“We can’t, but…” Dani pushed up off the floor and stood. She crossed to the movie posters on the far wall. “But this doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

She was pointing at the two darts, stuck into the posters.

“You guys didn’t do that?” Sam asked.

Dani shook her head. “We never played darts at all. And I know for a fact these weren’t stuck here the last time I was in this room. Besides, it’s just not something Lauren or her dad would do. Not just out of the blue, for no reason. It’s weird. I mean, if you knew them … trust me, this is weird.”

Sam went to her side. He stared at the darts, each stuck into a navel in the images—the only two navels visible on any of the posters.

“What if Lauren was down here when everything happened?” Dani said. “She would have heard her dad confronting whoever it was that came to grab them. What if she heard something important—somebody’s name, something like that? And if she had even a little bit of time before they came down here and found her … she could have tried to leave some kind of message behind. It’s exactly the kind of thing she would do.”

“You mean … the darts are supposed to be a message?”

Dani rubbed her forehead. She seemed perfectly aware of how strange the idea sounded. Yet her eyes remained focused on the posters.

“Look, I could be wrong about the why part,” she said. “But the darts have to mean something. There can’t just be no reason for them being like this.”

Sam pointed to a small notepad and pencil, tucked into the shallow wooden cabinet that held the dartboard on the wall.

“If she wanted to leave a message, she could have just written one,” he said.

He went to the notepad and picked it up. Several pages up front had been torn out, probably over months or years. None of the existing pages had anything written on them. He flipped through them quickly to make sure.

“Okay,” Dani said. “But she’d have to hide the note, or else the kidnappers would have just taken it when they grabbed her.” Her gaze went from the notepad back to the posters. “So what if that’s what the darts are about? Like … a red flag … or a hint.”

“About where she put the note?” Sam asked.

For a long moment Dani didn’t answer. Then she turned and leaned back into the wall and shut her eyes tight. Her hands made little fists at her sides.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe my brain is making stuff up to keep from going nuts. What do you think?”