Chapter Four
Gabe motioned for her to follow him upstairs, and Gwen left the couch and living room behind, giving her mother one last worried glance. Shaking her head, she took the stairs two at a time, finding Gabe in Ginny’s bedroom. He was sitting on the edge of Ginny’s bed, facing her desk. When she saw that her laptop had been turned on and was on the login screen, she realized what Gabe wanted to do.
Quickly she closed the door and sat down in front of her laptop. “The police may have taken Ginny’s laptop, but I can still get into her email account if I can guess the password.”
“You might be able to guess the password, but you’ll never figure out the throwaway account she made. It could be anything, even a completely random series of numbers that have no meaning. The password won’t do you any good without the account name.” He looked around the room. “Is there anywhere she would have written it down? If it is a throwaway account, it’s probably not something she would have remembered easily. I can see her writing it down and keeping it secret somewhere so she doesn’t forget it.”
“You start looking,” Gwen said. “I’m going to do a quick internet search and see if any other girls have gone missing in this area. The news hasn’t mentioned anything that I’ve seen, but I wanna check for myself. Now that we know she was probably out meeting someone, we might get something the police didn’t since they didn’t know what they were looking for yet.”
Gabe started to search Ginny’s room for any signs of a good hiding place, while Gwen opened a new tab online. She started out simply, just searching for missing girls in her state. She got way too many results to ease her nerves, and she decided to narrow it down more to their general area. She searched for missing girls in their county, as well as a few in either direction, but she came up empty handed. The only thing she found was two fourteen year olds that ran away to be together, and a missing persons case from over twenty years ago, which she doubted had anything to do with Ginny’s disappearance now.
“Nothing,” Gwen said, closing the tab in disgust. Her eyes had begun to blur the words together, and she was getting a headache from struggling to read the small print on her screen.
“I might have found it,” Gabe said, holding up a small sheet of paper. “This was tucked away in the back of her Calculus book. It’s an email address, one that definitely isn’t her usual one. But there’s no password written down anywhere,” he said, flipping the scrap of paper over to look for what they both knew wasn’t there.
“Give it here,” Gwen said, taking the paper from him. She rubbed her eyes, and when she opened them, she could see a little better. She typed in the email name, and then she leaned back, thinking of any possible passwords. Even if she made a completely random email, I’ll bet she made a password that was still her. What would she have picked?
Gwen looked around the room for clues, and her eyes settled on the posters on the walls of Ginny’s room. There were a couple of different possibilities, but one of them stuck out to her more than the others. She went back to her laptop and said a quick prayer before typing in her best guess. When the account let her log in, she let out a sigh of relief. At least one thing was going right for them.
She stared at the mostly bare account, her eyes straining to read the lettering on the backlit screen. Gabe gently shooed her out of the chair so he could take her place, and she gladly relinquished it to him. Her eyes hurt and her head was swimming, even though she had the brightness set as low as it would go on her laptop. She hated reading anything, especially on a computer, because the words didn’t always make sense to her. Sometimes it was a garbled mess that she was positive couldn’t actually be real words, but a second glance later told her it was. Her mind just had trouble comprehending it sometimes.
“There’s not much here,” Gabe said, sounding more than a little disappointed. “There’s only one contact, and it’s not one I recognize. It probably belongs to whoever she met up with. I’m sure there’s plenty of deleted emails back and forth between them, but I’m not nearly skilled enough with a computer to recover them.”
“So what now? Is this a dead end?”
“Not necessarily,” Gabe said, leaning over her laptop keyboard. “I’m going to message whoever it is.”
“Gabe, no! What if we get in trouble?”
“Who cares? This might be our best chance at finding out what happened to Ginny. We might even get the name of who she was meeting.” He looked over at her. “I’m gonna do this. We have to. Now help me figure out what I should say. Keep in mind we’re not one hundred percent sure if it’s a man or a woman she met up with.”
“Just be honest. Tell whoever it is that we’re Ginny’s cousins, and that she’s missing and we’re really worried about her. If they’re an actual friend, they might not know she’s missing and we can cross one theory off our list. If they do know she’s missing and had something to do with it, they might end up giving something away, something that will help us find her.”
Gabe began typing away, and she did her best to keep up with what he was writing. When he looked back and noticed her struggling, he paused and began to read what he’d written out loud for her. Gwen gave his shoulder a quick squeeze in thanks, and listened as he read the entire message. It was good, better than anything she could have written. When Gabe was satisfied with it, he hovered over the send button, and Gwen gave him a gentle nudge. He clicked it, and they exited out of Ginny’s fake email account, wondering what was going to happen next.
“I wonder if the police have gotten into her fake email yet or not,” Gwen wondered. “I doubt the small town police in this area have the resources to hack into anything, but they might have the FBI helping them. I’m not real sure. Have you seen any FBI agents around here?”
Gabe shook his head. “We must not merit an actual response,” he said in disgust. “It doesn’t matter though. We are gonna find her, alive and unharmed. I can feel it.” He looked over at her. “Don’t give up on Ginny just yet, Gwen. She’s got lots of people out looking for her, people that care whether she comes home or not. Nobody is gonna give up on her anytime soon.”
“I know. I just have a bad feeling,” she said, glancing out the open window nearby. “I don’t like how long she’s been gone. They say the first twenty-four hours are the most important, and we’re well past that by now. If you look at statistics of kidnappings and disappearances, her chances aren’t looking so good right now,” she said quietly, her voice cracking. “I don’t know what I’d do without her, Gabe.”
He gave her hand a squeeze. “You’re gonna make yourself sick if you worry too much. Just trust that she knows how to take care of herself. She knows we’d never give up on her. She’ll hang on no matter what it takes.”
Gwen nodded. “You’re right. Worrying so much isn’t going to help anything right now. There’s still plenty of time to find her. We’re making progress, and we’ll keep looking until we find her.” She glanced out the window. Dark clouds had started to roll in, and fat rain droplets splattered the window sill. She rushed to close the window, giving the woods an anxious glance. “It’s coming down really hard,” she said as the rain worsened. It pelted the roof in a relentless torrent, quickly drenching the yard.
“Good thing I put the windows up,” Gabe muttered to himself. Gwen glanced at him, and he sighed. “I doubt the search is going to continue in this weather. I bet they’ll call it off until tomorrow morning. This sucks. I hope Ginny is someplace dry and warm and not out in this weather.” He headed for the door. “I’m gonna ask Mom if there’s any word on the search continuing or not.”
Gwen didn’t take her eyes away from the window. She looked at the woods, her spirits sinking once again. It wasn’t even dinner time yet, and the search was already probably getting called off for the day. Several hours wasted, hours that could mean the difference between finding Ginny alive and finding her body. Her hand touched the window pane, the cool and damp feeling seeping into her skin. She rested
her forehead against the window and closed her eyes, wishing more than anything that Ginny was safe and sound in her bed tonight. The two of them could stay up until dawn trading gossip and secrets just like old times.
When Gabe came back up moments later and poked his head into the room, Gwen already knew what he was going to say. When he told her the search had been halted due to the severe weather and dangerous conditions, she sighed but didn’t say anything. She had been waiting for it, really. Nothing was going right for them at the moment—she hadn’t expected even the weather to go right. It seemed like everything was against them finding Ginny. When she tore herself away from the window, Gabe was gone, and she was alone in the room.
Movement out of the corner of her eyes caught her attention, and she glanced back at the window. A small gray wolf was sitting on the front lawn, hiding just inside the tree line. It was drenched to the bone and shivering, staring at her with dark blue eyes that were so sad she felt her heart ache for the poor creature. Her fear was pushed aside for a minute, and she actually felt pity. The wolf turned away from her, limping into the trees and disappearing like a magic trick, leaving Gwen feeling conflicted.