Long Lost, стр. 22
Rose Lane. Rose Lane. Where had she heard that name before?
On street signs on the way out of town, obviously, Fiona answered herself.
But that wasn’t it. Or it wasn’t all.
Fiona sat up straight.
There had been a Rose Lane in The Lost One.
Pearl had rushed across it with the Searcher chasing after her. And just before meeting the Searcher, she had passed an old cemetery. A cemetery on Turnpike Road.
Fiona’s heart jolted in her chest.
She yanked a notebook out of her backpack. Rapidly, she scribbled down every location she could recall from The Lost One: Rose Lane. Turnpike Road. The cemetery. The meadow. The river and the lake. Parson’s Bridge.
She stared at the list for a moment.
Then, backpack in hand, she dashed toward the circulation desk.
“Good morning,” said the man with the bow tie as Fiona barreled closer. “Can I help—”
“Do you have any old maps of Lost Lake?” Fiona blurted. “Maps that would show the town back in . . .” The Lost One mentioned cars and telephones, but it also had horse-drawn carts and girls who always wore dresses. “Maybe 1900 to 1920?”
The librarian’s face brightened. Fiona had noticed that this often happened when you asked librarians for interesting things.
“Sure,” he said. “They’d be in the reference collection, right over here.”
Fiona followed him into the long rectangular room.
“Here’s our local history section.” The man, whose name tag read MR. OWENS, pulled a wide book from the shelves. “This is one of the most complete histories of Lost Lake. It has a lot of great illustrations, maps and charts and old photos. Sound like what you need?”
“That’s perfect,” said Fiona, already pulling the book out of his hands. “Thank you!”
She plunked down at the table and cracked the book open. Near the start was a series of maps. Lost Lake and Environs, 1700. Village of Lost Lake, 1776. Lost Lake, 1850. Lost Lake, 1910.
Perfect.
Fiona craned over the open page.
Rose Lane and Lilac Lane were small gray lines at the northern end of town. Running past them was Turnpike Road, lined by the big green plot of Wayfarer’s Rest Cemetery. Fiona checked off the four items on her list, her fingers shaking with excitement. She traced Turnpike Road to the north, to another wide green space that had to be the meadow—and beside that, between a patch of woods and the river, was a narrow twisting track labeled Joyous Ridge.
Her heart thudded again.
She leaned over the book, her eyes like needles. There was the big blue body of Lost Lake, and winding upward from it was the blue line of the river. At one twist in the river was a black square labeled Lost Lake Mill Site. And not far from that square, so small that even Fiona’s sharp eyes had missed it at first glance, was a little line spanning the river. The tiny letters beside the line spelled Parson’s Bridge.
Fiona suppressed a happy squeak. She felt like an archeologist whose shovel had just scraped the wall of a buried city.
This was proof. The Lost One was set right here, in Lost Lake.
But what did that mean?
Fiona ran her fingers over the map. If the setting was real, was the rest of the book real too? Could the whole unfinished story—the story of Hazel and Pearl and the Searcher in the woods—be true?
She could think of one person who might know.
Fiona jumped up from the reference-room table.
She checked every corner of the library, peering into every room and behind every shelf, just like she had done for The Lost One itself.
But the blond boy had disappeared.
Chapter Twelve
The next morning, for the first time in days, Fiona did not wake up thinking about The Lost One.
She’d gone to bed thinking about it. Arden and her mom had come home late from Arden’s dance class, and Arden had gone upstairs immediately after dinner, and Fiona had never gotten the chance to corner her and demand answers. But now the missing book didn’t seem quite so important.
Because this was Saturday. The day of Cy’s birthday party. And she was going to spend the whole day at the science center with her friends. Fiona’s body buzzed with joy.
She leaped out of bed, grabbing her cartouche T-shirt and pulling it on over her beaming face. The whole world seemed brighter this morning. The sky was already vividly blue, and crowds of birds were having cheerful conversations in the woods outside her window.
Fiona had one leg inside her jeans and the other still tangled in her pajama pants when she noticed another sound.
Voices. Loud, familiar voices, coming from downstairs.
One voice wasn’t just loud. It was shouting.
Fiona stepped out into the hall.
“I didn’t write it on the calendar! You did!” Fiona heard Arden yell. “So I didn’t know you had put it on the wrong day!”
Her mom and dad murmured something that Fiona couldn’t catch.
“It was on the list Carolyn gave you!” Arden shouted as Fiona padded down the stairs. “I was always going to be skating on Saturday, not just on Sunday!”
“We get it, Arden,” her mom answered. “It was a mistake. There’s nothing we can do about it now.”
Fiona slunk closer. Her family was in the kitchen, gathered around the calendar taped to the refrigerator. No one seemed to notice her hovering in the kitchen doorway.
Arden’s face was warped with desperation. “Can’t you just tell the clinic that you can’t come in?”
“Arden, I have patients to see, and it’s my very first week. I can’t—”
“There’s no other way.” Fiona’s dad broke in. “I’ll cancel my meetings and take Arden instead.”
“So Mom won’t even be there?” Arden spun back toward her mom. “It’s the Longfellow Open. One of the biggest competitions of the year. And you won’t be there to see me do my new program for the very first