There was a bed shoved into the corner. The lavender lace covering had lightened to gray, and bits were eaten away by moths. The pillows looked misshapen, as if they’d been slept on by trolls. A smattering of pale, faded stuffed animals sat beside the bed, but the most interesting part of the bedroom was the board strung up on the wall. Belle’s fingers vibrated as she reached out to touch it. Breathing came with great difficulty. Her adoptive father had to be a serial killer, because why else would he have pinned this little girl’s face on his wall over and over again? Why else would he have tacked up articles about her disappearance? The only things missing were red bits of string connecting one article to the other.

With this thought came clarity. Edwin Drake wasn’t celebrating a murder. He was trying to solve a mystery, Belle realized, as her eyes scanned the headlines. Almost two decades earlier, a little girl had gone missing while walking home from Rose Hollow Elementary. Reporters speculated on what had happened to her. Someone could’ve pulled up in a windowless van. Someone could’ve dragged her into the woods. A number of horrifying scenarios flooded Belle’s mind until her vision started to glaze.

Edwin’s daughter had been stolen.

In the twenty years that followed, the police had never found a trace of her. Not a single lock of hair or a fingernail. Not a tooth or a piece of clothing. One day she’d been in this room, cradled in her father’s arms, and the next she’d ceased to exist in his world.

Belle slumped onto the bed, lifting a faded blue tiger from the floor. Half his stripes were gray. The other half, cornflower blue. Had he been vibrant once? Sapphire and white until someone had smothered the color right out of him? Had the girl been smothered too? Belle couldn’t help but wonder as she stared down at the toy. These kinds of thoughts, well, they had a way of burrowing into your mind. And Edwin had spent a decade alone in this grand house, envisioning all the ways his daughter had been killed.

A sob welled up in Belle’s throat, not only for the girl that had been stolen, but for the life that had been stolen from her as a result. She’d never walked home from school alone. She’d never ambled through the rose gardens in the center of town, leaning in to whisper in a friend’s ear. Better safe than stolen, Edwin had told her when she’d wanted to go to a birthday party in the sixth grade. Better hidden than gone.