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remember. A book that her fourth-grade teacher, Miss Hill, was reading on the day when the school’s guidance counselor had come and interrupted the teacher’s afternoon story session. The counselor whispered to Miss Hill, who turned to Sarah.
    “Sarah, would you go with Miss Cummins, please?”
    Sarah had been surprised. She could sometimes be naughty, but her father had promised her that if she continued to excel in school and music, he would buy her a violin in the spring, and so she had been especially good all winter. This promise was, of course, a secret from her mother, who would have pointed out that their car had four bald tires that needed replacing. Sarah told her dad that the violin she rented through the school was fine, but he said he was proud of her talent and wanted her to have her own. Though a trace of snow still coated the frozen ground, crocuses were beginning to appear, and Sarah lay awake every night, thinking about how smooth and scratch-free a new instrument would be. Sarah wondered if maybe this was some kind of wonderful surprise that Miss Cummins was in on. Maybe she was about to present her with the violin!
    Sarah skipped down the hallway alongside Miss Cummins, who closed the office door behind them and motioned to a chair. When Sarah looked up at her, she was suddenly surprised and uncomfortable to see Miss Cummins was crying.
    Sarah looked at her, wondering what was the matter with her. She slid off her chair and went over to the counselor, putting a hand on her back. The woman took a breath and looked at Sarah.
    “Your father had an accident on the highway,” Miss Cummins said. “I’m so sorry, Sarah. He’s dead. Your daddy is dead.”
    Sarah never heard the end of the story about Sally and Cindy and the house with the missing window. And she could never be certain if the accident hadn’t been caused by the bald tires on her father’s car. Tires that might have been replaced if her daddy hadn’t been saving up to buy her a violin. In some strange way, these things had gotten tangled up in her mind, and Sarah spent a lot of time in the year after her father’s death trying to reconstruct the story of Cindy and Sally and the house with the secret room. But this one little scene was all she could remember. She wrote it over and over again, but it didn’t change anything. Her father was gone forever.
    She couldn’t even ask her old teacher, Miss Hill, about the book, because after the funeral, her mother had needed time to get their lives together, and she had sent Sarah off to stay with her uncle Fred and aunt Margot. Sarah had lost touch with her classmates. Then she was selected to attend Boston Latin for high school, a long commute from the old neighborhood. By the time Sarah went back to ask about the book, Miss Hill had left the school. And no one knew which book she was talking about.
    It wasn’t like Sarah hadn’t spent a lot of time in libraries. But it was hard to find a book when you didn’t know the author or the title, and it wasn’t a well-known favorite. She had asked every children’s librarian she had come across, with no luck.
    Sarah didn’t keep a journal, didn’t scrapbook, or make photo albums. But she had hung on to The Page. [ Panio
    •   •   •
     
    R estless, Sarah prowled the apartment again but found nothing other than a bug on the ceiling of the kitchen. Well, she could at least kill the bug. It might feel good to smash something, let off a little steam. Sarah took off her shoes and, holding on to the hammer, stood on a kitchen chair, then on the table, then on top of her beloved and completely outdated seven-volume
Lives of the Romantic Composers
.
    It was only then that she could see that her intended victim was not a bug. It was a symbol, written in a minute hand:

    Sarah stared at the strange drawing. Someone
had
been here.
    “
Gesu cristo,”
said Alessandro, coming through the apartment door and spotting Sarah perched on the heights