Sam turned in place and swept his gaze over the basement. He looked at the bay window, and briefly wondered why Lauren wouldn’t have just escaped through it, if she had really been down here when the kidnappers arrived. She could have run to a neighbor’s house and called the cops. Then he saw that there were no latches on any of the windowpanes; none of them could be opened. And the glass was double-layered. Lauren might have been able to shatter it, but not quickly or quietly; anyone upstairs would have heard it and come running.

He turned back to Dani.

“I think there are only so many places to hide a note down here,” he said. “So let’s look.”

Dani opened her eyes again.

“Thank you,” she said.

They spent half an hour searching. They peeled the posters off the walls and looked behind them. They checked behind the dartboard, and behind its wooden cabinet. They took the baseball display case off the wall. They opened it up and studied every baseball from all sides, in case the message had simply been written on one of them. They looked under and behind and on top of the arcade games. They went into the laundry room below the stairs, and checked inside the washer and dryer.

No note from Lauren. Nothing at all.

Their only find was something that deepened their confusion: in each of the six pockets of the pool table, there was another dart. They were crammed way down in, out of sight to anyone not standing right above them and looking down.

“Okay,” Sam said, “so the darts are definitely supposed to mean something. But what?”

Dani looked as lost as Sam felt. “Belly buttons and a pool table,” she said. “If there’s a connection, I’m missing it.”

Sam thought about it for more than a minute, but got nowhere.

“Stumped,” he said softly.

Dani made no reply.

Sam went back to the bay window and stared out into the late morning sunlight. The tall grass on the slope moved in long, rolling waves.

He found his gaze drawn to the block-sized pine grove, far away to the southeast, beyond the cluster of buildings downtown. He had seen those pines two days before, on the way to Echo House with Dani. He didn’t know why they drew his attention now, except for the obvious fact that they were almost the only trees visible south of the subdivision.

He looked at Dani. She was sitting against the arcade machine again. She had her knees pulled up close to her, and her forehead resting on them.

He wished there were something he could say to her. Something to make her feel better. He watched her for a few seconds and then went back to staring out the window.

Staring at the distant pines.