When we left the aquarium, we headed straight back to The Sanctuary to look for Adam and Rob. With Naomi dead, there were no clues to follow and no way to find where she might have put them. The first thought was that she would have somehow tricked or overpowered them here at the house and then locked them in a room somewhere. But Michael and I searched the entire place, and there was no sign of them.

“Hey,” Sarah said as she came out of her room and watched us frantically searching the building. “What are you guys looking for?”

“Adam and Rob, the other two guys that you met here last night,” I said. “Have you seen them?”

“No,” she said curtly.

“Have you seen anyone since last night?” Michael asked with tension in his voice.

“No.”

“Have you even come out of your room at all?”

I could tell that Michael was starting to get nervous about what had happened to the guys because he was starting to lose his patience on this poor woman who saw nothing and just came here to try to find some peace. His mood didn’t seem to rattle her though.

“No,” she said for a third time before turning to walk back to her room.

“That girl is weird,” he said to me.

“Hey, that’s not nice,” I said. “The people who will come here will need our support and understanding, not our judgement.”

“Sorry,” he said. “But we just don’t even have time for any of this right now. We need to find them.”

Agreed, we did. After we searched the house, we went to the campuses. Naomi was very familiar with both the Goldshire and the Lineage campuses, so it was probable that she would have put the guys somewhere there. We searched Goldshire first, checking every nook and cranny and asking everyone that passed by us if they had seen the two guys. But our search turned up nothing. Then we went to Lineage and did the same.

“The stone room!” I said as I got excited thinking that it would probably be the exact place Naomi was likely to put the guys. We ran to the stone room and when we got there it was locked. Instead of wasting time going to the main offices to look for the key (which Naomi had probably taken and hidden somewhere anyway), Michael worked on creating a wedge to yank the door open and break the lock from the outside. When it worked, I almost allowed myself to indulge in a sense of relief but as soon as I saw that the room was empty, that notion quickly faded.

We even went back to the aquarium and searched everywhere there, thinking that maybe she had somehow managed to drag both of the guys with her and hide them there right beneath our noses. It was highly unlikely that Naomi would have been able to drag both Adam and Rob anywhere all by herself without anyone else to help her, even if they had been drugged or something. And I couldn’t think of anyone that she would have been able to get to help her. There was no one there at the house aside from Sarah, and she seemed harmless enough. I doubt that she would have aided my aunt, especially not if she valued being able to stay at The Sanctuary.

Eventually, we headed back to the house because it was getting too dark to keep searching and we had run out of ideas of places to look. Adam and Rob were nowhere.

“What are we going to do?” I asked as I sat down at the table in the common room while Michael poured whiskey into glasses. Tonight was too much of a burden for wine, and we needed something stronger. He handed me my glass and sat down beside me. The first sip of whiskey always burned my throat in the most delectable and warming way. It made me think about sitting around the bonfire in the mountains of Asheville and I wanted to go back there right now. I wanted the four of us to be sitting around a crackling fire, drinking glasses full of burning whiskey as the snow-kissed air hit our faces.

“What if they’re hurt?” I asked.

“Naomi said they weren’t.”

“Yeah, I know. But do you really believe anything she said?” I asked.

“Yes, actually,” Michael answered. “I do. I really believe she thought that she was trying to help you. I don’t think she hurt them.”

That made me feel at least a little bit better.

“But I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of her putting them somewhere where they would eventually suffer,” he added.

And then I was back to feeling awful again.

“We can’t just sit here and do nothing,” I said. “We have to keep looking for them.”

“Agreed. But I can’t think of anyplace else to look right now and it won’t do us any good to keep spinning our wheels without a direction to head in. We need to get some sleep, and then we can start back at searching first thing in the morning.”

“I don’t want to rest. I can’t sleep knowing that the two of them are out there somewhere and possibly suffering,” I said as I felt the tears start to come.

“Then you need to rest,” Michael asserted. “Because a clear head is going to be the best way to find them.”

He was right, and so after we finished our drinks and pulled a few pieces of food out of the fridge to shove in our mouths, we went to bed. I curled up around Michael and tried to sleep, but every time I closed my eyes all I could see was Adam and Rob’s faces staring back at me. If anything were to happen to them, then I will have wished I had thrown my Aunt Naomi off the roof myself, several times over and over again.

13

After two days of searching, we still hadn’t found them. Two days, that was long enough for someone to die if the situation was ripe for it.

“We shouldn’t have come back here,” I said as I paced back and forth in the common room.

We had spent the day scouring the campuses again, and then even spreading out into the surrounding streets of the city to see if there was any place that looked like somewhere Naomi might have put them.

“We should have taken the money and run or given it to Naomi and gone back to our quiet and peaceful lives in Asheville. I should have listened to all of you. This was my idea to come back here and look what has happened.”

“No,” Michael said as he stepped forward and grabbed my hand to stop me from pacing anymore. “Don’t start with the self-blame again. Naomi would have found a way to make something like this happen regardless.”

I was just about to say something to argue that point, but then Michael looked as though he suddenly remembered something.

“Oh my god,” he said. “Money.”

“What?”

I failed to see what money had to do with finding the guys.

But Michael quickly cleared up my confusion. “You mentioned taking the money and it reminded me of a place that we haven’t looked yet. There’s a walk-in safe inside the headmaster’s office at Lineage. Naomi would have known about it. It would be the perfect place to put someone that you didn’t want to escape because it won’t open from the inside. If she found a way to get the guys there, then it would make the perfect unescapable prison.”

I felt my eyes grow huge as soon as he said it and I grabbed his hand to start running out the door.

When we got to Lineage, Michael led the way toward the headmaster’s office. Inside the office there was a bookcase that looked as if it had always been built into the wall. But Michael knew more about the intricacies of Lineage since he had grown up on this campus, way before I ever became familiar with it. He reached his hand behind the tiny space that was between the bookcase and the wall and wiggled his fingers around until he found the latch that released it. All of a sudden, the bookcase moved as if it was on an electric track, and it parted to the side to reveal a large metal door—the safe.

“Do you know the combination?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “But if the guys happen to be in here then that means Naomi had to have known it. Can you think of a set of numbers that would be meaningful to your aunt?”

I rattled off Naomi’s birthday, and my mother’s; the date of my mother’s death, and even the date of my grandfather’s death, thinking that it would have been a cause for celebration since she had hated her father so much. But none of the number combinations seemed to work.

“What’s your birthdate?” Michael asked me.

I looked at him with raised eyebrows.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I promise I’ll memorize it at some point, maybe after we get married. But for right now can you just tell me what it is?”

My eyebrows were raised not because Michael didn’t know my birthdate, but because I failed to see why that would be of any significance to my Aunt Naomi and therefore was a waste of an attempt at opening the safe. But after I told him the date, I felt my heart racing inside my chest and put my hand over the warmth that was growing down in the bottom of my stomach.