I told her you’d ruled out the boarding schools, I say by text. Who do you think the Elder is?
I’m trying to work that out, CheshireCat says. What did you think of the thing she said to that person at the bus stop?
Seemed creepy. I look up and notice that Nell is looking at me hopefully. Out loud, I say, “No news yet.”
Nell is right that putting up tape is annoying: I’ve been working my way around the room to tape the edge of the ceiling and my arms are getting tired, but the room is pretty small and I’m almost done when Nell’s phone buzzes with a notification. I’m standing on her desk, and I turn around to watch her face as she stares at the message.
“Is it an answer?” I ask.
“I asked where Glenys is,” Nell says. “The message says, ‘She’s locked in a shed.’”
“That’s it?” I climb down from the desk and go over to peer at Nell’s phone. The answer fills her entire screen, big white text on a black background. “Is the Elder always this literal-yet-useless?”
“Sometimes. It depends on the question.” Nell puts her phone down on her bed. “There are three sheds at her parents’ house. One’s about halfway fixed up to be a guest room; the other two are storage.”
“Do you think that’s where she is?”
“She might be?” Nell’s voice rises almost hopefully, like she thinks that would be too good to be true.
“How hard would it be to check?”
“I’m going to try calling her brother,” Nell says. “Not that he’ll necessarily tell me the truth, but maybe I’ll be able to guess from his reaction.” She dials. The phone rolls straight to voice mail. I climb back up to finish taping as she tries calling several more times. “I think he’s blocked my number,” she says, and her voice breaks.
I get back down. Nell isn’t crying, but her hands are shaking like every emotion she’s feeling is stuffed into too small of a container inside her. “Do you want to try my phone?” I ask. “Or—I could call, maybe. If you don’t think he’ll talk to you.”
“Can you think of any way to get him to check the sheds? If either of us says, ‘So Nicholas, is Glenys locked in the shed?’ he won’t give us a straight answer, but if you can get him to walk around to the sheds and look in them maybe … I’ll be able to tell something?”
“Okay,” I say, and think for a minute. “Do you know the names of some of their neighbors? Preferably someone who lives within a half mile but isn’t right next door, and isn’t part of the Remnant themselves.”
Nell thinks about it, then reels off a couple of names. I take a deep breath and dial Nicholas’s number.
Nicholas picks up right away. “Hello?” he says.
“Hi, is this Nicholas?” I say, and then ride straight through his suspicious “Who’s calling?” with, “I’m Adrienne’s niece Emily, I got to town last night for a visit, and my dog’s gone missing. She’s just a tiny little thing and she sometimes finds her way into places and can’t get back out. I’m calling around to the neighbors to see if maybe you could check inside your sheds, just to see if she’s there?”
A pause. I try to decide if his breathing sounds annoyed.
“Please?” I add.
“Okay,” he says. “Hang on, I’m going to have to get my coat and boots on.”
I hear snow crunching underfoot. “What sort of dog?” he asks.
“Her name’s Bernice and she’s a toy poodle and she’s just the cutest little thing,” I say, and discourage any further questioning by telling him how cute she is, and yet how stinky her farts are, establishing myself as the sort of person you don’t want to encourage with conversational openings.
I turn up the volume so that Nell can hear whatever I hear, and we lean our heads close together and listen as Nicholas unlocks each shed in turn, and whistles and calls for Bernice. With the half-finished guesthouse, he looks around quickly; with the other sheds, he spends some time looking behind some tools and under a workbench. “I’m not finding her,” he says. “You can come traipse around yourself if you want, though.”
“I might do that if I don’t find her somewhere else,” I say. “Thank you so much for looking. I really appreciate it.” I look at Nell to see if she’s got any other thoughts, but she shakes her head, so I ring off.
“That was perfect,” Nell whispers.
“Do you think he was hiding anything?”
“No. No, I don’t think she’s there,” Nell says. “He wouldn’t have said you could come look if they had Glenys locked up anywhere on the property. She’s not there.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Bad, I guess. Because that was the most likely of all the sheds in the world, and now we’ve ruled it out and that leaves all the rest.” Her voice has already shifted to defeated. “I’ll have to earn another question. Try again.”
“How specific is the Elder, usually?”
“Sometimes he’s really specific. That’s kind of why my mother started taking us to the Abiding Remnant.” Nell opens up the Elder’s answer to look at it again, like she thinks maybe it’ll have changed. “I mean, the fire, that meant something to that girl at the bus stop earlier. She didn’t have to break a code to figure it out; she knew.”
“Maybe treat it like a game of Twenty Questions,” I say, and then suddenly worry this is one more thing we won’t have in common. “Have you played that?”
“Yes, with my grandmother. Okay. That’s not a bad idea. It’ll be slow, but I’ll get answers I can use, maybe.”
“And maybe my hacker friend will have some new ideas? Don’t give up hope.”
“I’ll never give up hope,” Nell says fiercely. “I can’t give up trying to find
