"I wasn't going to ask."
"Good. Because the answer would be no."
There was a brief pause in which Eli considered admitting that he still wanted to know exactly what was happening in the hidden room. Ronan seemed to read it in his face.
"Whatever's down there," he said, "can be investigated after the people are safe. If we have to choose between knowing more and leaving sooner, we leave sooner."
Eli nodded. It was another lesson he would remember. Curiosity had brought him to the room. It did not have to keep him inside the building.
But then, at the edge of the main hall, he heard the same metallic knock that had first attracted Rascal beneath the platform. Three beats, a pause, two beats. This time it came from inside the building rather than below it, resonating through the wall behind the bar. The sound was followed by a distant vibration, and the emergency lights briefly dimmed.
Ronan and Cutter exchanged a look. Mara turned toward the sound, and a thought crossed all their faces at once. The altered system might have more than one stage. There was no guarantee that the final event was the only danger.
Mara shouted for the remaining group to move. The words were calm enough to prevent panic and urgent enough to prevent argument. Cutter guided one of the older men toward the window. Ronan took Eli by the shoulder and turned him toward the exit.
Then a voice came from the rear hallway.
"Ronan. There's someone outside the hidden platform."
Boone had been watching through a side window while directing the last members. He had seen a light moving near the rear foundation, not from a rescue vehicle and not from anyone he recognized. It swept across the old decking and disappeared. A person who knew the concealed entrance was approaching the room beneath them.
Eli turned so sharply that Ronan had to hold him steady.
Somebody was going back to the equipment.
Across town, Megan Mercer had already searched every place she could think of.
She had checked the backyard, followed the muddy prints to the creek trail, and called Eli until the recorded voice told her his phone could not be reached. At first she had been annoyed with him, the familiar irritation of a parent whose child had gone farther than permitted. Then she had found the torn section of chain-link fence near the ridge and recognized the direction in which the paw prints continued. The irritation had gone out of her so suddenly that she felt cold beneath her coat.
She called Jonah. He answered from the service van he had parked outside a closed county office building, where a furnace had stopped working just as the holiday weekend began. Megan spoke quickly, telling him that Rascal was missing and Eli had followed the dog toward Iron Hollow. Jonah did not interrupt her. He knew the boy's habits as well as anybody, and he knew that Eli sometimes became so absorbed in an unanswered question that he forgot the ordinary passage of time.