Chapter 3 - What Waited Behind the Office Door
The police were on their way.
I knew better than to pretend I could handle a missing eight-year-old alone.
But I also knew my house better than anyone they were about to send.
And the interior door Celeste had glanced at was part of that house.
It did not lead to another formal room.
It opened into an old service vestibule between the study and a narrow corridor running toward the side driveway. My grandfather had used it when books and cases were delivered without dragging carts through the main foyer.
We rarely used it anymore.
When I pushed the door open, the smell hit me first.
Cardboard.
Packing paper.
Furniture wax.
Then I saw the floor.
Two straight sets of rubber wheel marks ran across the marble dust—exactly the width of a delivery dolly.
They came from the study.
They ended at the side exit.
Hadley remained safely behind me with the house manager.
Blaine watched from across the study.
I crouched near the vestibule wall.
A strip of blue packing tape had been crushed near the baseboard.
Printed repeatedly along it was a small white bird.
A heron.
My eyes moved immediately back toward Hadley’s drawing.
Blue bird.
For a second I thought Mike had drawn the tape itself.
Then I recognized the logo.
Blue Heron Bindery.
A specialty restoration shop in Connecticut.
I had used them years earlier when several books in my wife’s collection needed archival repair.
Why would fresh Blue Heron packing material be inside my service vestibule?
Then I saw the backpack.
Small.
Navy blue.
One reflective stripe on the front.
Mike’s.
It had been shoved behind a narrow bench.
I picked it up.
Inside were two pencils, a half-finished granola bar, his math notebook, and the brass bookmark I had given him on his seventh birthday.
No jacket.
No phone.
No overnight clothes.
Nothing suggesting he had gone anywhere willingly.
I turned toward Blaine.
“You told Hadley he left?”
Blaine’s jaw tightened.
“I didn’t tell her anything.”
“Then Celeste did.”
He looked away.
That was answer enough.
I carried the backpack back into the study and placed it beside the shredded drawing.
Then I noticed something else.
One of the books that had fallen when Blaine crashed into the shelf was lying open on the marble.
At first glance, it looked familiar.
Too familiar.
I picked it up.
Moon Over Briar Hill.
My wife’s first edition had cream deckled pages and a tiny printer’s error on page nineteen—a reversed quotation mark we used to joke about.
I flipped to page nineteen.
Perfect punctuation.
Perfect paper.
Perfect binding.
Too perfect.
I felt the blood drain from my face.
This wasn’t my book.
It was a reproduction.
And suddenly the shipping tape, the dolly marks, the missing child, and Hadley’s strange shelf-game drawing began moving toward the same answer.
Someone had been taking books out of my study.
May you like
And Mike had noticed.
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