Peter arched an eyebrow, shaking his head. “Wendy, you barely believe me, do you really think a bunch of grown-ups are going to believe a word of this?” he asked. “They’ll lock me up and throw away the key!” He scowled. She had hit a nerve. “They can’t help us.”

“Then we need to at least tell them about Alex!” Wendy pulled her phone out of her back pocket. Her mind raced, thoughts tumbling over one another. She needed to do something. She needed to come up with some immediate solutions to these daunting and insurmountable tasks.

“They need to know he’s missing—his parents need to know! At least then people can be on the lookout for him,” she insisted. Wendy paced back and forth, tightly gripping the phone. “I—I don’t know what I’ll say, how I know he’s gone missing,” she mused. “I can just make something up—”

Wendy’s cell phone lit up. An AMBER alert with Alex’s name filled the screen.

“Too late,” Wendy said. Peter leaned over to give it a look. “They already know.” Wendy snatched the remote from the counter and turned on the TV. Sure enough, it was on the news, too. Alex’s face smiled at her from the corner of the screen. In the center, Detective James stood in the middle of a street. Bright lights from news cameras lit up his face, causing him to squint.

“Mrs. Forestay witnessed Alex being taken from their backyard this evening, but didn’t get a good enough look at the abductor to provide a description,” Detective James said.

Guilt swarmed inside Wendy.

“I heard voices when I was in the woods,” Wendy said, turning back to Peter. “I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they were definitely kids. I couldn’t see them but it felt like they were right there, just out of sight.” Her skin crawled as she thought about the voices, the breathing, the footsteps. “That’s gotta be where it’s hiding.”

“That’s where I had tracked it to, when you found me in the road,” Peter said, walking to stand next to her. His shoulder lightly brushed against hers. “After what you saw, I think that’s a pretty safe bet.”

“Do the police know that?” Wendy wondered as she watched Detective James talk about a special hotline the police department had set up for anyone who had any information about the missing children. “Should we tell them?” she asked, looking up at Peter.

His jaw was tight. “Grown-ups can be slow at figuring stuff out,” Peter said flatly. There was that disdainful tone that always crept into his voice when he talked about adults. “But they’re bound to put it together sooner or later.”