Page 107 of Breaking the Dark

“What!”

“Uh-huh. And I can only assume that that is where he currently is. But New York is a city of a thousand Airbnbs and I have no clue where to begin looking. But maybe Lark does? Is she there?”

“Yes. She’s here. Lark! Hold on, I’m going to put this on speaker.” Then a moment later she says, “Lark, what do you know about an Airbnb and a woman named Miranda?”

“What?” says Lark.

Amber sighs. “Apparently Fox is at an Airbnb, with someone named Miranda. I know you know someone named Miranda, Lark. I’ve heard you talking to her in your room.”

“I have not.”

“Yes, honey, you have. Why would I make something like that up? And you have that flyer in your room. The one that says MEET MIRANDA. So come on, just tell me. Who the hell is Miranda and why would Fox have gone to her Airbnb?”

“I literally don’t know, okay. I just know that she’s a beauty influencer, from England. And that she’s over here launching some kind of new product. And that Fox is helping. But that’s all I know.”

“Fox is helping. But why?”

“Because of Belle.”

“Belle—the girl in England? The one he liked?”

“Yes. That one.”

“But she’s not even named Belle, remember, she’s named Grace. And she’s been rescued. She’s in the hospital, being taken care of. He doesn’t need to help her anymore.”

“Yeah, well, I know that, and you know that, but he doesn’t seem to care. He seems to think that Belle is really the girl he thought she was and that that Jessica woman had her abducted by the police against her will—I dunno, it’s like he’s turned into some kind of conspiracy theorist. It’s because he’s in love with her.”

“With who? With Miranda?”

“No! He’s in love with Belle! He can’t accept that she might not be who he thought she was when he fell in love with her. And I don’t know anything else.”

“So you don’t know where this Airbnb might be?”

“I have no idea. But why don’t you look on his laptop?”

Jessica exchanges a look with Luke and then says to Amber, “Fox has a laptop at home?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Just wait there, Amber. We’re coming straight over.”

As she and Luke stride down Lexington toward the Randalls’ building, Jessica notices more and more young people in the area, staring at their phones, looking lost and out of place. A few clutch MEET MIRANDA flyers in their hands. She glances at the time on her own phone and sees that it is coming up to six p.m. She feels a small shiver of panic as the day starts unraveling into night and she is still no closer to finding Malcolm, let alone stopping whatever the hell it is that Madame Web told her she needs to stop.

She starts to walk faster and Luke steps up his pace to keep up with her.

“Slow it down, Jessica, you’re gonna run someone down.”

In Amber’s apartment, she directs them to Fox’s bedroom, where Lark has taken Fox’s laptop from a drawer under his desk and opened it up. Jessica stands over the desk and waits while Lark inputs his password.

“You know his password?”

“Of course,” she says. “We’re twins.”

The screen comes to life and Lark goes to Fox’s browser and selects his browsing history.

She scrolls down and Jessica sees at least a dozen searches along the lines of Sly McNeil and Sly McNeil father, and Sly McNeil Robert F. Kennedy School. And then finally, Sly McNeil Jessica Jones.

“Shit,” says Jessica. “He was really onto Malcolm, huh?”