A car from behind honks impatiently. Snapping back to reality, Clayton turns left. The rear of the SUV fishtails on the wet pavement from the sudden acceleration, but I'm more worried about something else.

"My place is to the right. You know that," I say, thumbing in the opposite direction.

"Yes, but we can't drop this Cox connection now and I have access to university systems from home, which is this way," he says, speeding in the rain towards Ward Manor.

"Possible connection," I correct him, fearing that he's latched onto a lead that may turn out to be nothing at all. But at least that supports his sincerity in finding Jules and makes it less likely that he had anything to do with her disappearance. At this point, I'll take that as a win.

It only takes us a few more minutes of driving for us to arrive and Clayton leaves the car in front of the beautiful mansion. We run up the stairs and burst through the unlocked entry, but we still manage to get soaked.

A woman old enough to be Clayton's grandmother appears from a side door as we're shaking the rain off ourselves. Wearing a fitted suit and stylish glasses, I think that she might be family until she addresses him.

"Good afternoon, Dr. Ward," she says in that disinterested, yet formal tone of household staff speaking to their employer. "You didn't mention having a guest for the evening. We'll have to–"

"Just tea will be enough for now," Clayton cuts her off before turning toward me. "You like tea, right?"

While his not wanting to make a big deal out of me being here doesn't escape my attention, anything hot sounds good about now. So I nod. "Yes, please."

"Very good," the woman says, starting to turn, but Clayton isn't done.

"Barlow, this is Mrs. Adelaide. She runs the house," he says, subtly forcing the woman to officially recognize my presence. "If you need anything while you're here, she's the one to ask."

I'm less sure about what I could possibly need from Clayton's housekeeper than whether Adelaide is her first or last name, but I smile and shake the woman's hand.

"It's nice to meet you, but I promise I won't be a bother," I say, feeling like I should stay on Mrs. Adelaide's good side, but somehow already knowing that won't be easy.

And unsurprisingly, she just pulls her lips into a thin line and nods before speaking to Clayton again. "There's a fire in the study if that's where you'll take your tea."

"That'll be perfect," he says, reaching for me to follow. "Thank you, Mrs. Adelaide."

"She's kind of scary," I whisper when we've gone in opposite direction and I'm sure we're out of earshot.

Clayton laughs. "Don't I know it. But she's been with my family for as long as I can remember and I can't even imagine what I'd do without her."

"Is she a . . . you know, wolf?"

He stops in front of a door and looks at me. "No," he says with a shake of his head as he pushes down the handle and urges me inside.

I enter the very manly-looking room with lots of wood and leather. There's a large desk, a spacious sitting area and a well-stocked bar cart, plus the requisite built-in bookshelves and ornate fireplace. Thankfully and unlike in Clayton's on-campus office, there's no deer's head or any other dead animal hanging on the wall.

"What about Carlos?" I ask the question I've been curious about since the first day we met in the woods. "Is he part of the pack?"

Clayton goes to his desk and flips open a laptop. "That's also a no. And since you asked, I'm guessing that you still can't tell."

I shake my head and follow him, standing next to his chair.

"You could have a seat," he says, motioning toward the armchair on the other side of the desk.

"No, thank you. I'd like to see what you're doing," I say, leaning in closer to the monitor as he opens a new browser window. "What system are you accessing?"

"One that should be used only on a need-to-know basis and I'm not sure this situation qualifies as such," he says, selecting a URL that brings up a login screen. "It's better that you don't know. Plausible deniability and all that."

"Right," I say as I glance away while he enters his password. When I look back, he's in some type of student informations system. "So where are you going to start?"

"We need to tie Juliette Kaczmarek to Cece Cox, right? So I suppose we could start with either—assuming that Cece was also a student at Packard—and work our way forward or backward to see if we find any common threads," he says. "But because we aren't sure she was a student plus those records would probably have predated any type of digital record keeping, it's a safer bet to start with Juliette."

I watch for a while as Clayton pokes around on different screens to pull up various information about Jules, following the breadcrumbs as it were. Standing hunched over, it doesn't take long for my back to hurt, so when Mrs. Adelaide enters with the tea, I use it as the excuse to sit.

"I thought that tea would just be a steaming mug full of leaf water, not proper high tea all British-style," I say, munching on a finger sandwich once the housekeeper has left. She's not only brought a fancy bone china pot of Darjeeling, but also cookies, petit fours and vegetarian sandwiches.

Clayton reaches for a pistachio shortbread. "Now you see why I can't live without her. Hmm, these are my favorite."

It's kind of adorable how excited he is about the cookies until I remember why we're here again.

"So how are you doing over there?" I ask, licking a bit off strawberry jam off my finger. "Any leads yet?"

Clayton looks puzzled as he keeps his gaze on his computer screen. "I'm still going through Juliette's records, but something here feels off."

This gets my attention and I straighten up. "Off? How?"

"Bring your chair over."

I do as he asks and soon I'm back at Clayton's elbow.

"So Juliette had claimed that her hometown was Pittsburgh. That was what we had put on her missing persons fliers and the Pittsburgh PD was the Woodhurst police's contact in her case," he says before pointing at a data field on the screen. "And while her admissions information lists a high school in Pittsburgh as having issued her diploma, digging into her contact details brings up a post office box from a zip code well outside of the city."

He clicks through a few related links that show the P.O. box and the 16701 zip code before pulling up an online map. Plugging the postal code of the high school and the box in results in a distance of over one hundred miles.

"There could be a reasonable explanation for the two addresses, right?" I ask, giving the benefit of the doubt. "Maybe her parent were separated and she lived with one while finishing school? Or it could have been a boarding school type situation. The P.O. box could have even been a temporary way to contact her while she was on summer break. There are a bunch of possibilities."

"True. But then I also noticed this." Back in the student system, Clayton uses his cursor to highlight a date stamp on one of the screens related to Jules' records. It's from two months ago.

"Okay, so? The information was updated recently," I say, not getting his point.

Leaning back in his chair, Clayton rakes his fingers through his hair. "Barlow, that's a part of the system that we use at the university to evaluate freshman applicants," he says before crossing his arms. "Juliette was a senior meaning that there has been no reason for anyone to touch that record much less update it for over three years. And when I looked at all of her other data—prior semester classes, grades, housing assignments, tuition payments, whatever—all of them had the same time stamp."

I think I already know, but I ask anyway in case I'm grossly mistaken. "What could that mean?"

Clayton sighs. "It means that every piece of information at Packard University about Juliette Kaczmarek was created right before the start of the current semester because the girl who everyone is looking for—"

"Doesn't exist," I finish his sentence, horrified at the discovery.