The little girl pressed her palm to my idling engine, felt its voice, then signed one word: HOME?
People say engines have a sound. Mine has a heartbeat. The Indian Scout I call Bluebird sat there purring in the Sunday heat, paint the color of a lake before dawn. I cut the throttle so the vibration softened, and the child—eight, maybe—kept her hand on the case, eyes half-closed like she was listening through her bones.
Her sister hovered a step behind, holding a plastic grocery bag and a library card turned soft at the edges. Twelve years old, all elbows and watchfulness, the kind of kid who scans a parking lot like it might change on her without warning.
“This is private property, honey,” I said, soft, because some signs on the chain-link fence said so, and too many things in this world already tell kids to move along.
“She can hear better when it’s running,” the older girl said. “Only with her hand. I’m June. That’s my sister, Luna.”
“Hi, June. I’m Mara.” I nodded toward the taped-up flyers on the fence where a row of houses used to be. Concrete pads like missing teeth. “You two live nearby?”
June’s mouth did a little twist that wasn’t a smile. “We used to. They said our home was being relocated.” She pointed at the flattened block. “Guess it left without us.”
Luna looked up then, a question alive in her face. She signed fast and bright. I know a handful of signs from a station class I took years ago—emergency basics. I caught HOME. PLEASE. FIND.
June translated anyway, careful and proud. “She wants to know if your motorcycle can find a house that left.”
Bluebird ticked in the heat. I’ve pulled people out of smoke that swallowed their names. I’ve watched wind roll in off the plains and known what kind of night it was going to be before the weather radar did. But the way Luna’s palm rested where the motor hummed, trusting the rhythm, knocked something loose in me.
“I can’t promise I can find a whole house,” I said. “But I can look for answers. Where’s your grown-up?”
June lifted the grocery bag. Inside was a daisy-print water bottle, a pair of socks rolled tight, a cookbook with flour on the cover. “Our Nana’s meeting people at the relocation office. We’re staying with Ms. Ortiz for now. It’s two blocks that way. We only came to see if any mail got left.”
The fence had a laminated notice with an 800 number and a slogan about new beginnings. The kind of cheerful font that tries to smile at you while you pack your life into boxes.
I pulled my phone and punched the number. Voicemail. Another number spilled me into another recording. “Due to high call volume…”
June’s fingers worried the library card. “Nana says the people at the library can find anything. But the library’s closed today. And maybe tomorrow.”
“Sometimes,” I said, “the people at the library find more than the people with clipboards.” I snapped the kill switch and swung a leg off Bluebird. “Let’s walk up there and check the posted hours anyway. If there’s a community board, we might find someone who knows someone.”
We went slow so Luna could keep a hand on my sleeve. The afternoon smelled like hot metal and fresh plywood. A section of the block was just scraped earth. The only color was a strip of wildflowers along the chain-link, stubborn little daisies making their own kind of argument.
At the library, a hand-written sign in the window apologized for “temporary reduced hours during budget review.” The door was locked. I shaded my eyes and looked in. Empty tables. One light buzzing where a corner didn’t quite give up.
June pressed her forehead to the glass. “Nana taught us to put the good stuff back where we found it. Books, tools, people. She says towns are just lost and founds that learned to be a place.”
“That sounds like Nana knows things,” I said.
“She does. She keeps everything on little cards.” June lifted the frayed library card again. “She says cards last longer than phones.”
Luna tugged my sleeve and signed a slow circle over her heart. I understood that one, too. LOVE.
My hands aren’t delicate; scars cross my knuckles like old road maps. But I’ve learned to be gentle with hot metal and bruised feelings. “Okay,” I said. “Here’s what I can do today, within the rules. I’ll leave a message with the relocation office and the town clerk—paper trail helps. We’ll ask the church on Maple about their bulletin board. And if you don’t mind, I’ll walk you back to Ms. Ortiz so she knows where you are.”
June looked disappointed, like she’d hoped for a magic key. But she nodded. “We’re not supposed to ride with people we don’t know,” she said, eyes flicking to Bluebird.
“That’s a good rule,” I said, even though a small part of me wanted to snap a second helmet strap under a small chin and let the wind do the rest. “We’ll keep to the sidewalk today.”
On the way back, June stopped at a stump where a mailbox used to be. She knelt and pried something loose from the dirt: a folded, rain-stiff piece of mail. A utility bill, months old. Our town’s logo smeared into a blue comet.
“Junk,” I started to say, but June had already flipped it over. Someone had scribbled a phone number on the blank side and a note in slanted block letters.
She smoothed the paper against her knee and read it out loud, as if making it true by speaking: “Ask Bluebird.”
My throat went dry. Bluebird isn’t painted on my tank. It’s a nickname I say under my breath when the road opens and the morning is kind. It’s what my husband used to call her when he’d hand me the keys and tell me to go clear my head, before the long quiet that followed. It is not a word strangers write on old bills and leave like breadcrumbs.
June looked up at me. “Is that… your bike?”
“How would anyone know that name?” I asked, and the wind chose that moment to stir the chain-link so the daisy heads bobbed in a dozen tiny nods.
June turned the paper so I could see the handwriting better. It wasn’t fancy. Just neat, intentional strokes. Familiar the way a tune is familiar when you can’t place the station.
“Who wrote it?” she asked.
I stared at the letters, at the number below them, at my bike waiting in the sun with its engine cooling like a heartbeat learning to slow.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think we should find out.”
Part 2 — Quiet Miles
I walked June and Luna back to Ms. Ortiz’s porch, the paper bill folded flat in my pocket like it might crack if I breathed too hard. The porch paint was new, the railing not quite dry—a smell of fresh effort in a neighborhood scraped thin. Wind chimes made out of old keys sang when we stepped up.
Ms. Ortiz answered fast, like she’d been standing just behind the door. She did a quick scan—girls first, me second, the street third—then let her shoulders drop.
“Thank you,” she said, hand still on the knob. “They told me they were going to ‘just look.’ I told them ‘just look’ turns into ‘get lost’ too easy.”
“It does,” I said. “We stuck to sidewalks. Library’s closed. We found… this.” I set the utility bill on her little table by a pot of basil. The words Ask Bluebird stared back like they’d been waiting their turn to speak.
“Bluebird?” Ms. Ortiz asked.
“My bike’s nickname,” I said. “Not on the tank. Something my husband called her.” Saying his name still felt like turning a key in a lock I wasn’t sure I wanted open. “I don’t know how this note found them.”
Ms. Ortiz’s face changed in that way people’s faces do when they turn a problem in their hands. “Ruth keeps lists,” she said. “Cards. Scraps. Receipts. If it holds ink, it holds a memory. Maybe someone gave her that number a while back.” She pushed the bill gently toward me. “If you call it, you won’t say where the girls are. Not until I know who it is.”
“Shouldn’t and won’t,” I said. “Can I have your number, so if we hit anything real we loop you and Ruth in?”
We traded numbers. We agreed on daylight and paper trails and the kind of boundaries you draw in chalk because they keep everyone honest. Then I walked home with the late sun on my back and the old feeling of smoke-season in my lungs even though there wasn’t a plume in the sky.
In my garage, Bluebird waited where I left her—front tire on a square of cardboard, kickstand scuffed from a thousand careful landings. I sat on an upside-down milk crate and dialed the number from the bill.
Two rings, then a recorded voice I knew like I knew the seam in my favorite gloves. “You’ve reached Riverton Fire Station Three. If this is an emergency, hang up and dial—” The old watch desk number. They retired it when they consolidated the stations. But then the message cut, and a real voice slid in, warm and gravelly.
“Station Three—Eddie speaking. Or… I guess just Eddie now.”
I let the laugh happen. “Still answering as if you’re on shift, huh?”
A beat. “Mara? Is that you?”
“It’s me.”
“I’ve been playing phone tree with ghosts. Folks still call the old line, and it forwards to my cell because someone forgot to untie the knot.” He cleared his throat. “What’s up?”
I told him about the empty block, about June and Luna, about Ask Bluebird written on the back of a utility bill pulled from a stump. I didn’t say where the girls were. I didn’t say much about Ruth beyond that she raised readers and made the world make sense with index cards.
“Ruth,” Eddie said slowly. “Ruth Ellison. Short hair. Laugh like a screen door. Daisy sticker on a beat-up water bottle.”
“Daisies?” I asked.
“We handed those bottles out after the spring floods. Some vendor sent the wrong pattern. All daisies. Ruth told me they were her favorite because they live where they aren’t supposed to.” Paper shuffled near his phone. “I wrote ‘Ask Bluebird’ for her years back. We were putting a list together for folks who fall through cracks. You had that little blue bike and that big habit of finding things: spare parts, lost dogs, a guy’s dad at the bus station. ‘Ask Bluebird’ seemed quicker than your full name.”
Something in me eased while another part tightened. “That explains the words. Not how the note showed up this week.”
“Ruth keeps things,” he said. “She probably slid that bill into a cookbook or a Bible and then… well. Relocation turns drawers into wind.”
“Do you have any record of where she went after the flood?” I asked. “Anything besides ‘relocated’ and a smiling font.”
He breathed out through his nose, and I could see him, the way he leans back in a chair that will complain. “I’ve got paper logs. Don’t laugh. They make me keep them. I’m at home, but I can meet you at the old house—we keep the cabinets there because no one wanted to haul them. Fifteen minutes?”
“Ten,” I said, already zipping my jacket.
The road to Station Three is a spine of asphalt that knows my weight. Bluebird’s engine settled into that low hum that lands somewhere between heartbeat and hymn. The wind pulled at my sleeves. The bright on the horizon was the kind that makes you think you could ride straight into a better day if you just picked the right gear.
Eddie was waiting by the side entrance, a ring of keys like a chorus at his belt. We went in through a door that used to stick in August and rattled in January. The watch desk was someone else’s storage now: boxes labeled with numbers and the kind of shorthand that meant everything to the hand that wrote it.
He went to a drawer, pulled a log book I recognized—the green cover soft from years of palms. He flipped with that speed you earn from knowing where you’ve been.
“Here,” he said. “Relief distribution—Miller Rec Center. Ruth signed in as ‘Ruth E.’ Two grandkids. One note: hearing accommodation requested.” He looked up. “That one of the girls uses touch to listen?”
“Luna,” I said. “She puts her palm on my engine and calls it a voice.” I didn’t realize I’d said my engine like a promise until Eddie smiled a little.
“She’s got good taste. Okay—Ruth E. picked up supplies twice. Then a month later…” He traced a line down the page. “A case worker moved seniors to temporary stays near the clinic. Names redacted. Of course.” He shut the book with a gentle slap. “We can try Miller. The rec center folks kept better on-the-fly notes than the county.”
We rode separately—him in an old pickup, me on Bluebird so I could feel each mile, take the measure of the town with my chest. Quiet miles, my husband used to call them, the ones where the road doesn’t need you to talk back.
Miller Rec Center looked like a gym between lives. The sign for a summer camp still hung crooked, even though summer had moved on. Inside, the air had a hollow smell—cleaner on concrete. Tape squares on the floor marked where tables once stood. A bulletin board near the door still had pushpins but no flyers, as if news itself had been taken down and boxed.
We found the old front desk. A teenager with a volunteer lanyard had left a doodle of a rocket ship on a blotter. Behind the counter, in a milk crate, were three clipboards. Eddie set them out. Names, check marks, handwritings of every kind, ink that bled when rain got in.
“There.” He tapped a line in pencil so faint we had to tilt it to see. “Ruth E. It says ‘Ruthie.’” He squinted. “Someone tried to make the e into a y later.”
I thought of all the ways a name can get lost: accents, hurry, a clerk on hour ten of a twelve-hour day. I thought of how you anchor people to a place by saying them right.
In the lost-and-found bin nearby, under three single gloves and a stack of outdated swim schedules, was a water bottle. White, chipped. Daisies marching around it in two rows. I held it up, and Eddie gave a small grunt that meant there you go.
“Can I leave a note?” I asked.
“Leave two,” he said. “One on the board, one in my truck for the next person who asks me about daisies.”
I printed careful block letters, the way Ruth would. If you’re Ruth E. or know her, the library is looking for you. Ask for the volunteer with the blue motorcycle. We’re with family. I added the library’s number first, then the town clerk’s, then—after a full breath—my own.
Back outside, Eddie leaned on his truck bed and looked at the sky like it could give us a name. “You still carry that postcard from the coast?” he asked.
I patted my jacket pocket. “Every mile.” It was from a trip years ago—a picture of a lighthouse my husband said looked like a rolled-up sleeve. On the back, he’d written: Quiet miles count too.
“You know,” Eddie said, “the thing about ‘Ask Bluebird’ is it never meant ‘Ask a motorcycle.’ It meant, ‘Ask a person who doesn’t quit just because the office is closed.’”
I tucked the daisy bottle under my arm and nodded. “I’m not quitting.”
On the ride home, I used the long way, the two-lane that curves by the feed store and the shuttered drive-in. I thought about Ruth writing on cards by lamplight, about June pressing that soft-edged library card to the glass, about Luna’s small palm learning the language of vibration. I thought about how towns are a braid: school, clinic, library, pantry—pull one strand too hard and everything loosens.
My phone buzzed in my pocket while I waited at a light. I don’t look down when I ride. I pulled over near a stand of mailboxes and took off my glove.
Unknown number. A text.
Don’t keep looking. They already left town.
A second text blinked in before I could respond.
Let it go, Bluebird.
Part 3 — Daisy Stickers
The texts sat there like pebbles in my boot: Don’t keep looking. They already left town. Let it go, Bluebird. I showed Eddie in the Miller Rec parking lot, screen tilted out of habit.
“New number?” he asked.
“Brand-new. No name, no history.”
“Could be somebody at the relocation office worried about privacy,” he said. “Could be somebody who just likes telling other people what to do.”
“Either way,” I said, slipping the phone back into my jacket, “I’m not posting the girls’ names or faces. And I’m not quitting.”
When I pulled into my driveway, the last of the sun laid a long copper line across the floor of my garage. In the corner, under a tarp, sat a boxy old sidecar my husband used to bolt on for winter grocery runs and hardware store trips. He called it the “breadbox.” I dragged it into the light. The paint had dulled into the color of a lake on a cloudy day. The tire sighed when I pushed on it, but the frame was solid. When I set my hand on the rim, it did that thing old metal does when it remembers you—gave a little, then held.
I texted Ms. Ortiz: Thinking pop-up book drive at the church lot. No kid photos. No addresses. Focus: books + community. Okay to bring June and Luna if we keep it close and safe?
Her reply came fast: Okay. I’ll bring folding tables. I can ask Father Miguel about the lot.
And then, a minute later: Thank you for keeping them off the internet. Ruth would say: ink lasts longer than pixels.
Eddie rolled up as the streetlights flickered on, tossed me a set of orange safety cones and a milk crate of bungee cords. “Figured you might need these,” he said. “Also, a proper tire for that thing. You planning to haul books with a breadbox?”
“Quiet miles,” I said. “Quiet pages.” I wiped my hands on a shop rag and looked at the girls’ library card in my pocket, softened by years of checkouts. “If the library’s closed, we can be open.”
We worked until the moths came, and then a little after. The sidecar bolted to Bluebird’s frame with that clean yes of parts that were made to fit. I lined the interior with a moving blanket and cut down a couple old apple crates to make dividers. Eddie stuck reflective tape along the rim. “If you’re gonna be a bookmobile,” he said, “you might as well be seen.”
By morning, the church lot bloomed with card tables, camp chairs, a cooler full of ice water, and exactly eleven boxes of donated paperbacks. Ms. Ortiz put up a cardboard sign in tidy marker: QUIET MILES—TAKE ONE, LEAVE ONE. She underlined take twice. “It gives people permission,” she said. Father Miguel brought out a stack of hymnals nobody uses anymore and said, “A book is a book.”
June settled on a milk crate with a box of pencils, making little cards with titles and notes like “best read under a tree” and “gentle dog but sad at the end.” Luna set her palm on Bluebird’s case with my permission, the engine idling low in neutral—wheel chocked, cones set, distance kept. The vibration seemed to thread her to the morning. Her shoulders dropped; she smiled with the kind of smile you tuck away for later.
I took a picture of the breadbox full of paperbacks—no people, no names—and posted it with a caption: Library closed today, so we opened this one. If you’re missing someone after the relocation, leave a card—names, landmarks, safe clues only. If you’re worried about privacy, use the town clerk’s number. Quiet miles, quiet pages. I added a photo of the daisies along the chain-link, bright and stubborn. I didn’t tag a location.
Within an hour, the comments rolled in: church ladies who kept entire shelves of cookbooks in their garages, a high school kid who offered to bring comic books, a grandmother who swore she had three copies of the same mystery and had been waiting for a sign to give them a better life. A veteran wrote, “Sidecars save the day again,” and somebody else replied with a picture of his granddad’s rig from 1952.
Then the first direct message: I’m a nurse. Not giving my name here, but our clinic did a pop-up at North Spur when the flood hit. We gave out a lot of those daisy bottles. Two days ago, a woman with short gray hair and a daisy sticker on her cane asked if anyone knew ‘the woman with the blue motorcycle that sings.’ A second message followed with a photo of the waiting room: brown vinyl chairs, a hospital poster about handwashing, and, on the side table, a white bottle with two rows of daisies. No faces. Time-stamped. The name North Spur Community Annex blurred into the corner of a bulletin board.
I called Eddie on speaker. “You seeing this?”
“I am now,” he said after I forwarded the photo. “North Spur’s a temporary annex next to the old feed store. They took overflow when the main clinic filled. If she was there two days ago, she might still be nearby. But listen, Mara—be careful about posting. Clinics are prickly about photos, even if they’re empty rooms.”
“I won’t post it,” I said. “But it’s a lead.”
At the card table, June hovered her pencil over an index card. “Do I write Nana’s full name?”
“Initials,” I said. “And a note only she would recognize. But nothing that gives away where you are, okay?”
She nodded, wrote: R.E. — Remember the daisy seed packet under the sugar canister? She looked up. “She keeps emergency money in there,” she whispered, embarrassed by the smallness of it.
“That’s exactly the right kind of clue,” I said. “Personal, not revealing.”
By noon, the breadbox had emptied and filled again twice. A retired teacher in a sunhat cried quietly at the sight of kids carrying chapter books under their arms like kittens. A man with a hardware apron brought over a stack of screwdrivers for “assembling shelves that don’t want to be shelves.” Father Miguel found a roll of butcher paper and set up a place for people to draw their old blocks—where the oak tree was, where the bus stop used to be, where a stray cat had kittens behind the laundromat in 2015.
And then the comments took a turn. New accounts with no profile pictures began posting the same thing under my bookmobile photo, word for word: Wrong address. They moved east. Another one: Not there. Try the Ridgeview lot. The phrasing was so identical it rang like a chorus line that hadn’t learned free harmony yet. One even used the exact wording from my text: Let it go, Bluebird.
I didn’t say anything to the girls. I flagged a few comments, tightened my post settings, and pinned a note: We won’t move this book swap, and we won’t share private info. If you have verified leads for seniors separated from their families, call the town clerk or the clinic. Be kind, or be quiet.
Ms. Ortiz slid a bottle of water into my hand. “You saw it too, huh?”
“Bots or bored people,” I said. “Either way, noise.”
“We make more signal,” she said, patting the breadbox. “Books are loud in the right hands.”
By late afternoon, the heat broke a little, and a breeze wandered in from the river. Luna dozed on a blanket in the shade, her fingers splayed like a fan. June sat cross-legged, sorting a pile of worn-out cards into “keep” and “rewrite.” Eddie showed up with a spool of twine and flagged the perimeter like a pro, then taught a ten-year-old how to tie the kind of knot that holds a tent in a storm.
My phone buzzed again. The nurse: I can’t say more publicly, but your person—Ruth?—asked our front desk if anyone knew a ‘Mara with the blue bike.’ She used the word ‘Bluebird.’ I didn’t correct her. She left a card. I can’t share it without permission. But I can tell you that our shuttle to the senior suites stops at the annex at 5 p.m. most days.
Another buzz, almost on top of it. Unknown number: Wrong address.
Then, before I could respond, a third: Seriously. They left town.
I felt the now-familiar prickle run up my shoulders—the firefighter’s barometer that registers weather other people call hunch. I looked across the lot. A sedan idled by the curb with the windows up, driver a silhouette. Maybe a volunteer on break. Maybe somebody’s uncle. Maybe just my nerves stacking shadows on top of heat.
“Everything okay?” Eddie asked.
“Yeah,” I said. Then, more honest: “Mostly.”
He lifted his chin toward the breadbox. “You want me to take a turn on Bluebird while you make some calls?”
“Would you?” I asked. “Just idle, let Luna nap. Keep it safe.”
“Born to babysit combustion,” he said, and slid onto the saddle like he’d been carved for it.
I stepped behind the church, where the dumpsters smell like last Sunday’s potluck and this morning’s coffee grounds. I called the annex. A human answered. I asked for the front desk, then asked if a woman named Ruth had left any message for a Mara, and the answer was the kind people give when they want to help but don’t own the rules. “I can’t confirm names,” she said, “but I can say that if someone left a card for someone with a blue motorcycle nickname, it’s in a folder labeled for pickup. We close at six.”
I thanked her twice for the shape of her sentence.
Back at the tables, June looked up, reading my face the way kids do when they’ve had to get good at it. “Do we have clue?”
“We have a time and a place,” I said. “We’re going to the annex. But we’ll go right, not fast. We check in at the front desk, we sign the book, we mind our manners.”
“Like the library,” she said.
“Exactly.”
I sent Ms. Ortiz the plan, and she nodded, already folding tables with the speed of someone who’s broken down more church events than she can count. Eddie coasted Bluebird back and killed the engine, then checked the sidecar strap with a tug only other mechanics can read. “You want company?”
“Meet us there,” I said. “If this is nothing, you can take me out for a slice at Sal’s so it’s at least something.”
“Deal.”
We were halfway to the curb when my phone vibrated again. Another DM, not the nurse this time—someone whose profile picture was a sunhat and a porch. Saw your post. I work at North Spur. The woman with the daisy bottle? She’s been asking for ‘Bluebird’ all day. Shuttle leaves at 5. If you want that card, you’ve got forty minutes.
Then, buried under it, the unknown number again, same text as before, like static that didn’t know it was static: Wrong address.
I looked at June, at the sidecar full of books, at Luna waking up and rubbing her palm like it could still hold the morning’s hum.
“Forty minutes,” I said. “Let’s go see if the annex kept a card with our name on it.”
The sedan by the curb eased away, slow and unbothered, like it had only ever been a car.
Part 4 — Paper Towns
We didn’t race to the annex. Ms. Ortiz took the girls in her Corolla with a grocery bag of paperbacks in the back seat; Eddie followed in his truck; I rode point on Bluebird because it’s the one thing I do better when my mind is busy—count miles by feel instead of worry by inches.
North Spur Community Annex sat in a low brick building glued to what used to be a feed store. The old mural—corn stalks and a cow—peeked out from behind a banner about community health. The waiting room smelled like lemon cleaner and bandages. A fan clicked the way fans click when they’ve already done their best for the day.
We signed the book: time, last initials, reason—pickup. The receptionist read the chalkboard rules to us because that’s what you do when the world is a little tilted; you steady it with the read-back of polite sentences. “We close at six. No photography. Masks if you have a cough. If you need transportation, the shuttle runs on the hour until five.” She looked at the clock. Five-oh-five.
“I’m just here for a message,” I said. “Someone said there might be a card. Blue motorcycle nickname.”
Her eyes softened like a door on the right hinges. “We don’t give out names,” she said, and reached under the counter for a worn manila folder labeled PICKUPS—NOT SECURE. The not secure was underlined three times. She flipped through notes—pizza coupons, a business card for a repairman, a napkin with a doodle of a bird, two folded receipts—then pulled an index card with careful block letters on the front and a line of daisies drawn across the bottom like a fence.
For Bluebird—if books can move, so can a house. Ask at the library board for the hours that aren’t there. Pencil tells the truth. —R.E.
June’s hand closed on my sleeve. “That’s Nana’s way. She says pencils are braver than pens.”
I turned the card over. On the back, in smaller writing: If you’re not Nana: please get this to Bluebird. If you are Bluebird: we’re okay. The bus lady knows me as ‘Ruthie.’ A little daisy ring was drawn next to the name.
The receptionist watched my face like it might tell her what policy couldn’t. “The bus stopped at five,” she said. “Sometimes it runs a few minutes late, but I think you just missed it.”
“We’ll catch it somewhere it stops next,” I said. “Do you know if the senior suites are full?”
“Pretty full,” she nodded. “Some folks are in temporary rooms behind the old Ridgeview building. They call it ‘east’ even though it’s practically north. Don’t ask me why.”
Paper towns, I thought—the map that argues with the ground until somebody just changes the word and hopes people follow.
Outside, Eddie shaded his eyes to read the index card, then grunted in approval. “Library board,” he said. “Harlan keeps the back keys.”
“Mr. Harlan?” June piped up. “The man who stamps the summer reading cards crooked on purpose so you know it’s yours?”
“That’s the one,” I said. “Retired two years ago. Still treats the place like his living room. He’ll be there at five-thirty to check the book drop.”
We made the six minutes to the library in four and walked around back where the book return gaped like an old mailbox that missed its letters. Harlan was already there, a flat cap pulled down low, cardigan even in late heat, a cart with three wobbly wheels waiting to be filled.
He saw June and smiled like the sun making a late decision to stay. “Well, well,” he said. “If it isn’t my reading card conspirator. And Ms. Quinn with the blue motorcycle that purrs.”
“You always did hear better than most,” I said.
“I always did leave the windows open,” he said back, and unlocked the side door. “You’ve got five minutes. And if anyone asks, we were rescuing a book from the vent.”
Inside was half-dark in that way empty buildings are, a kind of hush that makes your bones remember to whisper. Dust motes did their dance in the line of a single light that hadn’t figured out it had been told to rest. The bulletin board by the entrance still held the TEMPORARY HOURS sign we’d read earlier through the glass.
“Ruth says to ask for hours that aren’t there,” I said.
Harlan leaned close, squinting. “Someone took down the pencil.” He tapped the corner where the paper curled. “There’s always pencil.”
We peeled the tape back like we were unwrapping something fragile. Under the printed hours, faint as a road at dusk, was a set of numbers written in carpenter’s pencil: ZIP 48652 → 46852, a tiny arrow pointing from the 9 to the 6, then a scratched Ridgeview E with a question mark and a hand-drawn compass where east pointed where north should be.
June breathed out, all at once. “That’s why our mail came back. If you switch those two, it goes to the wrong sorting bin.”
“Paper towns,” I murmured. “Maps that say a road exists when it doesn’t, so you know if someone copied your work. Towns change the other way around—they move things and call it the same.”
Harlan pushed his glasses up and looked pleased with the detective work. “There’s more.” He lifted the corner again and a second paper came free—a yellowed rectangle that didn’t match the bright white of the hours. An old flyer for a summer reading kickoff, edges soft. Someone had penciled along the top: If separated: Miller Rec Center; if no, Annex; if no, ask Bluebird. Teach L: thrum-thrum rhyme. Keep seed packet in sugar. Next to thrum-thrum, someone had drawn a tiny schematic of a motorcycle crank, as if the heart of it could be spelled out in graphite.
June pressed her fingertips to the note. “Nana,” she whispered, like a word you set down lightly so it won’t break.
I folded the papers back the way we found them because you don’t peel signs off walls in a world that needs every reminder of itself it can get.
Harlan nodded toward the stacks. “There’s a box,” he said. “Back room, bottom shelf where the encyclopedias used to give kids backaches. Old catalog cards. I don’t know why I never threw them out. I think someone asked me not to.”
We went single file to the back. He flipped on one overhead light. The box was shoe-sized, taped once, then again with a different tape decades later. The top flap had a flower sticker, aged to the color of tea. Inside: a hundred index cards. Titles in fountain pen, authors in pencil, notes in multiple hands. Between DAISIES—A FIELD GUIDE and SMALL ENGINES FOR BEGINNERS was a card that didn’t belong to any book: ELLISON, RUTH. Under her name, a list that wasn’t about call numbers at all.
— Two girls: J. reads like running; L. reads by rhythm
— Ask Q—blue bike—if stuck
— Don’t let the map say who we are
— If you can’t find me, I’m at the place that used to be a store but is now a clinic but still smells like hay when it rains
— If you see the daisy ring, it’s me
Luna stood on her toes to see, her hand finding Bluebird’s key in my pocket and resting there. She signed something to June, slow, careful.
“She says the rhyme Nana made for her goes like this: thrum-thrum, page-turn; thrum-thrum, we learn; thrum-thrum, we’re heard.” June did the signs along with the words, fingers like little wings.
“I can hear it,” I said, and I could—the rhythm of an engine timed to the patience of a page.
Back by the front desk, Harlan wrote down the corrected ZIP and Ridgeview E on a scrap for me. “If anyone asks, I did nothing but receive a book through the vent,” he said, and touched his cap like the gentlemen in the movies he loved when the tickets cost a nickel.
Outside, the air shifted. The first roll of thunder was far enough away that you felt it in your teeth more than your ears. Eddie tipped his face to the southwest. “Storm line forming,” he said. “If they close the north road for high water like they did last time, Ridgeview East’ll be a detour and a half.”
My phone buzzed. Unknown number again. For a minute I almost didn’t look. Then I did, because I always do, because there’s a part of me that can’t leave a bell unanswered.
It was a photo, low-res, like it had been sent through three different phones before it found mine. A hand, older, veins like blue pencil lines under thin skin, wearing a ring shaped like a daisy—five petals, a tiny center the size of a lentil. The hand held a paper cup with a stamped logo: RIDGEVIEW and a smudge that could be E or 3, the ink blurred. In the corner of the frame, a wall clock showed 5:28. On the wall behind, a corkboard with a transportation schedule; the only numbers I could read were :00 and :30. Under the photo, three words: Don’t be late.
I zoomed in, fruitless because there was no more detail to be found. The ring wasn’t fancy. It looked like the kind of thing you buy from a local craft table because it feels like a promise that flowers can be made of soft metal and still look alive.
“Is it her?” June asked, too tuned to me now to pretend she hadn’t seen my face change.
“I think it’s her hand,” I said. “I think someone wanted us to know she’s at Ridgeview East and the shuttle runs on the hour and the half.”
“Or someone wanted to send us in circles,” Eddie said, not to rattle me, just because you say the other possibility out loud so it can’t trip you in the dark.
The sky did that thing late skies do in summer—went green at the edges like a bruise thinking about tomorrow. My phone buzzed again. A county alert: WEATHER ADVISORY—STORM LINE APPROACHING. LOW-WATER CROSSINGS COULD CLOSE WITHIN 24 HOURS. Below it, another line: TRANSPORT SCHEDULES MAY CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE.
“You still up for this?” I asked Ms. Ortiz.
She locked her car and looked at the girls and then at the daisy sticker on the water bottle we’d found at Miller Rec. “I don’t do everything,” she said. “But I do this.”
We made a plan—paper, not breath: Eddie would take the truck down Riverway in case the low bridge went early. Ms. Ortiz and the girls would follow the main road with the good shoulders. I’d go ahead on Bluebird to check for closures and text only locations, not names, not faces.
June slipped the index card back into the manila folder, then paused and turned it over again. Her finger traced the penciled line that turned a 9 into a 6 like a correction that makes a sentence possible. “Nana says pencils are brave because they believe in second chances,” she said.
“They also erase clean,” I answered. “Which is another way of saying they keep you honest.”
We mounted up—doors shutting, helmets buckled, a litany of ordinary clicks. I thumbed Bluebird’s starter and the engine answered with that steady, chest-deep hum. Luna pressed her hand to the case for a heartbeat, then signed ready.
I was about to pull out when the unknown number buzzed one more time. No words this round—just a map image with a dropped pin and the words RIDGEVIEW EAST—REAR ENTRANCE cut off on the right. The street name looked like Mile or Miller; the last digits were …57.
Eddie leaned from his window. “Well?”
I held up my phone so he could see the grainy pin. “Rear entrance,” I said. “Looks like a service road. Something fifty-seven.”
He whistled, soft. “Mile 457. That’s the old mile marker on the access road. If the front lot is full, they stage buses back there.”
The wind came up hard enough to pull at my sleeves. The first small drops hit my visor and flattened there like dots on a map that hadn’t decided yet if they were going to be a line.
“Let’s go,” I said, and rolled the throttle open just enough to feel Bluebird’s yes.
We reached the main road as the shuttle from the annex, late by ten minutes, turned in the opposite direction. Its windows were tinted. Its destination placard read RIDGEVIEW EAST. Another bus idled farther down, facing back toward town, its placard flipped to OUT OF SERVICE.
Two buses. Two directions. A rear entrance nobody marks, a storm line drawing itself across the sky.
June leaned forward from the back seat of Ms. Ortiz’s car and raised the index card like it was a tiny flag.
“Which one?” Eddie called over the low thunder.
I looked at the photo again—the clock at 5:28, the :00 and :30 on the board, the ring that looked like a flower still trying to be a flower.
“We take the road that isn’t on the brochure,” I said. “We take the one that believes in pencil.”
And then my phone buzzed again, a third photo from the unknown number: the same hand with the daisy ring, resting on a metal rail stamped with a number I could finally read clean: 457.
