“And you don’t have any surveillance cameras or anything like that?”

“We do now. But then, no. We had a camera by the front door so we could see who rang the bell.”

“I assume the police checked it out.”

“Nothing to check. It didn’t record. We only used it for live viewing.”

There was a round kitchen table with four chairs. Rhys had only the one sibling—Clark—so Myron wondered whether it had always been like that, the four chairs, and after what happened to Rhys, no one had the heart to move it. Did they sit there at dinner every night for ten years, at that table, the one chair empty?

He looked at Brooke. She knew what he was thinking. It was all over her face.

“We sometimes eat on the island too,” she said.

There was a large rectangular marble island in the middle of the kitchen. A variety of upscale brass pans hung from the ceiling above it. One side had storage. The other had six barstools.

“One thing,” Myron said.

“What?”

“Everything faces the windows. I mean, except for one of the chairs at the kitchen table. The sink has a view. The stove has a view. The barstools and even the table.”

“Yes.”

Myron walked over to the sliding glass door. He looked to his left, then to his right. “So three men in ski masks get all this way—all the way to this door—and no one sees them?”

“Vada was busy,” Brooke said. “She was preparing the snack. The boys, well, they wouldn’t be looking out the window. They were probably playing some kind of video game or messing around.”

Myron looked at how wide open the yard was, how big the windows were. “I guess that’s possible.”

“What else would it be?”

No reason to answer that quite yet. “Clark told me he was in school when the boys were taken.”

“Right. So?”

“Most kids finish school around three in the afternoon. The kindergarteners in this town only go half a day, right?”

“Right. They were let out at eleven thirty.”

“And the kidnappers knew that too.”

“So?”

“So nothing. It suggests some planning on their part; that’s all.”

“The police figured that. They figured that they probably followed Vada or Rhys and knew their schedule.”

Myron thought about that. “But Rhys didn’t come home after school every day, did he? I mean, I assume sometimes his playdates took him to other kids’ homes. I assume he went to Patrick’s sometimes, for example.”

“Right.”

“So on the one hand, this looks carefully planned out. Three men. Knowing the schedule. And then on the other, they rely on your au pair leaving this sliding door unlocked and no one seeing them as they approached.”

“They could have known she never locked it.”

“By spying on how she entered the kitchen from the yard? Unlikely.”

“They also could have smashed the window,” Brooke said.

“I’m not following.”

“Let’s say Vada had spotted them. Do you think she could have gotten to the door and locked it in time? And then what? They could have smashed the glass and grabbed the boys.”