The sunlight followed them inside, casting a long, glowing strip down the tiled floor. Ravi closed the door and they walked slowly down the hall. Pip couldn’t help but tiptoe, even though she knew no one was home. She’d seen this house many times before, photographed at different angles with police swarming outside. But that was the outside. All she’d ever seen of the inside were snatches from when the front door was open and captured by a press photographer.

The border between outside and in felt significant here.

She could tell Ravi felt it, too, by the way he held his breath. There was a heaviness to the air. Secrets captured in the silence, floating around like invisible motes of dust. Pip didn’t even want to think too loudly, in case she disturbed it. This quiet place, where Andie Bell was last seen alive, when she was only a few months older than Pip. The house itself part of the mystery.

They moved toward the stairs, glancing into the plush living room on the right and the huge vintage-style kitchen on the left, fitted with robin’s-egg blue cabinets and a large wood-top island.

And then they heard it. A small thump upstairs.

Pip froze.

Ravi grabbed her gloved hand with his.

Another thump, closer this time, just above their heads.

Pip looked back at the door; could they make it out in time?

The thumps became a sound of frantic jingling, and a black cat appeared at the top of the stairs.

“Holy crap,” Ravi said, dropping his shoulders and Pip’s hand, the relief rippling off him.

Pip let out a hollow, anxious laugh, her hands starting to sweat inside the rubber. The cat leaped down the stairs, stopping halfway to meow in their direction.

“Hi, cat,” she whispered as it padded down the rest of the stairs and slinked over to her. It rubbed its face on her shins, curling in and out between her legs.

“Pip, I really don’t like cats,” Ravi said, recoiling as the cat started to press its head into his ankles. Pip patted the cat lightly with her rubber-gloved hand and it started to purr.

“Come on,” she said to Ravi.

Leaving the cat behind, Pip headed up the stairs. Ravi followed, and the cat meowed and raced after them, darting between his legs.

“Pip…” Ravi trailed off anxiously as he tried not to step on it. Pip shooed the cat, and it trotted back downstairs into the kitchen. “I wasn’t scared,” he added unconvincingly.

“Sure.”

Gloved hand on the banister, she climbed to the top, almost knocking off a notebook and a USB stick that were balanced precariously on the railing. Strange place to leave them.

Upstairs, Pip studied the doors that opened on to the landing. In the back bedroom on the right, the floral bedspread was ruffled and slept in, paired socks on the chair in the corner. The bedroom at the front had a dressing gown strewn on the floor and a glass of water on a bedside table. Neither could be Andie’s.

Ravi tapped Pip gently on the arm and pointed. There was only one door up here that was closed. They crossed over to it, and Pip grasped the gold handle to push it open.

It was immediately obvious this was her room.

Everything felt staged and stagnant. Though it had all the props of a teenage girl’s bedroom—pinned-up photos of Andie with Emma and Chloe at the winter carnival; a small framed picture of her and Sal, his arm round her waist and her eyes glittering; an old brown teddy tucked into the bed; an overflowing makeup case on the desk—the room didn’t feel quite real. A place entombed in five years of grief.

Pip stepped onto the plush cream carpet.

Her eyes scanned the room from the lilac walls to the white wooden furniture; everything clean and polished, the carpet showing recent vacuum tracks. Dawn Bell must still clean her dead daughter’s room, preserving it as it was when Andie left it for the final time. She didn’t have her daughter, but she still had the place where she’d slept, where she’d woken, where she’d dressed, where she’d screamed and shouted and slammed the door, where her mom had whispered good night and turned off the light. Or so Pip imagined, reanimating the empty room with the life that might have been lived here.

Pip looked back at Ravi, and by the expression on his face, she knew there was a room just like this in the Singhs’ house.

And though Pip had come to feel like she knew Andie, the one buried under all those secrets, this bedroom made Andie a real person to her for the first time. As she and Ravi approached the wardrobe, Pip silently promised the room that she would find the truth. Not just for Sal, but for Andie too.

The truth that could very well be hidden right here.

“Ready?” Ravi whispered.

She nodded, and he opened the wardrobe.

Inside was a rack bulging with dresses and tops, no room to part even an inch of space between the clothes. Struggling with the rubber gloves, Pip pulled her phone out of her jeans pocket and turned on the flashlight. She got down on her knees, with Ravi beside her, and they crawled under the garments, lighting up the old floorboards inside. They started prodding the slats, tracing their fingers around the shape of them, trying to pry up their corners.

Ravi pushed down one corner at the back, and the other side of the floorboard kicked up. Pip shuffled forward to pull it out of the way, and then they leaned over to look inside the dark gap below.

“No.”

She moved the light down inside the small space to be absolutely sure, pivoting the light into each corner. It revealed only layers of dust, disturbed now by their breath.

No phone. No cash. No drug stash. Nothing.

“It’s not here,” Ravi said.

The disappointment was a physical sensation tearing through Pip’s stomach.

“I really thought it would be here,” he said.

Pip had too. The burner phone was supposed to be here, supposed to reveal the killer’s name, and then the police would do the rest. Pip was supposed to be safe from Unknown. But it wasn’t here.

She slid the floorboard back in place and inched backward out of the wardrobe after Ravi, her hair getting tangled in the zipper of a long dress.

“Where could the burner phone be, then?” Ravi asked.

“Maybe Andie had it on her when she died,” Pip said, “and now it’s buried with her or otherwise destroyed by the killer.”

“Or,” Ravi said, studying the items on Andie’s desk, “someone knew where it was hidden and they took it after she went missing, knowing it would lead the police to them if it was found.”

“Or that,” Pip agreed. “But that doesn’t help us now.”

She joined Ravi at the desk. On top of the makeup case was a paddle hairbrush with long blond hairs still wound around the bristles. Beside it a Fairview High School academic planner for the year 2013/2014, almost identical to the one Pip had for this year. Andie had decorated the title page with doodled hearts and stars and small printouts of supermodels.

She flipped through some of the pages. The days were filled with scribbled homework assignments and test dates. November and December had various college open-house days listed. The week before Christmas, Andie had a note to herself: maybe get Sal a Christmas present. Dates and locations of calamity parties, people’s birthdays, and strangely, random letters with times scribbled in next to them.

“Hey.” She held it up to show Ravi. “Look at these weird initials all over the place. What do you think they mean?”

Ravi stared for a moment, resting his jaw in his gardening-gloved hand. “Do you remember that thing Howie Bowers said to us? That he’d told Andie to use codes instead of names.”

“Maybe these are her codes,” Pip said, tracing her rubber finger over the random letters. “We should document these.”

She laid the planner down and pulled out her phone again. Ravi helped her tug one of her gloves off, and she opened the camera. Ravi skipped the pages back to February 2014, and Pip took pictures of each page spread until that week in April, just after spring break. The last thing Andie had written on that Friday was: Start French revision notes soon.

“OK,” Pip said, pocketing her phone and slipping the glove back on. “We—”

The front door slammed below them.

Ravi’s head snapped around, terror pooling in the pupils of his eyes.

Pip dropped the planner back in its place and nodded toward the wardrobe. “Get back in,” she whispered.

She opened the doors and crawled inside, looking back for Ravi.

He was on his knees just outside. Pip shuffled aside to give him space to crawl in. But Ravi wasn’t moving. Why wasn’t he moving?

Pip reached forward and grabbed him, pulling him into her against the back wall, and Ravi snapped back to life. He grasped the wardrobe doors and shut them inside.

Sharp-heeled steps in the hallway. Was it Andie’s mom, back from work already?

“Hello, Monty.” A voice carried through the house. It was Becca.

Ravi was shaking beside her. She moved closer and took his hand, the rubber gloves squeaking as she held on.

They heard Becca on the stairs then, louder with each step, the jingling collar of the cat behind her.

“Ah, that’s where I left them,” she said, footsteps pausing on the landing.

Pip squeezed Ravi’s hand, his face just a few inches away. She hoped he knew she would take the fall if she could.

“Monty, have you been in here?” Becca’s voice drew nearer.

Ravi closed his eyes.

“You know you’re not supposed to go in this room.”

Pip buried her face into his shoulder.

Becca was in the room with them now. They could hear her breathing, hear the clicking of her bones as she moved. More steps stifled by the thick carpet. And then the sound of Andie’s bedroom door closing.

“Bye, Monty.” Becca’s words were muffled now on the other side of the door.

Ravi opened his eyes slowly, squeezing Pip’s hand back, his panicked breaths rippling through her hair.

The front door slammed again.