“Now I need you to be brave for a little while longer. You have to stay here while I look for your family.”

Riley leaped into Alana’s arms again, and hung onto her neck. It took longer to pull free this time.

But she had to get to work. Time was against her. She managed to get Riley to hide under the bed again. She was at the door when Riley asked, “Can you get them back?”

Alana turned and saw her tiny face peering out from under the bed skirt. She’d hoped she would get out before this part. This part was the worst.

“I’ll try,” she said.

Silence. The expression on Riley’s face said it all. Alana was pretty sure she was old enough to know when people didn’t have the guts to flat-out lie. They said stuff like “We’ll see,” and “Maybe,” and “Let’s find out what happens.”

And “I’ll try.”

Alana waited for something else from the little girl, some further question or demand. But apparently Riley was willing to take whatever she could get.

Alana realized she had a question of her own. “Weren’t you scared of me?”

Riley rolled her eyes, a regular little girl again for a moment. “No,” she said. “You’re not a monster.”

Alana left. It was the nicest thing anyone had said to her in a long while.

She went down the hall, to the boys’ bedroom: clothing on the floor, a football, a lacrosse stick, CD cases littering a desk, a discarded tube of hair gel, posters of Pamela Anderson in her red lifeguard suit, the girl from Saved by the Bell, Urkel with a big word balloon: “DID I DO THAT?” If she lifted the mattress on either of the two beds, Alana bet she’d find copies of Penthouse or Playboy.

She was more interested in the closet.

It had been left open. It looked normal. Shirts and jeans crammed onto a single bar. The techs had moved everything. They were clearly baffled at this point.

Alana wasn’t.

The floorboards were all in place. But Alana looked at the edges.

The nails were all missing. Nothing was holding the boards in place. Something had meticulously taken the floor apart to make a passage into the house, using the chaos of the boys’ bedroom to cover its tracks. It had probably been lurking around the house for at least a week, waiting for its chance.

She sighed heavily. A goblin.