Further from the Truth

At Whit's End, Emily Jones can hardly think about anything except the mystery hanging over her: someone deliberately trapped her and Matthew Parker in an escape room, and no one knows who or why. Whit tells her the trail has gone cold, though Detective Polehouse is still investigating. He gently points out that Matthew has been trying to reconnect with her, but Emily admits she has been avoiding him. Since Matthew said he no longer wants to solve mysteries with her, she insists she is fine on her own. When Morrie Rydell accidentally dumps her ice cream all over her, Emily heads into the kitchen to clean up at the sink.

The next morning at school, Emily opens her locker and finds it completely empty except for a mysterious note containing part of a poem. With Morrie eagerly tagging along, she traces the poem to a library book by a one-armed poet who lost his right arm, and inside the book she finds a second note with two columns of words. Reasoning that only the left column "remains," she takes the first letter of each word and unscrambles them to spell a name: Matthew. Sure enough, Matthew and his sister Olivia are absent from school, and Morrie's sister Suzu reports that no one answers the phone at the Parker house. Emily's locker mysteriously refills itself, along with another note warning her about asking the wrong people questions and urging her to "stick to where he thinks," ending with the words, "The truth will set you free."

The clue leads the three of them to the Parkers' empty, unlocked house and to Matthew's laptop, where a riddle about prime numbers guards the password. Suzu cleverly turns SIX into the Roman numeral XI, Morrie multiplies the primes in his head to get 2310, and they are in. A message on the desktop points them to the answering machine, where Eugene Meltsner has left word that something lost has been found. Eugene explains that his missing cell phone reappeared with all its photos erased, but his backup at Whit's End restores them, and one picture shows Matthew secretly handing Whit an envelope. Whit delivers the envelope to Emily: a letter from Matthew claiming his family is being held by the escape room villain and begging her to meet him at the Square One Club.

But Emily has had enough. Channeling Sherlock Holmes, she announces, "The truth is, this is all a lie, isn't it?" Matthew himself appears, congratulating her, and everyone claims they staged the mystery to get Emily and Matthew talking again. Emily is not finished. She lists the contradictions she has spotted: Eugene's story about the day he lost his phone does not match, Suzu's account of the school secretary's call makes no sense, and Whit misquoted a Bible verse, calling it James when it is really Ephesians, and leaving out the word "truth." None of it is real, she declares. It is all an Imagination Station adventure. When she calls out "End program," nothing happens, and her friends urge her to face the truth. Emily finally understands what the adventure has been pushing her toward all along. The truth is, "I do need you, Matthew." She admits he is her best friend, that solving mysteries without him is sad, and that she will miss him. The program ends.

Emily wakes standing at the kitchen sink at Whit's End. Though the adventure felt like a whole day, only about ten minutes have passed. Whit shows her the strange box in the corner that caused it all, cobbled together from his own portable Imagination Station technology, part of the equipment recently cleared out of his workroom. Whoever built it must be tech-savvy, skilled at programming, and very good at math. Emily promises to stop avoiding Matthew, then tells Whit she thinks she knows exactly who is responsible, for this and for the other strange happenings around Odyssey.

That night at the Rydell house, Suzu quietly presses Morrie with questions. Why would Whit ever program an adventure about a kidnapping? Morrie shrugs off every question, finds her missing notebook behind her desk, and admires the Japanese writing inside. When Suzu says there is something he is not telling her, Morrie only calls her suspicious and says good night, leaving the deepest mystery still unsolved.