Together, Sidra and I ran out of the door and descended the front steps, then jogged down the driveway toward the road. We reached the spot where the bus usually stopped. The main road was fairly empty, and I trotted across to the other side.

“Look,” I said, scooting down a steep bank to a dry ditch beside the road. “You see the grass here?”

I pointed to where it was flattened against the ground.

“Was Carlos wearing sneakers this morning?”

“Yes. Nike’s.”

“That’s probably his footprint,” I said. At the bottom of the indentation in the grass was a clear, child-sized print in the mud where someone was obviously pushing off to climb back out of the ditch.

“It’s just my guess,” I said. “But I’d be willing to bet he climbed down here and hid until the bus was gone. Then he climbed back out and either took off down the road or headed back home.”

“Back home?”

“Have you checked his tree house?”

Sidra shook her head.

“We haven’t even tried looking around the house. I just kept thinking someone nabbed him here on the road while he was waiting for the bus.”

We ran back across the street, and Sidra took off for the yard, yelling.

“Carlos!” she screamed, her voice carrying the anguish of a mother who’s lost her son. “Carlos! You come out right this instant!”

I headed back into the house, and Derek and Marion met me at the door.

“Looks like he hid beside the road,” I said. “There’s a chance he could be around here somewhere.”

“The pool, check the pool,” Marion said, clutching at her throat. “He may have drowned!”

She and Derek ran outside. The policemen and I began to search inside the house, and as I was running through the kitchen, Nick came in from outside, carrying a bag of groceries.

“What is going on here?” he asked. I told him as quickly as possible, and he immediately put down the bag and began to help us search the house. I could hear his booming voice shouting for Carlos even when I was upstairs at the other end of the hall.

It wasn’t until I went through my own door that I stopped short, my heart pounding. There, on my bed, was an envelope with my name on it, written in what looked like a little boy’s handwriting.

I picked it up and ripped it open. Inside was a piece of paper, a typed series of letters and numbers that made no sense at all.

“Carlos!” I muttered under my breath. “What have you done?” Across the bottom of the page he had typed, “Clue to crack the code: Move your fingers to the bottom row of the keyboard.”