“I agree.  You should be careful.”

Eric looked around the room again.  “You think I’m in danger?” The only other door leading in and out of this apartment was in this room.  With the apartment empty, Aiden must have gone through there.  By now he was probably long gone.

“Never hurts to assume so.”

Eric nodded and said, “Especially when things are freakishly weird.”

“Especially then.  I’m doing great, by the way.  Thanks for asking.”

Eric was looking nervously around the room, appreciating just how weird this all was, but as soon as she said this, he felt his shoulders slump.  “Aw crap…  I’m sorry.”

Isabelle giggled.  “I’m totally just joking.  It’s fine.”

“No it’s not.”  Now that he was thinking about it, it’d been over a week since he last spoke to her.  Karen had been keeping him so busy preparing for the shower…  He felt like a jerk.

“I’m fine, Eric.  I’m not a kid.  Well…  I am a kid…  You know what I mean.  I can entertain myself.”

“Still, that was rude of me.”

“Seriously.  Forget it.  You should be focusing on those…what are those?  Maps?”

Isabelle couldn’t actually see what was in front of Eric.  More accurately, she could perceive what he was looking at by what he was feeling and thinking.  They shared a connection.  It was…complicated.

Eric turned in a circle, scanning the walls around him.  “Yeah.  The whole city.  He’s circled a bunch of locations for some reason.”

“He’s put some serious work into all this,” observed Isabelle.  “But what’s he up to?”

Eric turned and leaned over the map on the table.  This part of Main Street was enclosed in the circle with the screw driven into it.  A line jutted out from the circle, pointing roughly westward.  It crossed three other lines, each of which originated from another circle elsewhere on the map, but did not appear to lead anywhere.  Each line ran to the end of the map.  And none of the drawn lines matched the lines created by the two lengths of string.  “Is he planning some kind of…massive burglary?”

But Isabelle didn’t know.

There was another circle drawn over the hospital and another just south of the water tower, centered over Milwaukee Street.  The others didn’t seem to have any outstanding landmarks to help locate them.

Only one of the circles did not have a black line running out from it.  Instead, it had been circled again in bright red marker and then crossed out with an X.  This particular location wasn’t far from his home.  He wondered why it was marked out.  It was the only one like it.  Was it a mistake?

“I get a seriously weird feeling about that place,” warned Isabelle.

“Weird how?”

“I don’t know.  I can’t quite put my finger on it.  But I really think you should be careful.”

Eric glanced around the room again.  There were two windows.  One appeared to have been broken.  It was boarded over with a roughly cut piece of plywood.  Eric’s eyes were drawn to a hole in the center of the wood.  Bright sunlight was pouring through.

As he ducked under one of the strings and moved toward this window, he saw that there were actually two boards, one behind the other, with about an inch of empty space between them.  The second board had a hole in it, too, but it was offset from the first so that he could only look through them at a sharp angle.  Peering through these holes, he could see the roof of one of the buildings across the street and the tall peak of a distinct structure reaching up behind it.  Pressing his eye to the hole for a better look, he thought at first that it was the steeple of the Catholic church on Deer Street, but it was squared off, not pointed, less a steeple than a tower.  And as he thought about it, he realized that Deer Street was in the opposite direction.  This looked more like a clock tower, minus the clock.  But he couldn’t quite place the building, even though he’d lived in Creek Bend most of his life.

A noise startled him.  It sounded like a door clicking closed.

Suddenly his heart was racing.

“Be careful!” hissed Isabelle.

Eric nodded but didn’t dare speak aloud.  Was that Aiden?  He pressed his back to the wall and glanced around the room.  The big, pink bouquet was still lying on the table, visible from the door all the way down the hall.  If anyone had entered the apartment, they would know instantly that someone was here.

That was really stupid.

But no one called out to ask who was trespassing.  The building remained deathly quiet.  The only sound was the occasional rumble of passing traffic on the street outside and the thudding of Eric’s pulse in his ears.

Silently, he stepped away from the wall and ducked under the string again, careful not to make any noise.  Seconds passed as he crept toward the hallway, his body tense, ready to defend himself, but no one came to investigate the bouquet.  The apartment remained quiet.  And when he peered around the corner, he found no one there.

He’d left the door open behind him.  Now it was closed.  Perhaps a breeze had pulled it shut.  It wasn’t all that unlikely.  The door at the bottom of the steps didn’t have a latch, so the wind could easily have created a draft.

He checked the bedroom and bathroom, just to be sure, but both remained empty.  There was nowhere to hide.  There weren’t even any closets.

He peered out the door and down the steps, but no one was there, either.

Returning to the living/dining room, he opened the second door and looked out.  Another dark stairwell led down to the first floor of the building.

Eric turned around and scanned the mysterious apartment again.  If these were the only two exits, then Aiden could only have gone this way.

Isabelle’s voice drifted up from his hand and he lifted the phone to his ear.  “What was that?”

“I said, what’s the deal with this guy, anyway?  You knew him?”

“Not very well.  Aiden was one of my students about seven years ago.  The next year, he disappeared without a trace.  It was big news in this town for a long time.”

“A missing person, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I can relate to that.”

Eric smiled.  “That’s right.”  He found Isabelle almost a year ago.  She looked and sounded thirteen, but she’d been missing for thirty-six years, trapped inside a living mansion that existed between two worlds.  She saved his life, and in return he gave her the courage to escape her strange prison.  But she still wasn’t exactly free.  Although she’d left the terrifying Altrusk House behind, she could only travel between buildings with similar properties.  She still couldn’t venture outside.

“Maybe you can save Aiden, too, just like you did me.”

“Maybe.”  But Aiden didn’t seem to want to be found.  He was gone as quickly and mysteriously as he’d appeared.  “But for now, I’m going to hang up until I’m out of here.”

“I’ll be watching.”

“Thanks.”

Stuffing the phone back into his front pants pocket, he retrieved the daisies from the table and then left the apartment down the spiral staircase.  At the bottom was a heavy, steel door.  Like the others, it was unlocked.

He stepped through the door and immediately found himself standing in a shadowy room that smelled of leather, stale beer and faint cigarette smoke.  A round, oak table stood before him with a single, unlit candle resting in the middle.  Four high-back chairs of matching oak stood around it.  Similar tables were set all over the room.  The walls were painted black, the floors were hardwood.  The décor appeared to be a passionate marriage of Harley Davidson and United States naval history.  Leather jackets, gloves and biker helmets mingled with American flags, framed photographs of aircraft carriers and battleships, paintings of sailors, framed medals and other various war memorabilia.

This was a bar.

He was still on Main Street, just a few doors down from the florist.  He thought for a moment and finally realized where he was.  This was Big Brooke Tavern.