Page Forty-One Leaves the Van

The mobile library van made its rounds of the valley every summer, and Elan and Ozan had been hired to help. Their jobs were small. They stamped the cards, stacked the returns and carried the heavy boxes of picture books up the steps.

On the second Friday, a book came back that Elan had never seen before. It was thick and brown, with a cracked spine and a title in faded gold: The Hearth Atlas of Salt and Smoke. The woman who returned it said she had borrowed it for a week and cooked from it twice.

"Both meals were wonderful," she said. "But the last pages are a little loose, I am afraid."

Elan thanked her and set the book on the desk. After the van had pulled away from the stop, he opened it to check for damage, and he turned the pages one by one. Near the middle, he stopped.

"Ozan, come and look at this," he said.

Ozan leaned over his shoulder. Between page forty and page forty-two there was a ragged stub of paper, as if a page had been torn out in a hurry. The edge was still slightly damp, and when Elan touched it, the stub gave off a faint smell of woodsmoke.

"Nobody tore that," Ozan said. "Look at the stitching. The page just left."

Elan laughed, and then he saw that Ozan was not joking. The librarian who drove the van had warned them on the first day that some of the old books on the shelf were unusual. She had said the Atlas was one of them, but she had not explained how.

They found out the rest from a note slipped inside the back cover. It was written in a neat hand: "The pages of this book are not content to stay bound. If one goes missing, follow the road it was carried along. It will always end up with the person it belongs to."

"That sounds like a joke," Elan said.

"Then it is a joke that smells of smoke," Ozan replied, and he reached for the route map.

The woman had returned the book at the crossroads by the beekeeper's farm, the last stop before this one. The page could have slipped out there, and Ozan remembered seeing something pale flutter across the yard.

They asked the librarian for ten minutes and ran the length of the lane. They found the beekeeper sitting on an upturned crate with a sheet of paper in her gloved hands.

"I found this on the gate," she said when they asked. "I read it twice. It is a recipe for a fish soup, which makes no sense, because I have never eaten fish in my life."

She frowned at the page. "Every time I try to read the ingredients, the words slide away. It is plainly meant for somebody else."

Elan thanked her and took the page. It felt warm, like a stone left in the sun. But as soon as he reached the road, it tugged gently against his fingers, and a gust of air lifted it out of his hand.

"It is leaving again!" Ozan shouted.

They chased it down the hill, through a gap in a hedge and along the riverbank to the little ferry landing. The page skimmed across the water, and a mechanic wiping oil from his hands caught it neatly against his chest.

"Is this yours?" the mechanic asked. He read the first line aloud, and then he frowned.

"I cannot make sense of it. It describes a kitchen, I think, but the roof is a ship's deck. Whoever wrote this was not from around here." He glanced at the sky. "The ferry leaves in five minutes. If I had the time, I would help you look. A girl was waiting at the school gate earlier, and she was staring at everything that flew by."

He pressed the page into Ozan's hand. For a moment, it lay still, the ink glimmering as though it were wet. Then it slipped between his fingers, drifted up over the roof of the ferry house and went sailing away across the fields.

"We must have let go too early," Elan panted, as they ran. "That is the second time!"

"Third time lucky," said Ozan, who had never run so fast in his life.

The school gate stood at the end of the valley road, where the van was due to stop at four o'clock. It was a quarter to, and a thin line of children was already waiting. Some of them were reading and some were arguing. One was holding a sheet of paper over her head like a flag.

She was about ten years old. She was wearing a coat too big for her and a pair of shoes that had been polished for a different town. When she saw the two boys, she held the page out with both hands and looked up at them without speaking.

"Is that yours?" Elan asked, as gently as he could.

The girl shook her head, and then she nodded, and then she said, in a very small voice, "I do not know. It showed me our kitchen."

"Your kitchen?" Ozan asked.

"At the harbour. Before we moved."

She turned the page toward them. The ink had rearranged itself into small handwriting that neither boy could read, but the picture beside it was clear enough. It showed a table by a window, a pan on a stove and a long grey ocean in the glass. "I have not eaten properly since we came here. Everything tastes of paper. But when I read this, I could smell the soup my mother makes, and I was not hungry any more. I was home."

For a minute, nobody said anything. The other children had gone quiet too. A bell rang inside the school, and the van rumbled around the corner and stopped with a sigh of brakes.

Elan took a breath. "The book belongs to the library," he said slowly. "But I think this page belongs to you. If the librarian agrees, you can keep it. We will tell her it found its owner."

The girl folded the page carefully, as if it might break, and tucked it inside her coat. Then she smiled for the first time, and it was a surprisingly wide smile. She said that she would come to the van every week, and that she would bring a bowl of the soup to share.

Ozan laughed. "I will hold you to that bowl," he said.

That evening, after the last stop, the two boys sat in the back of the van. The Atlas lay open on the desk between them. The librarian had read the note and nodded, saying that it had happened before and that it always ended well. Elan held the book up to the lamp, and he looked once more at the stub where the missing page had been.

The stub was not empty. A line of fresh ink had appeared along the torn edge, written in the same neat hand as the note in the back cover. It was a short line.

"The next page is already on its way," Ozan read aloud.

Elan closed the book and slid it carefully onto the highest shelf. Then he glanced at the window, which he was almost certain he had shut.