With Brooke, Wren, Derinda, and Vic watching the back door and Clarence, Sarah, Charis, Rake, Henrique, and Raphael watching the front door, Keith and I begin searching up on the third floor, while Christopher and Roderick start on the second.
All the third-floor rooms are unoccupied right now. Keith and Christopher usually block off the week of the fall lecture series for a thorough cleaning of the house and making needed repairs, so until Raphael’s arrival, Anna, Taylor, and I were the only guests.
Just thinking about Taylor makes my heart pound and sets off a panic inside me, but realizing I’ll be no good to her if I let that happen, I’m trying to place who she is to me and how I feel about her inside a vault deep inside me and lock it up tightly. Unless I approach this like I would any other missing child case, work it the way I would if she were a stranger—some random plumber’s daughter—I might as well be a plumber.
I’ve got to find her. I’ve got to focus. I’ve got to let everything else go. I’ve got to compartmentalize. I’ve got to stop being her dad, at least psychologically, and just be the investigator hunting for her.
On the landing, surrounded by the five doors, Keith says, “Where do you want to start?”
I point to a door. Not because it matters which one we start with—all the rooms are the same and we have to search all of them—but because we can’t afford to waste any time at all, not even seconds on indecision.
“All the rooms up here are the same,” he says as he unlocks the door. “At least in terms of size and layout. Not in terms of theme and decoration.”
We enter the Faye Dunaway room, which is part Bonnie and Clyde and part Chinatown, and begin to look around, though I can tell immediately that no living human beings are in this room.
We check under the bed, in the closet, in the dresser drawers, and then, as he checks the bathroom, I step over to the window and look out.
The Faye Dunaway is on the back of the house on the third floor. From it, I scan the area below.
Looking straight down, I can see the small group keeping an eye on the back door. Looking back up to the left and right I realize that from this location I can’t really see into the backyards of the other houses from here.
But what I can see are the woods directly behind the house where we were searching just a few hours ago and where Vic Frankford found the Toy Story pajamas.
The night is dark and nearly moonless, cloud coverage obscuring any stars that might otherwise be visible.
I can see one of the bright beams of the flashlights Anna and the two deputies are using. The light looks lonely in the dark, dense woods—like a lone car on a canyon road. In a few moments, the other flashlights join it and the pace and movement of all three increase and together look like rural children playing hide and seek in the safe little forest beside their home in a far more innocent time.
Keith and I step back into the hall and repeat the same actions with the other rooms on the floor, which include Sidney Poitier, Zora Neale Hurston, Jim Morrison, and Butterfly McQueen, and find exactly what we did in the first one.
As we enter each new room, I’m filled with dread at what we might find. Searching a huge house room by room for my little girl makes me feel more like John Ramsey than John Jordan, and I beg God not to find what he found.
As I turn from the window in the last room on the floor, I notice Keith pulling on the mantel above the fireplace.
“What’re you doing?” I ask.
“Just making sure it’s locked,” he says. “When do you want to check the escape room and the secret passageways?”
“This room has access to them too?” I ask. “I thought only the Zora Neal Hurston room up here did?”
He shakes his head. “That’s just the one we showed you so you could see what they’re like,” he said. “All the rooms have fake fireplaces that are doors to the passageways behind the walls. We keep them locked. I’m just checking to make sure they all still are.”
“All the rooms on the third floor or all the guest rooms?” I ask. “I thought y’all said just one on each floor did.”
“All the rooms do.”
“Including ours?” I ask, and head for our room. “So that’s how whoever took Taylor got into our room.”
He follows me, matching my pace.
“Maybe,” he says. “But it should be locked. We’re missing one of the key cards, so it could’ve been used. All whoever has it would have to do is reprogram it with the machine on the desk in the parlor when no one was looking.”
“Should be locked?” I ask. “I didn’t even know our room had one.”
“Sorry if we weren’t clear about that,” he says. “I thought you knew.”
“We wouldn’t be staying in there if I had known,” I say. “I’d never knowingly expose Taylor to that kind of risk.”
“I feel terrible,” he said. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t clear when we took you through it.”
My focus and energy is directed toward getting to our room and checking the fireplace, but as he says that I wonder if he really is sorry or if the omission was intentional.