When Alex came downstairs, he glanced around the basement, which was dimly lit by a few bulbs hanging from the ceiling. He had a brown leather laptop bag slung over his shoulder, and he readjusted the strap before turning his attention back to Harper.

“What are you doing here?” he asked her.

“Just cleaning up.” She absently wiped at her eyes, which had welled up a bit while she was looking through the box. “I’ve been meaning to reorganize this junk for a long time.”

“I see,” Alex said, but he didn’t sound like he really did. “Anyway, I came over because I wanted to show you what I’ve been working on all morning.”

“You’ve been working on something?” Harper asked.

When they’d spoken yesterday, neither of them had been able to come up with a concrete plan for what to do about Gemma. The best they’d come up with was Harper making a few phone calls. Alex had offered to help, but they both agreed it would sound better if the calls came from a family member instead of Gemma’s boyfriend.

“Yeah, it’s on my laptop.” He tapped the bag hanging on his hip. “If you wanna take a look.”

“Yeah, sure, of course.”

Alex glanced around for a place to sit. Looking past the old lawn chairs, which still looked rather cobwebby even after Harper had wiped them off, he sat down on the basement steps. Then he pulled out his laptop, setting it across his knees.

“I know you were making calls, but I wanted to do something, too,” Alex said as Harper walked over to him. She tentatively sat on the step next to him, peering over at his computer screen as he clicked away. “So I went to the Internet.”

Within a few seconds a big picture of Gemma popped up, nearly filling the screen. She was smiling, with her long waves of hair shimmering in the sunlight. Harper had taken the picture a few weeks ago on the last day of school.

“I took the picture from her Facebook,” Alex explained.

In large bold letters above Gemma’s picture, it read Have you seen me? Alex scrolled down below the picture, where all the pertinent information was listed, like Gemma’s age, height, when she was last seen, and a contact e-mail address given as [email protected].

“What do you think?” Alex asked, watching Harper expectantly.

“This is her own Web site?” Harper asked, avoiding answering him right away.

He nodded. “Yeah, I got a couple missing kids sites to link to it, too. And I also set up a Facebook page for it.”

He made a few more keystrokes, and the Facebook page popped up, displaying the same picture he’d used on her Web site. This one had the tagline Have you seen Gemma Fisher?