Melisma barely slept that night.  Each time she drifted off, her eyes popped open in a jolt of panic.  Cade was gone, but where had he gone to?  He wasn’t in his room, and he hadn’t escaped anywhere else.  She pictured him all scrunched up in Elmer’s briefcase, pounding at the walls.  She tossed and kicked at her sheets until they fell off the bed in a tangled heap.  Even the fitted under-sheet wound up on the floor.

            Eventually, she passed out from exhaustion on the bare mattress.  Her dreams were a jumble of insurance agents zipping around the house with socket wrenches and blowtorches.

            Melisma wasn’t the only one who had trouble sleeping.  The next morning, Aunt Delilah bustled around the kitchen making breakfast, but her eyes were puffy, and her face seemed drained.  She glanced up anxiously as Melisma stumbled to the table.

            “Have you seen any sign of your brother?”  she asked.  Melisma shook her head.

            Aunt Delilah turned to her cutting board and resumed chopping.  “I thought maybe he’d come back in the middle of the night.  But I popped into his room this morning to check, and no luck,” she said.  “Is Cadence an early riser?”

            Melisma shook her head again.  “Mr. Elmer said he was totally lost –”

            “A total loss,’” Aunt Delilah corrected.  She placed a bowl of oatmeal on the table.  “It’s an insurance term.  Probably just technical mumbo jumbo that doesn’t mean anything.”

            Melisma frowned in irritation at her aunt’s interruption.  “I don’t think so.  I think Cade is gone.”

             “I guess maybe he is.”  Aunt Delilah’s shoulders slumped.  Her knife blade rose and fell faster on the cutting board.

            Melisma snorted.  “Maybe?  He’s gone!  I mean, what did you think was going to happen when you told that company he was defective?”

            Aunt Delilah kept chopping.  Chk-chk-chk-chk-chk.

            “How do we get him back?” Melisma demanded.

            Chk-chk-chk-chk-chk.

            Melisma poked at the oatmeal with her spoon, then shoved a glob into her mouth.  It was bland, and very chewy.  It desperately needed brown sugar.

            Delilah’s knife had fallen silent.  Her shoulders shook softly as Melisma moved past her to the cupboard.  “Your parents will never forgive me,” Aunt Delilah sniffed.

            Doria and Lyddie bounded into the kitchen, bright-eyed and messy-haired.  Nobody had told them Cade had vanished.  They shouted happily at each other all through breakfast about whether or not pufferfish had bones.  Doria claimed that the fish had an interlocking skeleton that clicked into place when they got scared.  Lyddie argued that pufferfish were really full of grape juice.

            After breakfast, Aunt Delilah piled everyone into her hatchback sedan for a road trip to the Suleiman Kruld Financial Services office building.  She said she wanted to redeem the voucher coupons Elmer had given the girls, but Melisma guessed her aunt was more focused on Cade.  Maybe, if they asked really nicely, the company would reverse whatever it was they’d done to him.

            As the family drove along the highway, Doria finally noticed that her brother was missing.  “Isn’t Cade coming?” she asked, as Lyddie poked her hard in the side.  “Ow!  Stop that!”

            “We’re meeting him there,” Aunt Delilah lied.  Melisma noticed a slight waver in her aunt’s voice, and it made her even uneasier.

            Lyddie harumphed from the back seat.  “Cade’s outside all by himself?” she exclaimed.    “Man, I wish I was fourteen!”  She kicked Doria casually in the shin.

            Doria scowled and kicked Lyddie back.  “And I wish I could trade Lyddie for a pet sea slug.”

***

Suleiman Kruld Financial Services was headquartered in Kruld Tower, a gleaming spire of chrome and glass at the north end of Kruld Plaza.  The girls almost never came this far downtown, and even Doria and Lyddie stopped thrashing each other to gawk at the architecture as they passed.

            They found underground parking and took an elevator up to the plaza.  They walked by a huge fountain, and Lyddie threw herself in before anyone could stop her.  Aunt Delilah shrieked and jumped in after her, drenching her own pants in the process.  She seized Lyddie by the armpit and yanked her out, shouting the whole time.

            Lyddie was soaked from the neck down.  She slumped her shoulders and stared at the ground with a contrite look on her face.  “Sorry Aunt ‘Lilah,” she said meekly.  “I won’t do it again.”

            As soon as Aunt Delilah turned her back, Lyddie poked Doria and whispered, “look what I got!”  She proudly extended a handful of dripping coins she’d scraped from the fountain floor.

            The lobby of Kruld Tower was massive, almost as big as the plaza they'd just walked through.  The ceilings had to be at least fifty feet high, and sunlight spilled through the glass walls and splashed across the polished lobby floor, making it feel like they were still outside.  Melisma felt a twinge of embarrassment as Lyddie tracked puddles of fountain water across the atrium.  An array of reception desks, security checkpoints and keycard turnstiles granted access to a central elevator bank that led to the rest of the building.  Even though it was Saturday, important-looking men and women in suits shuffled busily back and forth across the lobby and into the elevators.

            Aunt Delilah stepped up to a reception desk and presented the girls’ voucher packets.   “I’m here about an insurance claim,” she said.  “Your agents did something to my nephew.”

            The receptionist took one of the vouchers and circled an address on the back without looking at it.  “You’re in the wrong place,” she said.  “You need to go to our claims processing center.  That’s Annex Building F.”

            Aunt Delilah wilted a little as she gathered the vouchers back into her purse.  The address the receptionist had circled was far away, in a nondescript office park.

            Forty minutes later, they pulled up in front of a small, dumpy building in the middle of nowhere.  Aunt Delilah’s face drooped as she shepherded the girls toward the entrance.