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“…Molly didn’t run away. She’s my sister. She wouldn’t leave without me. You have to find her…”

Leona’s voice was soft, blurred by sleep and infused with desperation. A chaotic energy swirled in the atmosphere.

Oliver came awake on a surge of adrenaline.

“It’s my fault she’s gone…”

He rolled onto his side and propped himself on his elbow. Leona was stirring restlessly. Her dreamstate anxiety electrified the room. The yellow crystal pendant was glowing more intensely than it had earlier in the evening.

“My fault. I wasn’t paying attention. I was on the swing…”

“Leona,” he said quietly. “It’s okay. Just a dream.”

“…You have to find my sister…”

He put what he hoped was a reassuring hand on her shoulder. Her eyes snapped open. Tension gripped her, rendering her motionless. He knew she was trapped in the strange, unnerving border between sleep and wakefulness. It was the territory where hallucinations and night terrors lurked.

“Wake up, Leona,” he said.

He tightened his grip on her arm and generated a little energy, just enough to interrupt the sleep state paralysis. She shivered and then awareness returned to her eyes. The panic dissipated.

She looked at him with a wary expression and then she groaned and draped an arm over her eyes. “Sorry about that.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about. You had a bad dream.”

She pushed herself to a sitting position, evidently remembered she was naked, and grabbed the sheet to hold to her throat. “I fell asleep before you went back to your room. That’s not supposed to happen. All I can say is that it’s been a stressful couple of days. Make that a stressful week. Actually, it’s been kind of a stressful month or two. Great. Now I’m making excuses.”

He sorted through her words and focused on the ones that bothered him the most. “What do you mean, it’s not supposed to happen?”

She glanced at him, bemused. “What?”

“You apologized because you fell asleep while I was still here. You said that wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“Oh, right. I told you, when we were younger, Molly and I decided to live our lives as free spirits. We made a couple of rules. Number one was that we would never date anyone who was married or registered with a matchmaking agency.”

“A sensible rule.”

“Number two was no sleepovers. No sticking around for breakfast in the morning.”

“Because spending the entire night represents too much of a commitment?”

“And because it might set up false expectations. We were afraid that we might get too comfortable and start thinking there could be more to the relationship.”

“And that would be a bad thing?”

“Realistically, yes,” she said.

“Your sister, the other free spirit in the family, changed her mind.”

“Yes.” There was a short silence. “She did.”

“Do you want me to leave?” He was not holding his breath. Okay, yes, he was holding his breath. Such a simple question. Why did it feel like so much was hanging on the answer?

She appeared to give that some thought.

“No,” she said, “I don’t want you to leave. This feels…different.”

He started to ask the next logical question— Why is this different? —but he changed his mind and shut his mouth. She had sounded bemused or maybe unsure. He decided it would probably be best not to push the issue.

He lounged against the pillows. “Do you want to tell me about your nightmare?”

“It was just a bad dream.”

“You were talking in your sleep. Something about the need to rescue your sister.”

For a moment he thought she was going to slide away from an answer, but she didn’t.

“It’s an old dream,” she said. “It goes back to the day my sister was grabbed at the orphanage. I had that particular nightmare frequently when I was growing up but rarely in the past few years. It still comes back occasionally when I’m under a lot of stress.”

“Do you know why the dream became less of a problem?”

“Sure. The moms taught me how to use lucid dreaming to rewrite the script. But in the past few weeks I’ve started having the dream again, and I haven’t been able to get control of it.”

“As you said, you’ve been under a lot of stress.”

“Yes.”

Oliver glanced at her pendant. The glow was rapidly fading.

“Your crystal was brighter than usual when you woke up a moment ago,” he said.

“My crystal?” She touched the stone with her fingertips and then raised it so that she could get a close look at it. “I guess my dream energy rezzed it a bit.”

“Interesting.” He pushed the covers aside, got to his feet, and padded across the room. He picked up her messenger bag and brought it to the bed. “Let’s take a look.”

Leona opened the bag, reached inside, and took out the yellow pyramid.

The glow was fading, just as it was in the pendant, but the stone was still faintly luminous. He sat down on the side of the bed and took the pyramid stone from her fingers.

“Tell me about your dream,” he said. “The one that seems to be rezzing these crystals.”

“I told you the story. Molly was kidnapped by a madman, Nigel Willard. The moms rescued her. They had just opened Griffin Investigations. Molly was their first big case. The press loved it.”

“Yes, but you never told me how the Griffins got involved. How did they know Molly had been kidnapped? Who hired them?”

“I did.”

“You were six and a half years old. What made you call a private investigation agency?”

“I thought about calling the police but I was afraid Ms. Inskip, the director of the orphanage, would tell them I was just a kid playing with the phone.”

“So you called an investigation agency instead. Why Griffin?”

“It was the only one I knew about. There was a sign on the other side of the orphanage fence. Molly and I could see it when we were on the swings. Griffin Investigations. Want answers? We’ll get them for you. Call now. No waiting . There was a phone number. We had both memorized it because we had seen it so many times.”

“You called the number and the Griffins believed you? A six-and-a-half-year-old kid?”

“I’m told I can be quite…forceful.”

He smiled. “I have a thing for strong women.”

She flushed. “Charlotte and Eugenie Griffin were at the door of the Inskip School less than thirty minutes later, demanding to talk to me. Ms. Inskip tried to stop them. She couldn’t.”

“So you were the one who rescued Molly.”

“What?” Startled, Leona frowned. “No. I just told you, the moms did.”

“You made the call to Griffin Investigations, and even though you were only six and a half years old, you convinced two adults to believe you. You launched the rescue operation and it was successful.”

“I should have been paying attention. I didn’t even notice Molly was gone until I turned around. I remember screaming—”

“I repeat, you were only six and a half years old. Even if you had been watching your sister every single minute, you could not have stopped a grown man from grabbing her. What matters is what you did when you realized what had happened. No question about it—you rescued your sister.”