Chapter 3: The Person on the Microfilm (Ella)

I pulled the old scissors out from behind the reference desk—the library used them to cut kraft-paper book covers—closed my hand around them, and walked to the back door.

I wrenched it open.

Rain rushed in. The alley was empty. Only a cigarette butt, still fizzling thin smoke in the puddle. I crouched to look. Marlboro, red pack. The kind sold at the town canyon gas station.

I wrapped the butt in a tissue and pocketed it. I tucked the old scissors back in my waistband—the book-cover shears, blade not long, but enough. I wasn’t police, wasn’t a detective. I just ran the shelves. But I’d been in this building four years, and I knew that every scrap of paper could eventually become evidence—if anyone was willing to look.

Back at the reader, I pulled the reel up again. If July had been swapped, then I’d look at what hadn’t been touched. After October 1999? December?

I turned to October 3.

Metro section, lower right, a small item. Headline: Local Girl Leaves Home, Police Say Portland Relative Contacted. There was a photo. The girl was maybe sixteen or seventeen, shoulder-length hair, smiling a little too tightly at the camera.

The name under the photo had been inked out.

Not printed that way back then. Covered later. The ink was fresh; you could see the shine under a magnifier. Whoever did it had been careful, blacking the whole name into a blob—but they’d missed something. In the small byline box at the lower-left of the page, two characters remained.

“Lena.”

I stared at those two words a long time.

I’d lived in this town four years. No one had ever mentioned a girl named Lena. No one in the café said “if Lena were still around.” No one sighed behind the grocery counter. She was as if she had never existed.

But she had existed. Her photo had had its name carved off the newspaper, her week’s coverage cut out of the bound volume, her microfilm swapped for obituaries.

Someone was afraid of her.

Afraid enough, twenty years on, to send a truck to park in a back alley on a rainy Tuesday night and listen for whether I’d found her.

I shut off the reader, locked the library door. The rain was heavier. I turned up my coat collar and walked home.

About two blocks in, I realized: that car that had been parked on the corner since I left the building hadn’t cut its engine.