we still don’t know how they got in,” I said. “But this tells us something useful.”
“What, they knew how to dazzle the cameras? It’s all over the Internet.”
“No. They knew where the cameras were.”
“Why do you say that?”
“No fumbling around. Quick and efficient. You can’t blind the cameras if you can’t find them. They knew exactly where to look.”
“So?”
“The cameras are concealed,” I said. “One in a smoke detector, and one in an air vent. The smoke-detector camera isn’t all that original, if you’re familiar with what’s on the market. But the air-vent one—that’s custom. It’s a fiber-optic camera that’s like a quarter inch thick. Takes some serious skill to hit that one first time.”
“So what’s your point?”
“They got hold of the schematics. As well as my password.”
“Maybe from the security company that put them in.”
“Possibly. Or maybe from my own files. Right there in the office.”
“Not possible,” she said. “I’d have detected the intrusion, Nick.”
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe,” she said, defensive. “For sure.”
“Put it this way,” I said. “Not only did they know exactly where my cameras are, but they were able to disarm the system. Meaning they knew the code.”
“From your security company.”
“The company doesn’t know my code.”
“Who does?”
“Just me.”
“You don’t keep your code written down anywhere?”
“Just in my personal files at the office,” I said.
“In your file drawers?”
“On my computer. Stored on our server.”
“Oh.”
“You see?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, and the other line rang. I saw from the caller ID it was Diana. “Someone’s gotten into the office network.”
“Or else we’ve got a leak,” I said. “Let me take this.”
I clicked over to Diana’s call.
“Nick,” she said, her voice tight. “I just heard from AT&T. I think we’ve found our girl.”
33.
Not until Alexa went away to boarding school did she learn that other kids, normal kids, didn’t have the kind of dreams she did. Others dreamed of flying, like she sometimes did, but they also dreamed about their teeth falling out. They dreamed of getting lost in mazes or realizing, with immense embarrassment, that they were walking around school naked. They all had anxiety dreams about having to take a final exam in a class they’d forgotten to attend.
Not Alexa.
She dreamed over and over about crawling on her belly through an endless network of caves and getting stuck in one of the narrow tunnels, thousands of feet underground. She’d always wake up sweating and trembling.
The thing about phobias, she’d learned, was that once you had one, some small part of your brain was always working to justify its existence. To show you why your phobia made perfect sense.
Wasn’t it logical to be afraid of snakes? Who could argue with that? Why wasn’t it logical to fear germs or spiders or flying in an airplane? You could die any of these ways, right? It wasn’t like your brain had to work very hard to justify any of these phobias.
Being in an enclosed space was the most deeply terrifying thing she could imagine. She didn’t require logic. She just knew.
Like a magpie forever gathering shiny little scraps, her mind collected the most horrifying tales, things she’d read about or heard from friends, stories that proved her fears were legitimate. Things most people barely noticed, she filed away obsessively.
Stories from history books of people who’d fallen ill during the Plague, gone into comas, declared dead. Stories she wished she could unread.
Coffin lids with scratch marks on the inside. Skeletons found with fistfuls of human hair clenched in their bony hands.
She’d never forget reading about the Ohio girl in the late nineteenth century who got sick and her doctor thought she’d died, and for some reason her body was placed in a temporary vault, maybe because the ground was too frozen to bury her, and when they opened the vault in the spring to put the body in the ground, they found that the girl’s hair had been pulled out. And that some of her fingers had been chewed off.
The girl had eaten her own fingers to stay alive.
Her English teacher at Exeter had made them read Poe. It was hard enough just trying to understand the guy’s writing, the strange words she’d never heard of. But his stories—she couldn’t bear to read them. Because he was one of the very few who actually got it. He understood the terror. Her classmates would say things like “That’s one sick dude,” but she knew that Edgar Allan Poe saw the truth. “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Cask of Amontillado”—all those