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“We’ll let you know as soon as we have her,” Karen assured me.

“What do you want me to do in the meantime?” I asked.

“Sit tight,” Dan said. He’d changed his entire demeanor around me. Gone was the skeptic. The moment he saw that bubble over Deadwater Lake, I believed he finally understood what I’d been telling him all along.

Geneva Bell was a victim and she may be in grave danger. God help her.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“If anything happens to her because ...”

“Mercy, don’t,” Dad said. “None of that matters now. Getting Geneva home safe is the only thing that does. We’re all on the same team, aren’t we, Dan?”

“Of course,” he agreed.

It killed me to do nothing. Dad had an arm around me as we watched the rest of them head out. A chill went through me as I watched Karen Maven put on a bulletproof vest.

Then everyone left in a caravan. Arrangements were made for a crew to head out in a boat as well. Just in case. I also knew there would be divers on standby if need be. I didn’t want to think about that.

And then we were alone.

“I can’t just sit here,” I said to Dad after we’d done just that for ten minutes. “I need to be doing something. He can hate me if he wants to, but Landon should know what’s going on.”

I tried to call him, but got no answer. Lord knew what his father had been telling him about me since I left.

I went back into the conference room. It was in the same basic condition I’d left it. Karen and the others kept my organization of the Sidney prison letters intact. They’d written a few new things on the whiteboard. A timeline from when Sidney slipped custody on his way to the dentist. I wondered what became of the poor deputies who let that happen.

They knew more than I did about Sidney’s movements after that. They had been able to fill in some of the blanks from the decoded messages.

It appeared Sidney’s accomplice may have picked him up personally near the Ohio/Michigan border. There had been one unconfirmed sighting at a truck stop in Toledo.

On the corner of the table, I saw something new. Something I had not been granted access to. Dan Holland’s canary-yellow file folder. He’d brought his murder book. The one he’d snatched away from me the moment he knew I was on Geneva’s side. He must have brought it with him.

I couldn’t help myself. I went to it. “Am I breaking any laws if I open it?” I asked my father.

He gave me a mischievous smile. “This is still our office.”

I didn’t know what I thought I’d find inside. What had been so incriminating Holland spent over a decade believing the worst of Geneva?

At first glance, I saw nothing I didn’t already know. The file mostly just contained Holland’s barely legible personal notes made contemporaneously with various witness interviews. The substance of those conversations ended up in his official report.

But a few of his witnesses had written things down for him. Most were written on a yellow legal pad Holland seemed to favor.

Zoe Oleson had written down the names and addresses of their mutual friends. The parents of each of the girls had written down all their contact information. Pinned to her notes was a note of Dan’s own. He labeled it “Off the Record.”

There were only snippets of a conversation written down. Things he had clearly discussed with Zoe that hadn’t made it into the official report.

“Geneva hated Annabelle…death threats…not telling the truth…”

After having talked to Zoe, I knew this was about the boyfriend. But surely, Dan couldn’t have based his suspicion of Geneva herself on such thin accusations.

I kept flipping through the file. Three pages of notebook paper were stapled together with what I now recognized as Dan’s handwriting on them. At the top of the first page, he’d written “Geneva Lying.” Beneath that, he’d written bullet points.

Geneva threatened Annabelle; lied to me about it

Geneva last girl attacked, could have opened door for Sidney or at least lying about having locked doors. Accident or deliberate?

Failed poly–withheld information from me