Chapter 10 Daniela
DANIELA
The printer.
Time to look closely.
The note was printed from here. The officers said they’d pull the print log. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn’t look at the paper tray. I slide it out an inch. Half a ream. The top sheet is clean. I angle it to the light. No faint impression from the page above, no pressure ghost of letters.
“Hey.”
I look up. Raven hovers in the doorway, one arm crossed over her belly. “Find anything?”
“Just a handwritten list.” I point to it. “It was lodged in the track of a desk drawer. Strange really. Written in block letters. It could have been there for a while. Who had this room before Belinda?”
“I don’t know. We’d have to ask Vinnie. And he may not know as he was in Europe for seventeen years. If I had to guess, I’d say it was Savannah’s.” She gestures toward the note. “I don’t have gloves.”
I nod.
Raven points to the printer. “The note,” she says, like it tastes wrong in her mouth.
I nod. Belinda’s laptop sits closed on the desk, a sheet of piano scales tucked under it. I lift the lid with the edge of my fingernail. The login screen blooms—her name, that goofy Mozart sunflower icon she chose, a password field blinking.
“I’m surprised the officers didn’t look more closely at this,” Raven says.
“Because they aren’t taking this seriously,” I say dryly.
She hovers over me as I slide my gloved fingers over the keyboard.
“Anything?”
We both look up at Vinnie standing in the doorway.
“Just a note lodged in one of the desk drawers.” I point. “Who had this room—more specifically, this furniture—before Belinda?”
“Hell if I know. I wasn’t here.”
I nod again. “I’m going to try to get into her computer.”
“The cops should be the ones doing that,” he says.
“Yeah, they should, but they didn’t even try.” I glance at the password window. Then, carefully, because these damned gloves make it difficult. I type in Mozart.
“Too obvious,” Vinnie says.
“Maybe.” I try Debussy. No dice. Chopin. Nope. I add her birth year to each. The laptop rejects each one.
I glance at the wallpaper photo—a snapshot of her with me. She’s holding out her orange fingertips from cheeseballs. “She’d pick something she loves. Or someone.”
“Try ‘Bach,’” Raven says. “She’s been on a cello suites kick.”
“Belinda thinks Bach is a ‘sad genius grandpa.’” But I try it anyway.
Nothing.
I type cheeseballs on impulse.
Wrong.
Then VinnieGallo.
Nope.
“Raven?” I try it. Wrong again.
After several more composers and musical terms fail, I type Daniela.
The desktop opens.
Raven’s hand flies to her mouth. “Oh, honey.”
I don’t let myself feel it. Not yet. I sit. “I’m in. I’ll be careful.”
Raven edges closer. “The detective really would’ve done this if we’d asked.”
“They would have,” I say, navigating to System Settings > Printers. “But we can’t even get an Amber Alert. She’s technically a runaway for a few more hours.” I click Print Queue. “And I am not giving the clock a head start.”
The job history populates—sheet music titles, a geography worksheet, a sloppy short story about a heroic golden retriever saving a ballerina from a volcano. My throat tightens. I scroll. Until—
Document (1 page) with no title, stamped with the time.
I point to the log. “Whoever printed the note did it about an hour before I found it. Which means someone was in here, at this desk, while you were in your room.”
Raven’s color drains. “We were ten yards away.”
“Or Belinda herself printed it,” Vinnie says. “Then left.”
“She didn’t.” I shake my head. “This is an adult’s cadence pretending to be a kid. And the timing is too well placed.”
Vinnie’s already tapping his phone, jumping feeds, calling up door sensors, cross-checking. “Nobody crosses a threshold without tripping something,” he says, more to himself than to us. “Unless they were let in. Or they never left to begin with.”
A quiet, mean little thought settles in my gut. I minimize the print queue and open Belinda’s browser. The history is long, childish, everyday.
How to grow strawberries in pots,
Debussy Clair de Lune
Dogs that don’t shed
What happens when you swallow gum?
But then, more recent—
Declan McAllister news
Declan McAllister daughter
What is racketeering?
What does extradited mean?
Raven makes a soft, wounded sound. “We promised we’d wait,” she whispers. “We told her the truth would be there when she was ready. She’d already been through so much at his hands.”
“She’s been ready,” I say. “Curiosity doesn’t wait for birthdays.”
A lot of the links are glossy profiles—philanthropy photos, golf tournament coverage, Declan smiling with a senator. The whitewashed story. She never made it past the first page of search results.
“I’ll talk to her about how to vet sources,” Raven says, and then flinches at her own words. “God. I’m talking like she’s in the next room and this is a fucking homework assignment.”
“She was looking for answers.” I keep scrolling. The URL bar suggests a site I don’t recognize—SpeakSecure.chat. My pulse kicks. I click.
A sign-in loads with two fields and a padlock icon. I open a second tab. A peer-to-peer messaging portal marketed to activists and journalists. Not quite the dark web, but not kid stuff either. “Belinda, who taught you this?” I murmur.
Raven leans in. “Is that…safe?”
“Safer than most,” I say. “But it takes intent to find.” I check the browser’s saved passwords. None for this site. I return to the tab and try the username field. It autofills.
bnotes.
“B-notes,” Raven says faintly. “She calls her little melody ideas ‘B-notes.’”
I tab to password. The dots appear as I type daniela again, because it’s suddenly the only thing I can think to try.
We’re in.
The interface is stark—conversations listed by handle. One thread. The other user is only numbers—019473. My mouth goes dry. I click.
The chat scrolls up. It’s Belinda’s typing style all right—short lines, bursts, emojis deployed like confetti.
bnotes: hi. do you know him fr??
019473: I know of him. I know what he did.
bnotes: to who
019473: To a lot of people. To your mother.
bnotes: don’t talk abt her
019473: I can help you find what you want.
bnotes: what i want is to know if he ever did anything good. Or was he all bad?
019473: He’s both. But mostly the second one.
bnotes: that’s not an answer
019473: Meet me. I’ll show you.
bnotes: no
019473: Public place. You choose.
bnotes: the mall food court?
019473: Tonight?
bnotes: can’t. sleepover
019473: That works. Just make an excuse to sneak out.
I scroll. The timestamps make my stomach twist. The “sleepover” night at Gwen Charleston’s. If she slipped out then and nothing happened, the seed was planted. She could meet him again without fear.
Vinnie swears under his breath. “I thought she had more sense than this.” His fingers are already moving. “I’m pulling cameras from every entrance. If security won’t hand them over, I’ll—”
“Call Chef Charleston,” Raven says quickly.
He nods once, jaw tight, and steps into the hall with the phone to his ear.
I keep scrolling. The thread ends abruptly yesterday.
019473: Today. 3 p.m. Not the mall. Easier for you. Your place. Back garden gate. I’ll knock twice.
“He told her to let him in,” I say.
Raven grabs the doorframe like she needs the house to hold her up. “She would never,” she says, and then, more quietly, “She might. If she thought she was getting answers. Answers she should have gotten from us.”
“She wouldn’t invite a stranger,” I say. “But you have to think like an eleven-year-old. Half the kids these days meet their friends this way. So this wasn’t a stranger. Not to her. It was a voice that knew her father’s name.”
Raven squeezes her eyes shut, opens them again. “Declan McAllister.”
I screenshot the thread, email the images to myself, to Raven, to Vinnie. I forward them to the detective with a single line.
Belinda’s secure chat suggests a meeting arranged at our back gate yesterday, 3:00 p.m.
Raven’s breath hitches. “We were home. Oh my God. We were home.”
I pull up the printer queue again and point. “And then this.”
Raven swallows. “What does it mean?”
“It means he was in this house,” I say. “Or close enough to shepherd her to the desk and tell her what to type.”
Raven steadies. I watch it happen—the brittle part in her spine stiffening into steel.
“Working on it,” Vinnie says. “I’m mapping proximity alerts to our phones and locking down every profile that isn’t ours.”
I nod, my eyes still on 019473. Numbers. Anonymous. A string you use when you don’t want to be found.
I scroll higher, looking for a tell—an idiom, a phrase, a spelling tic. Anything. The messages are clipped. Exact. Someone practiced at saying nothing.
I pull the laptop’s cord so I don’t have to risk battery sleep, and then open Downloads, Documents, Desktop—anywhere a kid might stash something.
Sheet music PDFs, a half-finished essay on Harriet Tubman, a folder of photos titled Summer.
I open it—Belinda’s selfies, the puppy she begged for in June, Vinnie asleep with a book on his chest, Raven’s hand in the frame holding a can of Orange Crush.
Raven is still beside me, close enough that I can feel the tremor in her breath. “You’re good at this,” she says softly.
“I’m motivated,” I reply.
She touches my shoulder, just once. “We’ll get her back.”
“We will,” I say, because I can’t bring myself to think anything else.
I switch back to SpeakSecure.chat and click the profile for 019473.
There’s nothing there.
Of course there isn’t.
But you can’t message a minor into her yard and stay invisible forever.
We will find him.
I close my eyes, picture the path from the garden gate to this chair, imagine the way his voice might have sounded coming through the dark. Probably calm and promising. So a girl who wants answers more than anything would have listened.
Okay, chef. Okay, shadow. Okay, numbers.
You knocked twice. Now it’s my turn.