I understand it now.

She had not wandered off.

She had been put somewhere out of sight, on purpose, by someone who knew how to make a child disappear from a busy room without anyone noticing, and the very smoothness of that disappearance was itself a kind of evidence of how carefully it had been arranged.

Chapter 6 — The Locked Door

By now the fear had stopped being a thread and become a rope, pulling hard.

I was moving fast through the back halls of the lodge, past the linen carts and the propped-open service doors, calling her name low so as not to alarm the guests, when I stopped.