Chapter 8: The Morning Call (Ella)

I was woken by a sound.

Not rain. Jasper’s phone was vibrating, the buzz traveling through his coat pocket against the floorboards.

He was up before me. Rangers sleep in fragments—the instant his eyes opened he was already sitting, hand already on the knife in his boot.

“Yeah.”

He listened five seconds. His face changed.

“When?”

He hung up and looked at me.

“The library.” He said. “Three this morning. Someone broke the side window.”

I sat up at once. “They—”

“They didn’t find what you were after. You took the bound volume out.” He said. “But they smashed the microfilm cabinet in the basement. The whole thing.”

I closed my eyes. I knew what that meant. It meant they weren’t just quietly swapping film anymore. They were starting to smash things, start leaving traces, start letting the whole town see—that someone was looking.

This was a warning.

“One more thing.” Jasper said. “It was Lila Bennett who called in. She was passing, saw the side window broken, called it in.”

Lila. The woman who’d brought down the previous sheriff last summer. I’d seen her a few times in town, at the café, always sitting with Cane, shoulders close. She was a few years older than me; there was a quietness in her eyes that comes only to people who’ve looked into the abyss.

“What did she say?” I asked.

“She told me to pass it on to you—” Jasper paused. “‘They’re panicking. Panicked people make mistakes.’” He stopped, then went on. “She also said, if you two really go up the mountain today, don’t go from the front. There’s a crack on the back side of the sea cave, you can loop in through the woods. After you climb out, go straight to the north parking lot of the state park—that’s the only road they won’t be watching. Cane’ll have the truck there waiting this afternoon.”

I closed my hand around the bound volume under my pillow.

“Jasper.”

“Yeah.”

“We can’t go to the sea cave today.”

He frowned. “Why?”

“Because they smashed the library. They must be guessing now—where did I take the stuff.” I stood and started putting on my coat. “They’ll check everywhere I was last. They’ll check every set of tire tracks on the mountain roads. Your ranger cabin is the most obvious secret in town.”

He stared at me.

“Then what do we do?”

“We can’t go up from the front.” I said. “Next to that tide table on my shelf, there’s also a Bluff Coast Cave Map. Seventies, USGS. I remember that sea cave—it doesn’t have just one entrance. The front mouth is below the high-tide line, but on the back there’s a crack you can loop into from the woods.”

His eyebrows went up.

“How do you know.”

“Because I’m a librarian.” I stuffed the plastic-wrapped bound volume into my pack. “I run books. Books hold all the things in this town nobody remembers.”

He looked at me a long time. Then he bent, pulled a waterproof pack out from under the bed, and started filling it: flashlight, rope, first-aid kit, two energy bars.

“Before we go.” He said. “I have to do one thing.”

“What.”

He walked to the stove, picked up the half-finished bottle of whiskey, unscrewed the cap, and poured a little onto the ash.

It wasn’t a random gesture. I watched him.

“When I was seventeen.” He said. “I didn’t dare come out and speak. Today I did.” He paused. “Tell those three who burned things—whether you’re dead or alive now—I finally spoke.”

The flame on the stove flickered.

We pushed the door open and went out. The fog hadn’t lifted.