Ronnie peeked inside. There was furniture: a queen-size bed with a generic white bedspread and a small dresser. The overhead light blazed and a ceiling fan whirred, but there wasn’t anyone in the room.

“Okay,” Ronnie said shakily. “Okay, he’s not here. Now can we go?”

“I guess.” Lauren sounded disappointed. She turned on her heel and started down the hall back for the stairs. But when she got to the first door on the right, she stopped cold. Her eyes popped wide. Her mouth fell open. “Oh.”

Ronnie and Andrea rushed to her side. The walls of this room were painted a soft blue. A navy sleigh bed was pushed into one corner. There were bookshelves full of paperbacks—Harry Potter, a bunch of graphic novels—and an Apple laptop sitting on a bare desk. There were Dallas Cowboys pennants and a Cowboys helmet and a Cowboys jersey from a player Ronnie didn’t know, but then also a flag in the corner for the Philadelphia Eagles. There were vacuum swirls on the rug. Not a speck of dirty clothes on the floor. The bedspread was astonishingly free of wrinkles.

Ronnie shifted her weight. Something bothered her, something she couldn’t put her finger on. She looked again at the football stuff. Maybe it was different out here, but where she came from, Eagles country, no self-respecting person would be a fan of both the Eagles and the Cowboys.

Snap.

Everyone looked up, freezing in the darkness.

The sound came again: another snap, and then a shush. Of fabric, maybe. A hand rubbing against a cushion or the back of a couch. And then the squeak of door hinges, somewhere downstairs. Ronnie glanced at the others, her mouth an O. Someone was here.

Andrea bolted out of the room and started down the stairs. Ronnie followed, but when she heard another slam of what sounded like a drawer, she froze. The noise sounded petulant. They shouldn’t have come here.

She reached the foyer. All they had to do was get to the front door and let themselves out. But another slam came. A rustle of papers. And . . . footsteps. Someone was at the back of the house. If they were lucky, North wouldn’t notice them before they slipped out.

Then Lauren’s phone rang, a loud bleat echoing through all the emptiness.

Ronnie whipped around and glared at Lauren, who was fumbling in her bag to turn the thing off. “Sorry!” she mouthed. Everything went still again. The rustling and slamming had stopped, but Ronnie wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

Then Lauren sucked in a breath. Her gaze was on her phone screen. She looked up at them with the kind of expression one would make if they’d just gotten word that half of California had been wiped out in an earthquake.

“What?” Ronnie whispered. “What is it?”