Chapter 1: The Torn Page Run (Ella)

It was raining again.

October in Black Reef wasn’t meant to be lived through; it was meant to be endured. I pushed the last bound volume of the Black Reef Gazette to the end of the cart. The page edges had gone soft from twenty years of coastal damp; they smelled like an old basement.

The town public library sat at the end of Main Street—red brick, the neon sign out front broken for three years running, the word PUBLIC reduced to PUB. At four in the afternoon, the sky was already pressed flat as dusk. I was the last person there tonight.

What I was after was the newspapers from those weeks between July and August of 1999.

Not out of boredom. Three days ago, Megan Clauson had turned a box of hidden letters recovered from a sunken ship over to the state bureau of investigation, and the whole town had felt something pulled out from under its floorboards. On the surface the rain was still falling, the coffee was still selling, but something in the air had shifted—people had started losing sleep.

I pulled the volume marked “1999.” My fingers had just touched the spine when they stopped.

Something was wrong.

The volume had been re-bound. The original wire stitching had been replaced with new spiral coils; the spacing of the binding holes was off. I flipped page by page. July 12 was there. July 19 was there—and then it jumped straight to August 9.

Three weeks in between, gone.

Not lost. Cut clean out with a blade, the cut running along the spine, as neat as surgery. I crouched and pulled the microfilm registry from the shelf beside it, turned to the matching reel number.

The film box read “1999.07-08.” I slid it into the reader and pressed play.

The image flickered twice. What came up was not the July metro section.

It was the September obituary page.

I stared at the screen, and my back went cold by degrees. Someone had swapped the whole reel. Replaced it with the dullest weeks of the whole year—the elderly dead, church suppers, farmers’-market ads. The first three weeks after that girl disappeared, the most critical, the loudest, the most chaotic weeks in the town paper, had been lifted out of our own library, gently, by hand.

I closed the reader and listened to the rain on the tin awning outside.

Then I heard something else.

Not rain. From the back of the building, someone had given a light push to that old wooden door no one ever used.