Roger got it. His face became pale. “It called her,” he said.

“Hel-lo,” said a voice from the doorway. Roger and I were both so keyed up that we jumped a mile and snapped our heads around so fast to look at the door that we almost gave ourselves whiplash.

It was Fred, the janitor.

“Who’s your friend, Maddy?” Fred said.

“Roger,” I said, half a second before Roger said the same thing. Our two tense voices made his name sound like an echo bouncing back from a canyon wall.

Fred smiled. “Pleased to meet you, Roger-oger. Anything wrong?”

“Nothing,” we both answered, in perfect nervous unison.

Fred raised an eyebrow. “Obviously,” he said in a dry voice. “In any circumstance, Maddy, if you’re looking for your aunt, you just missed her. I saw her depart the building a mere ten minutes ago.”

“Thanks,” I said, jumping up and hurling myself through the door.

“Pleased,” Roger said as he brushed by Fred, “to meet you.”

I was all the way outside on the sidewalk and just about to break into a frantic dash for home when Roger caught up with me and grasped my shoulder.

“Wait,” he said.

“I can’t,” I said, reaching up to tear his arm away. As I did so I realized that I had been holding something in my hand. It was Aunt Lyssa’s laser pointer. I’d grabbed it off the desk without thinking at the exact moment when Fred startled us in the office.

“Listen,” Roger said, “we’ve got to be calm, right?” He took the laser pointer that I had almost stabbed him with out of my hand.

“Right,” I said.

“So let’s think about the best thing to do right now. Your aunt didn’t bring her car to work, right?”

Was that right? My brain didn’t seem to want to function, like a computer with some new, unnamed virus. I searched my memory and saw Aunt Lyssa’s blue Honda parked in the driveway next to our house. It had been there this morning after she left for work. Aunt Lyssa had walked. I remember her saying that it was such a beautiful day and it wasn’t that far, almost exactly five K, to the library from our door. Of course the weather had changed by mid-morning. Even though it wasn’t raining now, storm clouds were still overhead.

“Right,” I said. I thought I saw where Roger was going now.

“So she wouldn’t have a quick way home. But even if it didn’t look like rain, once she got that message that you were hurt and resting at home, she’d want to get home as fast as she could.”

I nodded.