“You know, you remind me of someone, Christopher,” she said. “What was his name again? I was trying to think of it all night.”
The room went cold, and the itch started crawling up his neck.
“David Olson,” she said slowly. “That’s it. God, I’ve been trying to remember that name all night. It was driving me crazy.”
Mrs. Henderson sighed. She was still talking slowly, as if her whole body were underwater. But she felt such a relief that she remembered his name.
“He loved to read books. Just like you,” she said.
“What books?” Christopher asked.
“Oh, gosh. Everything. He couldn’t check them out fast enough,” she continued, suddenly lost in memory. “‘Mrs. Henderson, do you have Treasure Island? Do you have The Hobbit?’ He would read them in a day. I’ll bet if he hadn’t gone missing, he would have read every book in the library.”
Her face suddenly changed with the memory of David’s disappearance. Christopher saw the wrinkles come back around her eyes and mouth. Deep lines that she earned with a lifetime of pretending to smile.
“Do you know that when he went missing, there was one book he threw into the return bin. I just didn’t have the heart to check that book back in. I knew if I ever did, he would be gone forever. God, that sounds so strange now, doesn’t it? I kept it checked out for the rest of the school year hoping that he would come back. But he didn’t. And when we did our year-end inventory, I was finally forced to check the book back in.”
“What book was it?” Christopher asked, his voice stuck in his throat.
Mrs. Henderson put her other hand on Christopher’s. It felt so warm and dry to her. She felt so good all of a sudden. So peaceful.
“Frankenstein,” she said, smiling. “God, David checked that book out a dozen times. It was his favorite. I never had the heart to replace it.”
Mrs. Henderson stopped for a moment. Tears began to well up in her eyes.
“I went home that night for the start of summer vacation. Mr. Henderson surprised me with our first color television set. He had saved his money all year to buy it. We watched television together on the couch all summer. Old movies. Baseball games. We even saw Frankenstein. It was part of a double feature. And I thought about David and lay on my husband’s chest. And I knew how lucky I was just to be alive.”
“You’re still lucky, Mrs. Henderson,” he said quietly.
“Thank you, Christopher,” she said. “Tell Mr. Henderson that.”
With that, she let go of his hands. She blinked twice and looked around the library, as if suddenly realizing she was crying in front of a student. Embarrassed, she excused herself and rushed away to the bathroom to fix her makeup.
Christopher was alone.
He knew the solitude was temporary. He felt the voices trapped in homerooms swirling around him in a circle. Hundreds of classmates busy daydreaming or paying attention to their lessons. Teachers with sins and secrets busy instructing children how to know what they knew. He was an island in the eye of a hurricane.
Just like the tree house in the middle of the clearing.
Christopher steadied himself and moved as quickly as he could on wobbly legs to the computer. He clicked on the search engine to look for David Olson’s book. He began to type rapidly…
F-R-A-N-K-E-N-S-T-E-I-N
Christopher saw the section where the book was. He moved over to the shelves and found an old hardcover copy, beaten and worn with the same years that took the red out of Mrs. Henderson’s hair. He cracked it open and looked at the title page. There was nothing. No notes. No writing. He turned the page. And the next. And the next. There was nothing. Just a few underlines. Christopher didn’t understand. He was sure that David Olson left him a message in the book. Why else would he come to the library? Why else did he listen to Mrs. Henderson’s story? There had to be a message in here somewhere, but there was nothing but these stupid underlines.
Christopher flipped back to the title page of the book. He looked again and thought maybe David wrote in invisible ink. Maybe David was afraid that the hissing lady would find his messages, so he hid them somehow. Christopher stopped and looked closely at the underlined passages of the book. The underlines were strange. They weren’t full sentences. They were words. Sometimes, letters within a word. Christopher looked