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Now I get a laugh, and the lightness in his eyes eases some lingering doubt.

There’s more to the story of Lucas and Taylor than either has shared, but I won’t push.

I need his help, and as the saying goes, you catch more flies with honey.

However, who really wants more flies? Either way, I’m letting it all go.

I might not have the answers I’m looking for, but I have a gut feeling I’m not in danger.

I reach out my hand. “Truce?”

He grudgingly steps forward, and we shake.

“Yeah, truce. Give me the box,” he says.

Lucas sits next to me on the bed. I pick up that underlying scent that’s uniquely his, and it sends my mind reeling… but there’s unresolved business between him and Taylor, so I push the feeling away.

Lucas turns the box over in his hands, examining it keenly. “Where did you get this?” he asks.

I go for a half-truth. “It belongs to the lady who rescued me. She let me borrow it, and I accidentally broke it.”

He opens his plastic toolbox full of guitar picks, wire cutters, strings, and little wrenches. There are tiny compartments containing small screws that look perfect for this purpose.

“This is easy,” he says. He takes out a screwdriver so small it could have come from a dollhouse.

He uses two drops of glue, applied with extreme precision, to ensure the metal sets tight against the wood, then turns the screw, securing the clasp.

When it’s all done, he holds up the box to examine his handiwork.

It looks fine to me, but he’s very thorough.

He opens the lid and feels along the inside with his fingertips, making sure the screw didn’t poke through the wood before tightening it one last time.

As he brushes his hand along the spacious interior lined with red velvet, I notice a shift in his eyes. He looks puzzled. He takes out a different screwdriver from his tool kit—this one a small flathead—and wedges it into the narrow gap between the front of the box and that velvet liner.

“This has a false bottom,” he says, intrigued.

He applies light pressure, and the bottom lifts up.

We peer into the exposed compartment and see something white resting within.

There’s faint lettering on the back, like a watermark.

I can make out the word KODAK, set at an angle and printed repeatedly across the paper.

“What’s this?” he asks, but I know the answer.

It’s a photograph; I’m familiar with the brand name.

They make instant print cameras, but this picture is way old, judging by the faded markings on the back and the slight yellowish tinge to the paper.

It reminds me of my mom’s old photo albums, before she digitized and uploaded them to the cloud.

I carefully remove the photo from the hidden compartment. Lucas doesn’t know I have a connection to the lake, and likely to this box, and it needs to stay that way.

The paper feels smooth against my fingers, its finish glossy. Lucas and I exchange wary glances because we’re invading someone else’s privacy. But I have to know. I turn the picture over to see what’s on the front.

My heart leaps to my throat as I peer down at an image of my aunt Susie.

I’d know her anywhere. She’s about my age in this photo, meaning it must have been taken shortly before she disappeared.

And it was captured here, at Lake Timmeny—I recognize the front porch where she’s standing.

I’ve seen the house behind her with my own eyes, from across the shore.

She’s wearing denim shorts, and pink bathing suit straps show from underneath a white halter top.

Her freckled, sun-kissed skin glows with youthful radiance.

Long blond hair falls like a curtain over her slender shoulders.

Even at such a young age, she looks like my mother.

She has the same basic features—the signature Welch family round nose (which sadly I didn’t get), and sparkling blue eyes that are as crisp as the sky on the day this photograph was taken.

She has her arm draped around the shoulder of a boy. Her fingernails are painted the same dark tint as the lake. Her sunny smile tells me she’s in love. It’s in her eyes, too, an unmistakable light that burns bright. But as for the object of her affection, he is an enigma.

I can read nothing in his eyes and gauge nothing from his features because someone took a black marker and scribbled him out. The blackout is crudely done, thick lines made in crazed zigzags that cover his face, disguising him completely.

I can feel the haste, anger, and raw emotion that went into obliterating him from the image.

I don’t need to be an experienced investigator to deduce that something happened between these two.

The picture was found in a hidden compartment, in a box that had been in my aunt’s room, so she must have been the one who blacked out his face.

But why?

While I have no idea who I’m looking at, I can guess he’s about Lucas’s age. He doesn’t have the build of a grown man, and his olive-toned skin pokes out from beneath a Nirvana T-shirt and tan surf shorts that descend below the knees.

“Whoa. It’s like a horror movie prop.” Lucas says it lightheartedly because he doesn’t know the black ink covering this boy’s face might be hiding a monster.

I feel a wave of nausea. It’s too much to process, more than I can bear. My thoughts are bouncing around as if my mind is a pinball machine.

When was this taken?

Who is the boy?

What did he do to my aunt?

I notice one small detail that eluded me before, and something clicks. My blood freezes as I focus more intently on the photograph—specifically a small, seemingly inconsequential piece of jewelry the boy is wearing.

That day in the kitchen when David returned from his run, only to find out that Fiona was missing, he pranced about shirtless, leering at me over the rim of his glass of orange juice, basically forcing me to look at his bare chest and the thick gold chain he wore around his neck—a piece of jewelry the same color, size, and shape as the necklace that the boy with the blacked-out face is wearing in the picture with my aunt Susie, taken not long before she disappeared.