“Have a seat,” she says. She rests her hands flat on the desk and doesn’t look at the computer. “I’m Patricia. Patricia Piper, one of the librarians. How can I help you, young lady?” She looks at me like there’s nothing else she’d rather do right now than answer my question.

I sit in one of the chairs facing her. “I’m looking for a person, actually.”

“Ah, well, I have the internet, phone books, Who’s Who books.”

“He’s a professor. Here.”

“Ah, that will be simple then. Easy as pie,” she says, and snaps her fingers like Mary Poppins.

“What are you doing?” Mercedes appears behind me, literally breathing down my neck where it’s ticklish.

“Are you two together?” asks Patricia Piper. “Looking for the same person?”

We nod.

“Well, have a seat, miss,” she says, pointing at the other chair. Mercedes sits. “Who are you looking for?”

“Francisco—”

“Frank—”

“Gómez.” We finished in unison.

“What a coincidence! Professor Gómez was just here.”

The librarian’s smiling face goes blurry. The room spins. I feel that invisible thread pulling. This is it. We’re going to find him—meet him. Now.

“But, I’m sorry to say, you just missed him.”

Mercedes and I both deflate. We missed him again? Tears prick my eyes.

“He was dropping off his book.” Patricia Piper reaches under her desk and pulls out a plastic bag. “We love when our visiting professors donate their books to the library. It’s so important for students to be able to read the works of their instructors and to have primary source material for their research. Often books by these international professors are difficult to procure in the US. Like this one, never published in America, only in Colombia, Spain, and this copy—the one in English—in Australia.” She slides the book out of the bag. “We have to process and catalog it, but you’re welcome to look at it.”

The book is large, bigger than my seventh-grade math textbook. The cover is swirls in shades of black and the title is in raised white print. The Seed Sower and Other South American Myths by Francisco Gómez Flores. I pick it up and the light catches the swirls. I realize that the swirls are pictures. Wolves, panthers, suns, moons, stars, mountains, monkeys. The more I find, the more I see.

“Go ahead,” Patricia Piper says, “take it over to that table. Just bring it back when you’re done.”

“Did he say where he was going?” Mercedes asks.

“He’s probably going to the monthly faculty meeting.”

Mercedes and I both leap from our chairs.

Patricia Piper laughs. “It’s no rush, girls. You can catch him when it’s over at one thirty.”

“Where?”

“Oh, well, I suppose it’s at Madrone Hall. That’s the only place that fits all the faculty at once.”