This gives me pause, even though my headshake is immediate. I don’t think Beatrix knows the code, but she pays attention. She hears things even when I think she’s not listening. It’s possible she knows the code, and it’s possible that in all the commotion upstairs we didn’t hear her disarm, then rearm the system and leave, but the doors are all locked. She couldn’t have done that, not without a key. I think about the spare in the kitchen drawer, or the one on a key chain in the bottom of my purse, but I don’t say a word.

“What about the basement?”

There’s no way Beatrix would have chosen the basement for a hiding spot, not without me or her father at her side. For the kids, the basement is a dark and hostile place, filled with spiderwebs and skeleton walls and dusty shapes looming in the darkness. They’re terrified of the place—which is a good part of why Cam and I have never considered finishing it.

He juts his chin at the bookshelves behind me and beyond, the hallway that leads to the basement door. “Let’s go take a look.”

Baxter wriggles deeper into my chest, clutching me tighter. “Mommy, I don’t wanna go downstairs.” My sweatshirt pulls on a shoulder from where it’s bunched in one of his tight fists.

“It’s okay, sweetie. We won’t be down there long.”

The man orders me to do a quick check of the street, then hustles us across the living room and down the hall, where I flip the dead bolt and pull open the door. A chilly draft rushes up from the darkness, and I shiver—not from the cold but with the beginning wisp of a plan.

The basement is where Cam keeps his tools.

I feel around the wall for the light switch, and a bare, dusty bulb flicks on, shining light on the steep wooden stairs, rickety and builder-assembled to pass code, but just barely. I follow them down, down, down into the darkness.

The stairs dump us onto a concrete slab, and I blink into the pitch-black basement. The air is a good ten degrees cooler down here, and it smells of underground, of dirt and dust and creatures living and dying.

I flip another switch, and it lights up the first room, an unfinished square tomb piled high with plastic boxes and furniture. A high chair, a crib, our old queen mattress and box springs, the plate rack that came with the antique buffet in the dining room but I found too fussy. Everything is neatly stacked, one on top of the other like giant blocks, then arranged against vertical studs waiting for drywall. Beyond it, the space that runs the length of the house is cloaked in blackness.