“Hey, Riley!” she said, smiling at us. “And you must be Nancy, right? The detective?”

“Well,” I said, “amateur detective.”

“Right!” she said. “Please come in, come in.”

Emily stepped off to the side and gestured in toward her room. I looked back at George before stepping inside. I could see that we were both completely shocked by the way Emily was acting. She seemed perfectly fine. She even seemed happy to see us. I knew that people often deal with stress in different ways, but I still couldn’t help but be taken by surprise.

“Excuse the mess,” she said, clearing a place for us to sit down on the bed and in the few chairs the room had. Emily’s room was a little messy, mainly just dirty clothes lying around, but I didn’t really mind. I took one of the chairs, with a yellow sweater still thrown across the back, and George took the other. Riley leaned up against the windowsill behind us.

“No, I understand,” I said. “You’ve been dealing with a lot recently.”

Emily let out a huff as she sat on the bed with a bounce and said, “That’s true. Riley said you’re trying to figure out what happened to Jacob?”

“That’s Emily’s boyfriend,” supplied Riley.

“We are,” I said. “We originally came to Shady Oaks because I’d heard about the missing museum employee, Grace Rogers. But now there’s your boyfriend, Jacob, as well.”

Emily nodded. “And the police aren’t doing anything,” she said.

“Really?” asked George. “I thought they were threatening to shut down the museum.”

“And they brought you and Susan in for questioning,” I added.

“Well, yes,” said Emily. “They did. But I don’t understand why they won’t just close the exhibit now. Really, I think they just want to ignore it, because the exhibit is bringing in so much money for the town. If they found something and had to shut it down, everyone would be really upset.”

“I was told that the police believe Susan is behind all this,” I said. “They’re hoping she’ll come forward before the end of the week.”

Emily let out a sound that was halfway between a snort and a laugh. “Susan isn’t going to come forward,” she said.

“Why do you think that?” I asked.

“Because she isn’t responsible for the missing people,” said Emily. “No one in town is. Those photographs are cursed, and as long as the museum is open, people are just going to keep going missing.”

Off to my right I saw George roll her eyes, but I didn’t want Emily to get offended and think that we didn’t believe her. I figured that the best thing to do would be to get as much information as I could from her, even if she might have a different interpretation of everything than I would.

“Emily,” I said, “why don’t you tell us everything, from the beginning?”

Emily nodded and told us how she and Jacob had visited the exhibit last night. The museum was just about to close, and they were the last two people there. She was looking at a photograph, and when she eventually turned around, Jacob was gone.