“Well, how’s this?” I say. “We don’t know whose bar this is. We don’t know who these people are or whether they are dangerous. All we know is that it’s looking more and more like your father may have taken you from here and, knowing him, if he did that there was something he was trying to protect you from. There may have been someone he was trying to protect you from. You cannot go inside there until I find that out.”

She is quiet. She stares at me unhappily, but she stays quiet.

I motion toward the coffee shop next door. It looks quiet, almost empty, after the afternoon rush.

“Just go sit inside and get yourself a piece of pie, okay?”

“I literally couldn’t want a piece of pie less,” she says.

“Then get a cup of coffee and keep working on Professor Cookman’s roster. See if you can pull anyone else up on a search. We still have a long way to go.”

“I don’t like this plan,” she says.

I pull the roster out of my messenger bag. I hold it out for her. “I’ll come and get you when it’s all clear in there.”

“Clear of what? Why don’t you just say it?” she asks. “Why don’t you say who you think is inside?”

“Probably for the same reason you’re not ready to say it, Bailey.”

This gets through to her. She nods her agreement.

Then she takes the roster out of my hand and turns toward the coffee shop. “Don’t take too long, okay?” she says.

Then she opens the door to the coffee shop, a whoosh of purple as she heads inside.

I breathe a sigh of relief. And I open the blue door to The Never Dry. There is a winding staircase, which I take upstairs to a candlelit hallway and a second blue door, which is also unlocked.

I open that door and enter a small cocktail lounge. An empty cocktail lounge. There are maple rafters and a dark mahogany bar, velvety love seats surrounding small bar tables. It doesn’t feel like a college town bar. The hidden doorway, the intimate room. It feels more like a speakeasy—guarded, sexy, private.

No one is standing behind the bar. The only indication that anyone is even there is the lit tea candles on the cocktail tables, Billie Holiday playing on an old record player.