THE MAFIA BOSS WATCHED HIS TRUSTED ADVISER WARN HIM AWAY FROM THE CELLAR, BUT WHEN SECURITY FOUND CLAIRE INSIDE, ALL 30 GUESTS FROZE.

The first thing Detective Salazar told us was that a fire was not proof of a kidnapping. The second was that nobody was going near the old ferry terminal until firefighters declared the structure safe. Ethan listened to both instructions with his jaw clenched so tightly I could see a muscle jumping beneath his skin.

“June asked for a meeting,” he said. “Somebody knew the address.”

“Which is why we are treating the fire seriously,” Salazar replied. “But the person seen entering could have been June, somebody else, or nobody accurately identified by the caller. I need you not to fill in those gaps for me.”

Ethan glanced at me, as if expecting me to argue for him. I didn't. I'd spent a night imagining Claire as a ghost under a dining-room floor. Reality had proved worse than imagination. I wasn't eager to build a new nightmare from rumor.

I went with Salazar in an unmarked car after the fire crews finished their search. The terminal stood between an abandoned ticket office and a breakwater furred with autumn weeds. Char marked one side of the building, and the air smelled of wet smoke. Firefighters had found no one inside. The flames had been contained to a waiting room, where old brochures and broken furniture had provided fuel.

A woman wearing a reflective jacket approached us. She was the fire investigator, Ruth Mercer. She had a neat braid, soot on one cheek, and an expression that suggested she liked questions more than dramatic declarations.

“We found evidence of an accelerant,” she said. “Laboratory results are pending. It began in a space that hasn't had power for years.”

“Any cameras?” Salazar asked.

“Street pole and the newer lot across the road. Their owners have been contacted.”

I noticed a narrow path beside the terminal that led to a rusted fence. On a slat of wood someone had painted three short blue lines beneath a pale circle. The paint was fresh. A few drops ran downward, caught in the grain.

“Detective,” I said.

Salazar followed my gaze. She photographed the mark before touching anything. A second mark appeared near a wooden bench overlooking the water. Beneath it, in block letters, was a single word: LISTEN.

I stared at the water. My mother had taken me to that shore when I was little, before most of the ferries stopped running. She'd taught me that you couldn't tell the wind's direction by watching one wave. You had to look at the whole surface.

“Someone wants us to follow these,” I said.

“Or wants us to believe someone wants us to,” Salazar answered.

Near the bench lay a small plastic capsule, wedged beneath a loose board. Salazar marked the location and asked an evidence technician to collect it. We didn't open it there. That mattered, even to me. If the contents became important later, no one should be able to claim we had altered them with our curiosity.

On the ride back, Ethan called repeatedly. I let Salazar answer on speaker. She told him no victim had been discovered, that a person might have been seen leaving before the fire, and that they were investigating. He thanked her. He did not demand that she turn around and search again. It was a small sign that grief wasn't governing every decision he made.

At the station, the capsule revealed a folded strip of waterproof paper bearing a phone number and a sentence: Ask Peter why the first ledger has no thirteenth page. There was no signature. Salazar treated it as a lead rather than a message from June.

Peter Vale was a name Claire had given them. He'd worked as a records clerk for a shipping company connected to Blackwell Holdings until thirteen years earlier. The first contact number they found for him had been disconnected. The new number on the note rang through to a printing workshop in Grayhaven, two hours north of Chicago.

A woman answered. Salazar introduced herself and asked for Peter. The woman hesitated long enough for all three of us in the interview room to notice.

“He can't come to the phone,” she said.

“Is he in danger?” Salazar asked.

“He's not in danger anymore.”

The phrase seemed to harden the air. The woman explained that Peter had died the previous spring following a long illness. His daughter, Ada Vale, had taken over the workshop. Then she asked whether we were calling about June.

“I didn't give you that name,” Salazar said.

“You didn't have to.” Ada sounded tired. “Peter spent years hoping somebody from that family would finally ask the right question.”

Salazar arranged an in-person interview. When we got there, Grayhaven was a quiet place of brick shops and streets lined with maples. Ada's workshop smelled of ink and damp paper. A heavy press stood beneath a skylight, and dried prints hung on lines like laundry.

Ada was in her forties, with dark circles beneath her eyes and ink stains on both thumbs. She showed us a framed photograph of Peter, a narrow-shouldered man with spectacles and a smile that seemed to belong to somebody patient.

“My father worked for Blackwell Freight,” she said. “Graham's office used a consulting company to move money out of employee benefit accounts. Dad caught the mismatch.”

“Why didn't he report it?” I asked.

“He did. To the person he thought would protect him.”

“Graham?”

Ada nodded. “Then the threats began. He lost his job. We lost our house. He told June Blackwell not to let anyone know where she was staying.”

Salazar asked for records. Ada brought out an old ledger in a protective sleeve. Its pages showed freight numbers, dates, and payment columns. Page thirteen had been cut away with a blade.

“Dad said June kept a copy of the missing page,” Ada explained. “She didn't trust him to protect that copy after the threats. He respected that.”

“Is June alive?” Ethan had asked me to pose that question, but it came out as my own.

Ada looked directly at me. “She is. She is also an adult who has spent more than a decade deciding who knows where she lives. I'd like you to remember the second part.”

“I will.”

“She never wanted her brother to think she'd stopped loving him.”

“Then why did she let him?”

Ada's expression softened. “Because the last time she tried to reach him, a driver followed her home. They broke her friend's hand. Then somebody mailed her a photograph of Ethan standing alone outside his father's hospital room.”

My throat tightened. The implication was unmistakable, though we still needed evidence of who had sent the threats. A young woman had been given a choice between contact and possible harm to the people she loved, and it had not been a meaningful choice at all.

Ada brought us to a shelf of linocut prints. One depicted a moon above three blue waves. Another showed a small figure standing on a shore while lights glimmered across the water.

“She invented the symbol with Ethan when she was little,” Ada said. “Later, she used it on anything she could verify herself. Graham copied it onto forged letters, but his people never understood the colors.”

She pointed to a print. The circle was pale blue; the lines beneath it were dark blue.

“In the genuine mark, the moon is always lighter than the waves. Her childhood joke was that night is never as dark as the sea. Look at those letters.”

I remembered the photocopy that had appeared in my wardrobe. The three lines had been pale; the circle dark.

“His copies were backward,” I said.

“That doesn't prove who wrote them,” Ada replied, “but it tells you someone wasn't paying attention.”

We gave Salazar photographs and let her arrange the originals. Ada supplied copies of a complaint Peter had filed with a regulator and a reply stating that further information was required. Nothing indicated that a full investigation had ever occurred. The complaint alone couldn't establish theft, but it proved somebody had raised concerns long before Claire's disappearance.

Before we left, Ada handed me a postcard. It bore the genuine symbol. The writing on the back said, Lucy, you picked up a ring when everyone else looked away. Thank you. I am safe tonight. Please tell Ethan I saw him at the hospital but couldn't go inside. I am not ready. June.

My eyes filled. I'd imagined June hiding in a cellar or fleeing a man in a silver watch. Instead, here was her own voice on a card, precise and frightened and making a choice.

“May I show this to him?” I asked.

“That's why she left it,” Ada said. “But he doesn't get your address in return.”

I promised.

Back at the station, Salazar showed me recovered footage from the parking lot near the terminal. Two masked figures approached the building after a woman in a wool coat had already left. The woman had painted a mark by the fence, entered a taxi, and driven away. The masked figures arrived eleven minutes later. One carried a fuel can.

No one could identify them from the footage. Salazar could, however, tell us that June had probably escaped before the fire began. Relief hit me so suddenly that I gripped the table.

Then the evidence technician turned over the missing thirteenth page, found folded inside the ledger's binding after Ada gave permission for examination. On it was a transfer instruction initialed by a man named Graham Hale, but the receiving account was not held by Graham or Vanessa.