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handset, asking for crew members, gate employees, or anyone who might have seen the boy or his BlueSky escort.
    “What’s he saying?” Max asked.
    “Nothing yet. He’s checking on the computer and asking around about Max.”
    “How old is he?” Darrel asked.
    “Five,” Melissa answered, noting the alarm in his eyes at her answer.
    She heard him mumble, “Couldn’t be. He’s only five. Yes, I’ll hold.”
    He looked apologetically at her as his fingers flew furiously across the keyboard. Fixing his eyes on the screen, he explained, “This happens from time to time when teens rebel because their parents forced them to have escorts.”
    “But little Max is not a teen.”
    “What? What?” Max was asking.
    “He said this happens from time to time. Teens ditching their escorts.”
    Max said nothing. Something inside her stirred.
    “He was on that plane, Missy.” His tone had softened.
    Melissa glanced up at Darrel, who offered her a smile, but it wasn’t kindness she saw in his eyes. She pointed at the crowd around the carousel. “That’s the flight from Denver? Flight 1212, right?”
    He nodded.
    With her cell phone jammed against her ear, she stomped off toward the carousel, pushing her way through the straggle of travelers left standing around to retrieve their bags. Then she saw it. The blue bag with a yellow puppy imprinted on the canvas, a dark brown bear wearing a Yankees baseball cap strapped to the handle.
    “Missy?”
    “Max?” Her knees had grown weak. Her head was spinning and a gray fog began to swirl near the edges of her vision as if the airport was closing in around her.
    “Missy, what is it?”
    She drew a breath.
    “His bag is here.” Her words were barely audible.
    She watched the bag draw nearer to her but made no attempt to retrieve it. Something told her to find little Max first, then have him identify his bag. His bear. She watched it round the corner on the belt and saw his name, Maximillian Bennett Williams III, written on the tag in big bold letters. The handwriting was not hers and it was not Max’s. Probably Nanny Judy’s, she thought, realizing it was easier to focus on that small detail rather than the scope of what was happening. She let the tiny blue bag slide past her and beyond the black strips of plastic that kept travelers from seeing what went on in the baggage handler area on the other side of the wall.
    Out of sight.
    Gone.
    She could hear Max barking orders in the background, hollering to people to get BlueSky on the phone, reciting the ticket number and invoice number for the escort he’d paid to accompany little Max from New York City to Los Angeles for the Christmas holidays.
    She saw Darrel, the BlueSky customer service employee, turn his back to her, but not before she saw the dread in his eyes.
    She looked toward the escalator, hoping with everything she had to see a delayed BlueSky employee escorting little Max down the stairs toward her, yet she saw nothing.
    And she stared at the single bag on the carousel as it came around again before the belt was stopped. The bag was taunting her to pick it up, the bear staring at her with judgment in its beady little marble eyes.
    “Missy? Missy?”
    The burden was too much for her to carry any longer, and she felt her legs buckle, her body crumple to the ground.

CHAPTER 5
     
    Noah
    CRITICAL MASS. THAT’S WHAT my mom and Auntie Elizabeth call Auntie Liv.
    Ever since the end of last summer, Auntie Elizabeth and Uncle Michael have been gone for months at a time rebuilding the cabin in Rochford that was destroyed when Auntie Liv tried to protect the Hansons. My mom and dad think I’m too young to know what’s going on. But I’m not. They also don’t know Auntie Liv has been training me to be a spy. She’s the one who told me the secret of the vents. I can hear just about any conversation my parents have through my floor vent, if I manage to roll close enough to listen.
    Luckily, I heard the whole story of what