The Note Left Behind

Questions Begin

By Monday, the note had a home in the inside pocket of Nathan's backpack, wrapped in a plastic sleeve Sasha insisted on "for preservation," though he suspected it was really so she'd have an excuse to keep touching it.

"Okay," she said at lunch, sliding into the seat across from him like she'd been rehearsing the sentence all weekend. "I made a list."

"Of course you did."

"Initial M. That narrows it down." She unfolded a page of notebook paper covered in her fast, slanted handwriting — ironic, Nathan thought, given the note itself. "Could be a first name. Could be a last name. Could be a nickname."

"Could be a red herring."

"Could be," Sasha agreed, entirely unbothered by the possibility. "But it's not, is it? You don't hide a note like that behind a drawer for twenty years over nothing."

Nathan didn't have a counter for that, mostly because he'd been thinking the same thing since Friday night and hadn't wanted to admit it.

"The handwriting's not from a student," he said instead, turning the conversation toward the one thing he was actually sure of. "It's too controlled. Too — deliberate. Whoever wrote this was already thinking about how it would look if someone found it."

Sasha looked at him with something like surprise, like she hadn't expected him to have noticed that on his own.

"That's actually good," she said.

"I have my moments."

"You have exactly one moment, and you're having it right now." But she was smiling when she said it, the kind of smile that made the teasing feel more like affection than an insult.

They spread the note out on the library table between them, along with a blank sheet of notebook paper Sasha had already started filling with theories — some plausible, most wildly not. "Maybe it's a coach," she suggested. "Coaches always have secrets."

"That's not a theory, that's a stereotype."

"Fine. Maybe it's a janitor with a mysterious past."

"Sasha."

"I'm just brainstorming." She tapped her pen against the table, undeterred. "The point is, we need more than an initial. We need a timeframe. Judging by the paper — the way it's yellowed, the ink color — this isn't recent. It's old. Years old, probably."

Nathan turned the thought over, appreciating despite himself how quickly her scattered energy could sharpen into something useful once she actually focused it. "The drawer it was in hadn't been opened in a long time either. Rust doesn't build up like that in just a few years."

"So we're looking at, what, a decade? More?"

They started small. A list of staff whose names began with M — not many, in a school this size. A cross-reference against who'd been employed there long enough for a twenty-year-old note to make sense. Sasha handled the social side, chatting up the school secretary about "historical school records" for the yearbook project, coming back with information she probably shouldn't have had.

"Mr. Mercer's been here twenty-six years," she reported, sliding onto the library table across from Nathan two days later. "Long enough."

"Long list of M names in this building, though. Could be a Mercer. Could be a Morgan. Could be someone who used to work here and doesn't anymore."

"Could be," Sasha said again, and this time there was an edge to it, something sharper than her usual careless curiosity. "But you know who else has been here twenty-six years?"

Nathan already knew where this was going, because he'd been circling the same thought since Sunday night, turning it over in his head instead of sleeping.

"Voss," he said.

"Principal Voss." Sasha tapped the table like she was closing an argument. "Except it's not him. It doesn't fit — the timeline's off, he was younger staff back then, wouldn't have had access to student files."

"Then who—"

"Mr. Callahan," Sasha said, and something about the way she said the name — flat, careful, like she was testing how it sounded out loud — made Nathan go very still.