My throat closed in on me, trapping my voice inside, cornering the words until they gave up and scattered away. All I could was stare at the messages, unravel them and put them back together until they made some kind of sense.
"That sender knew it was you" said Aaron, his voice coaxing me back to reality.
The shock had receded now and I jumped into action. "I need to reply now." I said typing out:
Who are you?
Where is Edward?

But there was no point now. The 'unknown sender' was already one step ahead.
As soon as I pressed the send button, an error message showed up:
The user has blocked you.
This user is no longer a valid number.

"No no no no, this can't be happening" screamed Aaron.
Alice tried to calm him down.
We lost our one and only lead but one thing was clear that someone didn't want us to get to the bottom of this.

We didn't even come to know how fast time passed by and it was already afternoon.

But we didn't lose hope and thought of checking his laptop further to see if we can find anything. After hours of searching, we couldn't find anything on his laptop. Then we thought of checking his drawers and books and his cupboard to see if something was kept there or if some note was written anywhere.

We divided the areas of search amongst us:
Aaron would search the cupboard.
Alice would search in between books.
I would search in all his drawers and the rest of the bedroom.
Still we couldn't find anything.
"It has already been two days since Edward has gone missing and still no sign of him and the police won't even help until five days of him going missing. This is ridiculous!" said Aaron in a rather irritated tone. "What could be the reason that the kidnapper took Edward, because I don't seem to find one" said Alice,  exhausted after going through all the books. "Me neither" I replied.

"Anyway, Aaron, I'm going to meet to mom and dad tomorrow. They just called me a while ago and said that they need help with something" said Alice. "I'll also come along with you" replied Aaron. "No need. You stay here with Ella and help her out: stay by her side until I'm back." said Alice.
And with this it was almost midnight and everyone went to sleep.
     ***
The next morning when we woke up, Alice had already left. Later Aaron went to Alice's room to take her car keys as he had to go and get some groceries and Alice had gone on a taxi.
While he was taking out the keys from the drawer, he saw a button in the corner of the drawer, almost camouflaged with the colour of the drawer. He pressed it and the pinboard above her study table flipped.