Page 123 of Buried Too Deep

He hoped the library would have the answers he sought.

Ironic, him going to another library. At least this time he’d had the presence of mind to disguise his face.

He didn’t want to have to kill another librarian.

That would suck.

He walked into the library and approached the librarian’s desk with what he hoped was a shy smile.

“Excuse me, ma’am.” He laid his drawl on thick. “I’m doing some research into my family tree. My granddad went to school around here and I was hoping you had some old yearbooks I could look through.”

The woman smiled up at him. She had a pretty smile. If Sage had met her at a club, he’d have taken her back to his hotel in a heartbeat.

“We have some,” she said. “What years were you looking at?”

This might work or it might not. He hoped that the library kept all the yearbooks in the same place, including the more recent ones.

“I’m not entirely certain. He died recently and we found conflicting information on his age. Home birth, y’know. Paperwork got messed up by the country doctor.”

She rose and began walking toward one of the stacks. “I hear that sometimes. Let me show you where we keep them.” She looked over her shoulder. “You can’t check them out. They have to stay here in the library.”

“I won’t ask, ma’am. I promise.”

“All right, then.” They crossed the library, coming to a little room with glass walls. “Here they are.”

Oh great. She’d be watching him.

He smiled nonetheless. “Thank you, ma’am. I’d best get busy.” He let himself into the room and did a walk around the shelves, checking first to see if they had any cameras installed.

They did not appear to, which was lucky for him.

He took a second turn around to see what materials they kept on the shelves. They had a few yearbooks from the fifties and sixties and he chose those. Luckily, they had all the yearbooks from the 2010s. He grabbed them all and put them on the table with the old books.

He’d think of an excuse if she asked why he was looking at the recent ones.

He opened all the older books and made a show of examining the pages, all while checking to see what the librarian was doing. Every so often she looked up at him, but he thought she was checking him out rather than monitoring his activity.

Eventually she answered the phone and turned to her computer monitor. Finally. Sage grabbed the earliest of the recent yearbooks, then paused, thinking. He didn’t have enough time to thoroughly check each yearbook.

This had to do with Cora Winslow. It had something to do with the date of Jack Elliot’s death. If his hunch was right, if the girl in the photo was twenty-three now, she’d have graduated five years before. So he chose the book that was five years old and flipped to the senior class pictures.

He paged through the photos, looking for the girl.

Nothing in the As or Bs.

He found her in the Cs. There she was, smiling for the camera. She looked fresh and innocent and his chest clenched as he was once again hit with a wave of déjà vu. He knew her, even though he’d never met her before.

And now he had a name. Ashley Caulfield.

The quote by her name made him smile. It was a line from the song “It’s Not Easy Being Green,” the quote assigned to “Kermit the Frog.”

Then his smile faded as he let himself think of that photo in his grandfather’s safe. Of all the photos capturing this girl’s growing up.

Sage felt like he’d opened Pandora’s box and this girl had popped out. He’d never be able to stuff her back in.

He knew she existed now.

He knew she was important. He just didn’t know why.

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