Chapter 4

For the next two days, Rowan went through the box from top to bottom.

She was an organized person. Eleven years in an evidence records room had taught her how to find the thread that tied everything together, even when it looked like nothing was connected. She numbered every sheet music book, recorded the page numbers, noted every pencil mark, and sorted them into piles—etudes, hymnals, choral scores, hand-copied manuscripts. Each pile felt like a room she'd arranged herself, waiting for someone to open the door.

Toward evening, Toby pushed through the shop door, his backpack strap slipping off one elbow.

Toby Reyes was seventeen. He'd worked part-time at the shop for two years. He was thin, with round wire glasses, and he wasn't exactly passionate about old books—but he had a kind of obsessive talent for digging up small stories online and turning them into eight different versions. He saw the sheet music spread across the table and raised an eyebrow. "Mr. Hale's?"

"Donation," Rowan said. "Toby, I need you to look something up."

"Like what?"

Rowan slid the newspaper clipping across the table. "This girl. Sarah West. 2003, state conservatory scholarship. Find out what happened to her."

Toby pulled out his phone and started scrolling. "You're the one who's always saying don't believe everything online—" He stopped mid-sentence, pushed his glasses up, and frowned. "Okay. Sarah West. She never went to the conservatory. Scholarship fell through, somehow. She left Hollow Creek the next year, and then…" He scrolled, his voice dropping. "She died. Portland, 2013. Cause was… overdose. Officially."

Rowan's pen paused over the notebook.

Overdose.

Mr. Hale had died of an overdose. The girl who never made it to music school had died of an overdose. Twenty years between them, but it felt like the same hand had connected them. She thought of the line at the funeral—one apology I never said. Maybe that apology hadn't been for anyone in town. Maybe it had been for a girl who'd been gone for years.

"Rowan?" Toby looked up. "Is something wrong?"

"I don't know yet," she said. "Can you look up one more thing? In 2003, the Hollow Creek Community Music Fund—where did that money end up?"

Toby's fingers flew across the screen. After a moment, he frowned. "Not a lot of public records. There's a small-town article saying the scholarship was postponed for reasons undisclosed, and then it looks like it was canceled. No reason given."

"Postponed," Rowan repeated, her eyes going back to the invoice on the table.

Postponed. What a clean, decent way to say it. Like a door closed temporarily—and then, one day, you notice it's been locked all along, and nobody ever asked again. She'd seen that phrasing before, in the records room, in case after case that went nowhere. The truth wasn't hidden in what happened. It was hidden in what happened and nobody ever asked about it again.

"Toby," she said, "can you find out who handled the money?"

Toby thought about it. "No name in the article. But I can try the state's public records database for the scholarship filing. It might take a while."

"Take your time," Rowan said. "Tell me when you find something."

After Toby left, Rowan didn't go back to cataloging right away.

She leaned against the bookshelf, looking at the sheet music spread across the table, and thought about her years in the city records room. Back then, she'd dealt not with living people but with evidence bags, one after another—an old jacket, a letter, a water-damaged photograph. Her job had been to make the things that couldn't speak speak for the people who owned them.

She'd learned that the "cleanest" cases never held up under close inspection. Because real people didn't leave clean traces. A panicked person pressed the phone button one extra time. A liar let a thread show in the details. She'd developed that instinct in the records room—and because of it, she'd seen things she wasn't supposed to see. She'd also lost her marriage to it.

After the divorce, she hadn't wanted to look at another evidence bag. She'd moved back to Hollow Creek, bought the old bookshop, and told herself the rest of her life would be about books and tea and a cat.

But now, looking at this box of old sheet music—the invoice, the clipping, the blue notebook—she realized she was standing back in that records room. Only this time, the evidence bags were sheet music, and the person who couldn't speak was an old man she'd respected, who was now gone.

Some skills, when you set them down, don't actually leave you.

She walked to the back of the shelf and pulled out the dark blue hand-copied manuscript—the most unassuming book in the box, no title, which she'd assumed was just old vocal exercise notes. She opened the first page.

On the staff paper was a piece she'd never heard. The melody was copied in neat pencil, as if whoever had written it had taken great care. At the top, in fainter ink, was a line:

For Sarah, vocal practice. G.H.

G.H. Gilbert Hale.

Rowan's fingers traced the words. She turned the page, then the next. The manuscript was forty-some pages long, each page a different voice part of the same piece, pencil-dated from the summer of 2002 to the spring of 2003.

The last page had only one line, like a note to someone:

Five thousand dollars. It wasn't your fault. It was mine.

Rowan froze. She held the manuscript and stared at that line for so long that Mabel jumped down from the windowsill and circled her ankles, so long that the streetlights outside came on one by one.

She thought of Sarah's shy smile in the newspaper photo. She thought of the funeral line about the apology never said. She thought of the wobbly P circled in pencil on the invoice.

Why would a music teacher, a man beloved by the whole town, write it wasn't your fault, it was mine in a vocal exercise book he'd made for a student?

Was he making amends for something? Or had he been part of it?

Toby came back and saw the line. He was quiet for a moment, then said softly, "Rowan… did Mr. Hale write that?"

Rowan didn't answer. She looked at the line for a long time, then closed the manuscript. "Toby, tomorrow go to the town library. Look up the 2003 newspapers—everything you can find. Especially… about that scholarship."

"Sure," he said. Then he hesitated. "But Rowan—the sheriff said it was an accident, right?"

"Yeah," she said quietly. "An accident."

She closed the manuscript. The line on the cover—For Sarah—sat like a small, slow flame in her chest.

A respectable old man who'd taught music for thirty years had handed a box of old sheet music to a woman who ran a bookshop. Inside the box: money that had disappeared twenty years ago. A girl who never made it to conservatory. A line that said it wasn't your fault, it was mine.

Rowan laid the manuscript and the newspaper clipping side by side, then looked out the window. Across the street, a light was on—the coffee shop owner was closing up. Further off, the church steeple blurred into the dark. Hollow Creek nights were always this quiet. Quiet enough to almost believe that old things would just fall like autumn leaves into the dirt and never be mentioned again.

But she knew better.

Some old things weren't gone. They were just carefully covered up, under a clean surface. As long as nobody lifted them, they'd stay there. Waiting.

The autumn night was deep. Rowan turned off the lamp and sat holding the blue manuscript for a while. The voice in her head was clearer than the dark.

Mr. Hale's death wasn't going to be that easy to explain away.