Page 144

Faith should have called the police first. She knows that now. Instead she opened the book, because she is a librarian, and a librarian opens the book. Page 144 was marked. Not with a receipt or a bus ticket but with a flower, pressed flat and brown with age, the kind that grows wild on the embankment behind the old quarry. And tucked against the spine was a folded note, lined paper, and the handwriting on it was round and careful and unmistakably the handwriting of a sixteen-year-old, the loops on the letters too generous, the way Lena had signed her library card. The note was three sentences long. Faith read it once and put the book down and found that her hands were not entirely steady. The note was not a goodbye. The note was an instruction, and it was addressed, by name, to Faith.