Dani shrugged. “I guess. And if there were a Baron’s Burger Hut downtown next to the sandwich shop, it would have made sense, but there’s not. Lauren and I tried for hours to figure out what it meant. We looked up last names in the phonebook, looked up the name of every business, everything we could think of. There’s nothing around here that even sounds like the baron’s.”

On the cassette tape, a phone rang. Dani’s dad answered: “Three-six, go ahead.” After a long pause, he continued: “Yeah, that’s fine, you can send the paperwork here. Use the secure fax.”

The phone’s handset clattered back into its cradle.

“To me,” Dani said, “it was just another random thing that didn’t go anywhere. We’d heard lots of stuff like that on these tapes. But Lauren was obsessed with Station Nine. She wanted to find it. She would read the few notes we had on it, over and over.”

“What do those notes say?” Sam asked.

“Nothing at all. Just random mentions of the place, in the middle of conversations.”

“Then why would Lauren care about it so much?”

“Because I think when she heard her dad talk about it, she heard more than just the location. Whatever the rest of it was, it’s the reason she was so stuck on finding it. And it was something she didn’t want to tell me. The few times I pressed her on it, she said it was nothing, no big deal. But you can tell when someone’s holding back. Why she would do that, though … I don’t know.”

“Maybe it scared her. Maybe it was something that bad.”

“Maybe,” Dani said. “No matter what, I think it has something to do with her and her dad’s disappearance. Which would mean Station Nine is part of all this. Part of … the problem. Part of Rigel, whatever that is.”

Before Sam could ask anything else, a new sound came over the recording on the cassette player. He flinched and spun toward it. In the corner of his eye he saw Dani startle at the movement.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Play that back. That sound.”

“It was just the secure fax in my dad’s office. It goes off all the time.”

“I need to hear it again.”

Without waiting for her, he picked up the device, stopped the tape and rewound it a few seconds. He pressed PLAY.

Dani stood from the bed and came up beside him.

Sam turned one ear toward the tape deck, waiting.

Then the sound came again:

Click, click, click, hum.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Two minutes later they were standing in Sam’s bedroom, staring into the closet.

“You’re sure it’s the same sound?” Dani said.

“Positive.”