Chapter One
The locker had been empty for two years, which at Westfield High was long enough to become a myth. Jess knew the story the way everyone knew it — Callie Morgan, junior, vanished one Tuesday in October, last seen walking toward the east parking lot with her backpack and a library book she never returned. The police found nothing. The parents moved away. The locker stayed shut, combination unknown, until the school ran out of space and the janitor cut the lock with bolt cutters on the first day of sophomore year.
The guidance counsellor had assigned it to her with the specific cheerfulness adults use when they know they are handing you something uncomfortable. "It is just a locker," Mrs. Pratt said, which was exactly what you say about things that are not just anything. Jess worked the new combination — 32, 14, 7 — and the door swung open onto a space that smelled like old paper and cherry lip balm, and she tried not to think about the girl who had stood in this exact spot and opened this exact door and then, one day, stopped.
She found the first note on a Wednesday, folded into a square the size of a postage stamp and wedged between the top vent slats. The handwriting was small and deliberate, blue ink on lined paper, and it said: *The library book is in the ceiling of the second-floor bathroom. Check before they find it.* The ink was fresh. Jess looked down the hallway in