who drowned a week before Mona fell from the balcony.

Alice and Iris track down Eugene Kennedy and find him in Hollywood. They discover that Mona and Clifford had a baby who was given up for adoption, and that the adoptive family lives in Whispering Pines. The girls drive to Whispering Pines and find out that Charles Levy shot Clifford, and Eugene pushed Mona from the balcony.

The girls drive back home and get into a fight about Iris’s mom. They split up and Iris heads to the hospital to visit Rebecca, but she is shocked to discover Ashley Henderson attempting to suffocate the girl. Iris stops her, but Ashley escapes. Alice goes home and realizes that Ashley is the culprit because of an Agatha Christie book. She rushes to the hospital and follows Ashley out of the parking lot and into the yacht club.

Ashley admits to finding out that Mona Moody was her grandmother during the genealogy project. She always wanted to be an actress, so she seduced Alex and conspired to steal back her grandmother’s necklace, then framed Helen. Ashley escapes onto a yacht with her mother.

In the end, the girls go roller-skating with their friends. Lilian joins them after deciding not to let the revelations about her father ruin her life.