She walked back to the hallway and looked at the rear wall. Her home office had a small external service door, used years ago for deliveries when her aunt sold seedlings. Mara kept a bookcase in front of it. She had forgotten the door because she had never once used it.
She moved the bookcase. A thin line of daylight edged the frame. The upper hinge had been loosened, and the door sat crooked. She touched the latch. It lifted with almost no resistance.
A soft, mechanical click came from outside. Mara dropped to her knees. Through the gap she saw the end of a black cable disappear beneath the garden bench. There was a small adhesive sensor on the door frame, scarcely larger than a thumbnail.
Someone had been monitoring whether the service door opened.
Mara backed away and called Holt. The officer told her not to touch anything else and promised to return. Mara stood in the hallway staring at the narrow shaft of light. The person who had tried the front door had never needed the front door. He had been checking whether she was alone and whether she would let him into a room whose second exit had already been prepared.
The thought unsettled her more than the broken glass.
Holt arrived with another officer and a technician who carefully removed the sensor. It appeared to be part of an inexpensive commercial motion alarm. There was no sign that it had been connected to her home network. Whoever set it could have used a receiver from nearby.
“This suggests someone planned access,” Holt said. “It doesn’t tell us why.”
“The photographs,” Mara replied. “There’s someone deliberately putting them in my gallery. They want me to find something.”
“Or they want you distracted.”
It was a fair point. Mara showed her the last message, then noticed a thumbnail she had overlooked. In it, the red wagon was partly covered by a striped picnic blanket. A corner of a hand-lettered sign protruded from beneath the blanket. The sign bore the image of a white fox.
“I know that logo,” Mara said. “Arcadia Rooms.”
Arcadia Rooms had opened six months earlier in the old grocery warehouse near the railway crossing. It offered immersive puzzle adventures for families, team-building evenings, and elaborate birthday parties. Its advertising featured the white fox on colored backgrounds. Mara had never visited, but its vans drove around town with furniture, screens, and collapsible scenery.
“ARC,” Holt said, remembering the van.
Mara showed her the picture. “It could be their vehicle.”
Holt called dispatch to check the business. The company was registered, with a valid storefront license. Its website listed upcoming events, including a limited-ticket attraction called The Lost Room, where players attempted to locate a fictional child who had disappeared from an imaginary town. The promotional photograph showed a lime-green raincoat hanging on a chair.
Mara stared at the screen. “That’s the boy’s coat.”
“Could be a costume.”
“Yes. But why photograph it in my yard?”
Holt could not answer. She asked Mara to remain elsewhere for the night. Mara agreed to stay with her colleague Priya, who lived near the library, then packed a bag while an officer waited on the porch.
Before leaving, she noticed something unexpected on the cracked brick. A faint white fox had been stamped onto one edge. It was not a manufactured marking. The image looked as though somebody had applied it with a stencil.
She mentioned it to Holt, who examined the brick carefully.
“Maybe your neighbor knows the logo,” Holt said.
“She used to drive a bus,” Mara replied. “Maybe that’s why she recognized the boy.”
On her way out, Mara found a small green ribbon tied to the fence latch. It fluttered in the evening wind, the same exact color as the raincoat.
Chapter Four: Willa’s Explanation
Priya Singh lived above a small printing shop, in rooms that smelled faintly of paper and cardamom tea. She let Mara in without asking whether she wanted to talk, made soup, and gave her the spare bedroom. It was the first ordinary kindness of a day that had become steadily stranger.
At nine, Mara’s phone rang from a private number.
“You should not have left your house,” a woman’s voice said.
“Willa?”
“Are you alone?”
“No. Tell me why you threw a brick through my window.”
A shaky breath came down the line. “I was told you would open the front door if there was trouble at the back. I needed you to stay where you could see your phone.”
“Who told you?”
“The man with the black case. He said if I didn’t do it, he’d take the boy before anybody knew where to look.”
“What boy?”
“His name isn’t Eli,” Willa whispered. “That’s the name they use in the show. His real name is Owen. I drove him to school when he was little.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. I thought I did.”
Mara looked toward Priya, who was standing by the stove. She placed the call on speaker.
“Willa,” Mara said, “there are police looking for you. Talk to them.”
“I tried. The man told me they would think I was confused, and then he showed me a photograph of my grandson outside his job. I know how it sounds. But I was afraid.”
Priya wrote the word grandson on a pad and held it up. Mara asked his name and where he worked. Willa said Nathan Fenwick, twenty-three, a delivery driver for a hardware store. She had called him twice since throwing the brick, with no response.
“You cannot protect him by staying hidden,” Mara said.
Willa began to cry silently. Then she said, “The pictures didn’t come from me. I don’t know how to send them. I thought you were the one sending them to yourself.”
“Why would I?”
“Because you were supposed to have kept them safe.”
Before Mara could respond, the line disconnected.
Priya poured tea into two chipped mugs. “What does that mean?”
“I have no idea.”
But as Mara spoke, she remembered the library tablet, the one with its protective orange case and the badly cracked corner. Children used it to photograph their displays and upload pictures to the shared folder. Two weeks earlier a teenager had returned it after borrowing it for an outdoor storytelling competition. Mara had asked him to place it in the charging cabinet. She had not checked afterward.
“Who borrowed the tablet last?” Priya asked.
“A boy who helped with the fox-costume workshop.”
“At Arcadia Rooms?”
Mara shook her head. “At the library. The children were building characters from recycled fabric. Arcadia sponsored some art supplies.”
Priya’s expression changed. She knew the workshop. It was where several teenagers had practiced photographing handmade sets, including the lime-green raincoat. “The Arcadia people came twice,” she recalled. “They offered to lend us lights. One of them made everyone sign permission forms for photographs. The librarian told him we didn’t need his forms.”
“Did you see the man?”
“Tall, dark hair, glasses. He carried a narrow equipment case. He wasn’t rude. That was what made him difficult to argue with.”
Mara sent Holt a message summarizing the call. Then she called the library’s director, Alma Ward, who answered sleepily and immediately became alert at the mention of the tablet.
“We put it in the lost-property cupboard,” Alma said. “The charging cable was missing.”
“Can you check it?”
“I can come in early.”
“No,” Mara said. “Please call the officer I’m texting you. Don’t go alone.”
Priya set down her mug. “You think they’re using our children’s photographs as part of some game?”
“I think someone made a story about a missing boy,” Mara said. “And now there’s a real boy I can’t find.”
Chapter Five: The Room Behind the Room
At seven the next morning, Holt called to report that Nathan Fenwick had been located. He was safe and furious, having switched off his phone while driving an overnight route through an area with poor reception. He had no idea anyone had photographed him outside work.
Willa was no longer missing. She had gone to the police station herself shortly after midnight and admitted breaking Mara’s window. She repeated her explanation about being threatened, identified the man as Simon Rusk, and described meeting him outside Arcadia Rooms. Holt confirmed that Rusk was listed as the company’s creative director. She did not promise that Willa would escape consequences for the damage.
“She knows she broke the law,” Holt said. “She also believes she was stopping an immediate threat. We’re sorting those facts out separately.”
Mara appreciated the distinction. She could not forgive the brick simply because a more frightening person might have arranged it. But she was beginning to understand why an anxious woman would do something reckless when she felt nobody would listen.
Alma located the library tablet under a stack of discarded craft materials. It was locked, but the account was still signed into the photo album. Several newly uploaded pictures had come from the device, even though it had supposedly been in storage. The most recent files were stamped with dates and times that did not match the library’s opening hours.
