While searching for the floating purple light, Violet speaks with Officer Ron and learns both of them live with hearing loss. Violet finds the purple light menacing two girls and chases it off, coming to recognize that the strange creature seems to be attracted to certain kinds of music.

Before she can warn the rest of the town of the danger the purple light poses, six-year-old Quentin Quinn goes missing. Violet learns that the boy had been trespassing at Question Park and petting zoo with his older brother and his friends, and may have been dared to enter the House of Dazzling Glass. But it appears Quentin never came out.

Violet rushes to the abandoned amusement park) and enters the House of Dazzling Glass, only to exit a day later, with no sense of how much time had actually passed, which leads to a terrible fight with her father.

While at work at the library, Violet learns the mayor’s deceased husband was co-owner of the park at the time of his death, and held a number of other strange investments as well. She also discovers someone named Marcy Towns disappeared inside the House of Dazzling Glass in 1998. When Violet confronts Marcy, she finds out it was only a hoax and that Marcy hid in a cave in the woods for two days in order to sell her story to the newspapers.

After several days without any clues or leads to the missing boy’s whereabouts, Chief of Police Gus Holt calls in the FBI from nearby Columbus, prompting a sense of escalating fear and imminent danger.