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nation I could come up with was that she wanted me to
know about it, about what took her.
Or about who.
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I had to find her, whether Ella had her toothbrush in
her purse or not.
The problem was, I was stuck. I couldn t get back
into the station to search for information on Ella without
Grant s help, and after Seth caught him, I wasn t sure he d
ever take me back there again. I paced my room, thinking.
An idea bubbled to the surface and I stopped in a ray
of watery light pouring through my window. If I couldn t
find anything on Ella right now, I could still search for
information on the wolves. There was the map Ella had
left behind with her message. Maybe she wanted me to
search for wolves there.
I was reaching for my phone to call Grant when a long
shadow diluted the sunlight splattered across my floor. I
glanced out my window.
Dad trudged through the freshly fallen snow, back
toward his shed. When he reached it, he paused in front
of the door, and then turned to look behind him not
once, but twice. Then he reached down and plucked an
old, chipped garden gnome from the snow. Something sil-
ver flashed in the sunlight as he tipped the gnome upside
down.
A key.
He shoved the key into the padlock. I thought he d
open the shed door, but he didn t. Instead, he just locked
it up again, and fiddled with the lock. Then he tried to
open the door, shaking the handle until the whole shed
wobbled. When he decided the padlock was doing its job,
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he replaced the key and the gnome and started toward the
house.
My eyebrows knitted together as I watched him,
flushed and full of secrets. I glanced out at the backyard.
Or maybe it was the shed that was full of secrets.
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eighteen
Grant stared at the computer screen for a long minute
scratching his head. I think my eyes are going blurry. This
thing is basically ancient. He rubbed his face. Whose
idea was it to come do research in the library, again?
My lips hitched into a smile. It s your fault you don t
know the topography of Michigan. I took a breath. Or
anything about wolves.
When I d called Grant about the map to Alpena and
how I wanted to investigate that area more, he d gotten
strangely quiet. I mean, Grant was usually quiet, but in
a thoughtful way. Not in a freaked out way. I didn t know
what it was about that map or that town, but he froze up
whenever I mentioned it. I realized the only way I was
going to get him to help me figure out what was there was
to tell him the truth. And so, I told him part of it. I asked
him for a lift to the library, and during the car ride I told
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him about the note Ella had left for me, about the wolves
and the warning. Grant didn t say much in response, but
he didn t tell me I was crazy either. I guess that was a start.
I pointed to a map on my computer screen. Here. Up
here, almost at the top of the state. That s where the packs
originated.
Grant leaned over me and squinted at the screen. He
smelled like some kind of ocean breeze shampoo and pep-
permint. Where does it say that? he asked, wrinkling his
forehead.
I glanced around at the dank little library that sat in
the center of town. In the corner, a girl with long, dark hair
and way too much eye makeup watched us. I dipped my
head below the monitor and whispered, This was tech-
nically your idea, and you said we d be in and out. Now
you re asking a million-and-one questions when a hundred
different websites confirmed it. I tapped the screen, just
north of Alpena. This is where the wolves came from.
Grant nodded slowly, his eyes glazed over. Yeah.
I snapped my finger in front of his nose, and he
twitched back to life. It says right here:
In 2008, the DNR reintroduced wolves to the lower
peninsula, where they have successfully bred and returned
to the state of Michigan. All lower peninsula wolf packs
are said to have originated from this area.
My eyes scanned over the fuzzy map on the screen.
Michigan, Minnesota and the northern tip of Ohio were
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flecked with blue: wolf migration patterns. I reached for
the mouse to click out of the website. But just before I
tapped the button, a pinprick of blue flashed over the right
side of the screen. I leaned in so close that the dust lining
the edge of screen tickled my nose.
Grant, look. Do you see this? I whispered. That s
totally blue there, right?
Grant s eyes darted to the screen, almost like he was
afraid to look at it. But when he saw the fleck of blue posi-
tioned over New York, his eyebrows drew together as he
blinked at the screen. Yeah, he said slowly. Yeah, right
there. Looks like one little speck of wolves found their way
to New York. Probably just one pack.
I smiled to myself. I knew there had to be wolves
there. And Dr. Barges told me there couldn t be any there.
Who? Grant was staring at me, his face inches from
mine.
I felt the start of a blush blooming on my cheeks. Oh,
um. No one.
Grant swiveled his chair away from the computer.
Something about the way his shoulders slumped and how
he kept picking at his fingernails made me wonder if he
secretly thought I was out of my mind, even though I
knew he saw that blue fleck in New York. But even the
way he wasn t clearing his throat told me he didn t really
have anything to say to me.
Hey Grant, came a voice from over top of the moni-
tor. I peeked over and saw the girl with the long hair and
caked-on mascara that made her eyelashes look like fat cat-
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erpillars. She glanced at me and gave me a tight smile, the
kind without teeth. What are you doing here?
Just then, it came flashing back to me, like a wad of
algae or a lost flip flop or something pulled from the bot-
tom of Lark Lake, making the sand pucker. Lacey Jordan.
We went to school together a hundred years ago.
Grant s ears grew pink and his knuckles turned white
around the mouse. Just looking some things up, he said.
Lacey nodded before he even finished talking, and she
immediately snapped her eyes onto me. She pressed her
lips into smile again and said, Claire Graham, right? Do
you remember me?
I returned the courtesy smile and said, Kind of. Well,
we were just on our way out. I stood and clicked out of
the browser. The last thing I wanted to do today was pre-
tend to have a nice talk with Lacey Jordan.
It seemed to offend Lacey that I wasn t fawning all over
her like every guy in high school used to mostly because
they knew about how she d given it up to a senior in the
cornfield one night because her smile quickly disap-
peared. So, I thought you weren t ever supposed to come
back to Amble, isn t that right?
I blinked at her for a minute and then turn to Grant,
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