My 6-year-old daughter pressed her ear to my sister’s floor and whispered, “Daddy, Tobin is crying down there.” My son had been missing for 14 months, and everyone told me she was imagining things — until I heard three faint taps beneath the hardwood.

Because the woman on that telephone told me not to. Twice, calmly, while I was already moving.

And because the one thing I did correctly in this entire story, I did at about twenty past two on a Saturday afternoon —

and it was doing what somebody who knew better than me told me to do, for once in my life.

The first car was there in eleven minutes. Four more behind it inside the hour.

The lower level of that house is reached through a door at the back of the garage.

It was not hidden. There was a shelving unit standing in front of it and the key was in the kitchen, on the same ring as her car and her front door.

It is a finished room. Plastered, painted, carpeted.

There is a bed in it and a light and a chair and a bathroom. There are books.