Beatrix stares at him, too, grabbing on to the cuff of my sleeve, gripping the fabric in a tight fist. She waits until he turns away to lean close and whisper, “She took my signs.”

It’s the same words she said to me earlier, when I was taping her hands to the chair. She took my signs, she said angrily, urgently, and I still don’t understand what she means. When I asked her who took them, our whispering caught the man’s attention. He demanded to know what we were talking about. When I lied—wait, I said, rather than who—he ordered us to be quiet.

Now, though, he’s staring out the window down the roofline and into the backyard. Too giddy with success and whatever this person is saying to hear me whisper the question again to Beatrix, “Who did?”

She shifts her weight, her gaze flitting behind us into the hallway. “Mrs. Lloyd.”

No. That doesn’t make sense. Mrs. Lloyd is Tanya. The nosy neighbor from across the street.

I still don’t understand. Tanya took Beatrix’s signs?

I glance at the man standing like a statue with the phone pressed to his ear. The outline of his gun presses up from one of his pockets. “How’s she doing?” Whomever she is, the answer is not good. It drops the smile right off his face. “That’s awful low. Is she acting okay? What did our cousin say?”

I wrap my arm around Beatrix and lean in for a hug, whispering, “What signs?”

She presses her lips into my hair, her breath hot on my ear. “I made signs asking for help and taped them to the window on the front door, but they’re gone. I think Mrs. Lloyd took them.”

Her message straightens my spine, and I unwind my arm and settle into the seat. Beatrix made signs for the door—which explains the mess on Cam’s desk. The markers, the paper she must have pulled from the printer, the tape she dug out of a drawer. I imagine her hasty scrawl, a quick and efficient SOS taped to the front windows.

Clever, clever girl.

And now she’s suggesting Tanya took them. I try to come up with some other explanation, but I can’t. Tanya is the only person other than us to be in the house this afternoon, and the timing is right. There’s no other possibility.

I have so many questions. Tons of them.

But one word rises to the top like curdled cream: Why?