But that wasn’t what he found. What he found was another bedroom. At first, all he saw was the mess. Clothes littered the floor and hung over the furniture. The bed was unmade and slightly askew. The walls were covered with posters of bands Connor didn’t know: The Mowgli’s, Jukebox the Ghost, Billie Eilish. There was a simple white desk with a mess of papers on it and, perhaps most importantly, a laptop.
Connor had not considered until now that this was the first computer he had seen in the house. He knew immediately this had to be the madness behind the TruthSeekers website, the secret self the rest of the house tried so hard to hide. He wondered if this was the only room Dylan actually lived in. It was possible, wasn’t it?
As if to confirm his suspicion, he then noticed a series of large foam stickers that stretched across several of the posters and spelled out his name. D-Y-L-A-N.
Then he noticed other things that didn’t sit with his assumptions. The foam stickers were all different colors and sprinkled with glitter. The sheets on the bed had unicorns on them. The clothes were too small for an adult, and on one tee shirt he could clearly read “Girl power.”
He stepped into the room, saw the posters and foam letters weren’t the only things stuck to the walls. There were also photos. Lots of them. Most were of happy kids posing together. Some silly, some less so. They posed in front of a Starbucks, with animals at a petting zoo, in various parking lots and shopping malls. Unlike the photos in Olin’s house, there seemed no rhyme or reason to them. Well, except for one thing. One important detail Connor didn’t notice until he had looked at enough of them up close. Of all the people, there was one who came up more than any of the others. A girl with red hair and freckles. She looked to be about fourteen.
Suddenly, it all came together.
Dylan wasn’t an unstable adult capable of kidnapping. He wasn’t an adult, at all. Or even a man. He—she—was just a child.
Olin grabbed Connor’s arm. “What’s that?” he whispered. He was looking straight ahead, but didn’t seem to be focused on anything in particular.
“What?” Connor responded, also whispering. He felt a little foolish about it, since they were the only ones in the house.
“Sounds like a car.”
“It’s just your nerves.”
Olin moved to the bedroom window, trying not to step on Dylan’s clothes as he went. It was a futile effort.
“Do you see anything?” Connor asked. Even from where he was, he could make out part of the driveway, so he knew the window faced the front of the house.
“No.”
“Like I told you. It’s just your nerves.”
Then there was a much louder sound—a mechanical rumble. It lasted only five or six seconds. Connor and Olin stood frozen in place until it was over, then simultaneously looked at each other. Connor knew what it was and suspected Olin did, too. Still, he said it out loud just to make sure they were on the same page. “That was a garage door,” he whispered. Only now, whispering seemed to make sense.
“I told you,” Olin said.
The mechanical rumble started up again. It lasted another five or six seconds.
Door open. Door closed.
Olin looked left and right as if assessing an unseen enemy. “I knew this was a bad idea.”
“Relax. We’ll get out of here.”
“How?”
It was a fair question. There was no climbing out a window from this height. Then Connor had an idea. He peeked into the hall, heard a door open downstairs. Presumably, it was the one that led to the garage. “This way,” he hissed, as he hurried from the bedroom to the laundry room.
Olin cursed and followed him. “This is your plan?” he said, once they had crossed the hall.
Connor remembered the laundry room door had been closed when they had come upstairs, and he kept it open only a crack now. “Shhhh.” He had his ear pressed to that crack, trying to hear what was happening.
Someone treaded across the hardwood floors downstairs. The sound faded and transformed as that someone stepped into the kitchen, then disappeared completely for a minute. No one spoke—upstairs or down.
“I think, whoever it is, they’re alone,” Connor said.
“Probably not Dylan, then.”
Connor wasn’t sure if Olin intended the comment to be a verbal jab or if he was simply noting that she looked too young to have driven herself here. Either way, there was nothing to say to it. He kept his ear pressed to the crack between the door and the jamb.
The footsteps returned, moved somewhere else on the first floor.
“What’s the plan?” Olin said.
Connor had been hoping that whoever it was would come upstairs, disappear into one of the bedrooms for a while, giving them enough time for an easy escape. It no longer seemed like that was going to happen.
But then he heard a much softer sound. A rat-a-tat-tat he recognized. And at least he knew where in the house the person was.
When Connor and Olin had searched the first floor, Connor had come across a room to the left of the front door that, it seemed to him, had been converted from a formal living room into a library. Built-in bookshelves lined every wall, and every shelf was packed with books. There was also a desk dead center that looked out onto the foyer, but was bare save a Georgetown brass-finish desk lamp.
At the time, he had thought the room was mostly for show. But with the whole house maintained in pristine condition, he now knew better. That rat-a-tat-tat was the sound of a keyboard, and that desk was likely where Dylan’s parents sat when they worked from home. It was easy enough to imagine her father or her mother coming in with a laptop, stopping by the
