PAINTED IN BLOOD

Chapter 3: The Missing List

The list was written in red ink.

I didn't know that until Cora pulled it out from under her mattress at eleven thirty that night, unfolded it carefully — the kind of careful that meant it had been folded and unfolded many times before — and set it on the bed between us.

It was a single sheet of paper, handwritten, both sides filled top to bottom in small, neat script. Names. Dates. A brief note beside each one, never more than a sentence.

Eleanor Voss. 1991. Left three days before finals. No forwarding address.

James Aldric. 1989. Withdrew citing personal reasons. Family confirmed he never came home.

Priya Shen. 1986. Top of her year. Missing. Case closed — insufficient evidence.

I read it twice before I spoke.

"Where did you get this?"

"I made it." Cora was sitting cross-legged on her bed, watching me read. "Over the summer, before I came. I found what I could — old school records, local newspaper archives, a forum thread that got deleted three days after I found it." She pointed to the bottom of the page. "That's as far back as I could go with public records. Thirty-two years. Thirty-two top students."

"All missing?"

"Not all. Some just — left. Suddenly, quietly, no explanation. A few came back eventually and refused to talk about it." She paused. "Three are officially listed as missing persons. Two of those cases were never solved."

I set the paper down on the bed.

My name wasn't on it. It couldn't be — I had only arrived yesterday. But I felt the absence of it the way you feel a word you can't remember, hovering at the edge of everything.

"Cora," I said. "I'm ranked first."

"I know."

"How do you know? Rankings aren't posted until end of semester."

She looked at me steadily. "Because you're on a full scholarship. Aldermoor only gives full scholarships to the student they've assessed as the highest talent in the intake. They do it before you arrive." She picked up the list, folded it along its existing creases. "You were ranked first before you walked through the gate."

The lamp on my desk flickered.

Neither of us mentioned it.

I didn't sleep again.

This was becoming a pattern.

I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and made a decision — the second decision I had made since arriving at Aldermoor, and considerably less comfortable than the first.

I was going to find out what happened to the names on that list.

Not because I was brave. I want to be clear about that. I am not the kind of person who runs toward danger with any kind of enthusiasm. I am the kind of person who notices things and cannot stop thinking about them, which is a different quality entirely and significantly less heroic in practice.

But I was ranked first.

And thirty-two people before me had been ranked first. And none of them had finished the year.

So.

The library at Aldermoor was open until ten PM on weekdays, which I discovered when I arrived at nine forty-five the following evening with a list of names and the focused energy of someone who had been awake for too long and was running on determination and bad coffee.

It was a beautiful room — two floors, dark wood shelves, reading lamps that cast everything in amber, the smell of old paper so thick you could almost taste it. The kind of library that made you want to be the sort of person who spent entire days in libraries.

It was also almost entirely empty at this hour, which was what I had been counting on.

I found the archive section on the upper floor — a row of filing cabinets and a shelf of bound yearbooks going back to the academy's founding, which the spine of the oldest volume listed, with no apparent irony, as 1847.

I pulled the yearbooks from the last forty years and carried them to a table in the corner.

The photographs were small and slightly blurry in the older volumes — black and white becoming colour sometime in the late seventies, formal portraits replacing candid shots in the eighties. I went through them methodically, year by year, matching names from Cora's list to faces.

Eleanor Voss. 1991. Dark-haired, serious expression, paint smudge on her collar that the photographer had clearly not noticed.

James Aldric. 1989. Laughing at something off-camera, caught mid-movement.

Priya Shen. 1986. Looking directly into the lens with the kind of confidence that made you feel certain something terrible had happened to her.

I wrote down what I found beside each name on my own copy of the list — physical descriptions, notes on their stated majors, anything that might form a pattern.

No pattern formed.

They were different in every way that seemed to matter — different backgrounds, different disciplines, different years. The only thing they had in common was the ranking.

And Aldermoor.

And, I realised as I turned to the faculty pages at the back of the 1991 yearbook, Professor Damien Voss.

There he was, in a small black-and-white portrait at the bottom of the faculty page. Same dark hair. Same composed expression. Same sharp jaw that in certain lights looked like it had been carved rather than grown.

Prof. D. Voss. Art History and Theory. Faculty since 1981.

I flipped back to the 1986 volume.

Prof. D. Voss. Art History and Theory. Faculty since 1981.

I went back further. 1979.

Prof. D. Voss. Art History and Theory.

Same photograph. Identical in every detail to the one in last year's faculty handbook, which I had read on the train to Aldermoor and which listed, under his name:

Prof. D. Voss. Art History and Theory. Faculty since 1981.

He had been here for over forty years.

He looked twenty-seven.

"You're still here."

I nearly knocked the yearbooks off the table.

Professor Voss stood at the end of the row of shelves, hands in the pockets of his jacket. He had made no sound approaching — none at all, which was impressive on a floor made of old hardwood that creaked under my weight every time I shifted.

He looked at the spread of yearbooks on the table. At the list in my hand.

Something moved across his face — too fast to name.

"Library closes in four minutes," he said.

"I know." I didn't close the list. I didn't close the yearbooks. I looked at him and thought about Cora's grandmother's notebook and the brass plaque in the entrance hall and the three blinks in twenty minutes and I made a third decision, faster and less careful than the other two.

"You're in every one of these," I said. I turned the 1979 yearbook to face him across the table. "Same photograph. Same age. Forty-seven years, Professor Voss, and you haven't changed."

The library was very quiet.

He looked at the yearbook. Then at me.

"That's a serious accusation," he said, "for someone who has been here for two days."

"It's not an accusation. It's an observation." I held his gaze. "I'm an artist. Observation is what I do."

Another silence. Longer this time.

He walked toward the table — unhurried, the way he did everything — and stopped on the opposite side of it. He looked down at the yearbooks. At the list. At my handwriting in the margins, names and dates and questions I hadn't found answers to.

Then he reached out and closed the 1979 yearbook.

Not aggressively. Not a threat. Just quietly, deliberately, the way you'd close a door you didn't want left open.

"Go back to your room, Miss Blackwell."

"Why?"

"Because the library is closing and you need sleep."

"That's not why."