But Daniella was not anywhere on the first floor. Not anywhere in the larger back storage room, either. Rinn took the stairs two at a time, hoping to find her somewhere upstairs. She heard a noise above her. Books slapping against the floor. Books slapping against each other. Rinn dared to hope it was Daniella. Though what Rinn planned on doing after finding her was anyone’s guess. Yell some more? Apologize? Rinn didn’t have the answer. But she was in pursuit, and she was not about to give up. Rinn never gave up if she could help it, and she always believed that she could help it. Everything, Rinn assumed, was in her power if she tried hard enough and got just a little bit lucky.

The school counselor had called that a control mechanism, but Rinn couldn’t quite see what was so wrong with control mechanisms.

Rinn followed the sound, or so she thought. It was difficult to pinpoint. It kept ricocheting off walls and bouncing so that at first she thought it was in the dollar-book section, then the old romance novels. There old romance trade paperbacks melted into the classics and then into the adventure books in mass market fiction. Depending on the book they could go for anywhere between $4.99 and ninety-nine cents.

But still, no Daniella.

And still, no source of the sound. She went past the hanging roller girl by the back set of stairs and went around the memoirs from the mid-twentieth century that were stacked up on an old player piano. She passed the dollar-record collection and stopped right by the bank vault door. That’s where the sound was coming from—bargain mystery and crime in the old repurposed vault. Made sense why the noise had been reverberating around the floor and impossible to pinpoint.

Luck, it turns out, was not on Rinn’s side. Daniella was not to be found in the old bank vault.

Eli.

He was sitting all the way in the back of the vault, his legs crisscrossed. He was sorting through used books to put in the section. Hence all the slapping sounds. He was taking all of his own frustrations out against the inanimate objects. Rinn touched her cheek reflexively at the sound.

Better to slap a book, really. It was a thought Rinn wouldn’t have had before an hour ago. She was big into treating books as preciously as possible. She wanted to respect the written word. But there was still the stinging sensation that prickled through her cheek.

Rinn stared at Eli for a moment, unsure what to do. She could back out of the vault and pretend like she hadn’t found him.