She traced the screen lightly with one finger, then gave the phone back. Evan thought she looked less frightened by the existence of a plan than by any of their promises. He found Sophie's old magnetic drawing board in the bottom of the office cabinet and offered it as a way to spend the waiting time.
Mia drew a long black road and a small gray car. She placed a dark shape behind the car, erased it, and drew it again. Then she filled the right corner with a large yellow building that had no windows, just a door with a rectangle of light beneath it.
"Is that here?" Evan asked.
"Yes."
"You made my garage look nicer than it is."
"It's warm," she said, as though that answered everything.
A specially trained child interviewer reached the garage shortly after one. She introduced herself as Alana Price and explained the conversation in words Mia could understand. She told Mia that she could ask for a break, say she did not know, or correct any adult who got something wrong. Evan waited outside hearing distance, seated on an overturned bucket beside a lift, while Wells remained near the open office door.
When the interviewer began, Evan discovered his hands were shaking. He placed them flat on his knees. He had kept them steady beside the road, while starting the heater, and while the pickup pushed toward his garage. Now that other people were responsible for the child, the fear he had put away began arriving all at once.
Wells brought him bottled water. "That's what happens when you stop being busy enough to ignore yourself."
"I don't think I like it."
"Nobody does."
He twisted the cap until the plastic cracked, embarrassed by how clumsy his fingers had become. Wells did not ask him to be braver, which he appreciated.
The interview lasted less than half an hour. Mia described leaving the dinner, her mother arguing with David, and a gray car being followed by another vehicle. She remembered being pulled from her back seat after the car stopped near the trees. She remembered Claire shouting and a man telling her to look away. She was not sure whether she had seen blood or a dark mark on Claire's hair, and Alana recorded that uncertainty rather than replacing it with a more useful answer.
David Bennett's name emerged when Alana asked whom Mia meant by Uncle David. He was not a stranger; he was her father's younger brother, a man she had known at family gatherings. She said he once brought her a toy helicopter. She also said that on the roadside he had not sounded like the uncle who brought presents.
That was enough to redirect the search. State police requested emergency assistance from neighboring counties and issued information about two vehicles without disclosing Mia's location. Investigators began identifying the associates and business addresses connected to David Bennett. Wells told Evan only that the search for Claire had become more urgent, not that every detail was certain.
Forty miles north, Claire Bennett was lying on the floor of a dark storage room trying to remember how she had arrived there.