Free Shadows Falling: The Lost #2 by Melyssa Williams Page B

fraction of what normal people spent in slee p. I was desperate to stay, determined to live all my life with him and our library; so focused was I on my task that it never occurred to me that he would be the one to leave.
    My book of plans, ideas, designs, sketches and words and plottings and drawings, all gone with him. The space by Dante ’s Inferno where I kept all my treasures was barren. The space in my chest where I kept my heart was barren.
     
    I pause and grieve silently for the little girl whose only father figure was a strange con man. Why had he left? Had she become too wild and strange for him to handle? Had some accident befallen him on his way to market one day, or had he left with intention and purpose in his abandonment? The disappearance of her writings seemed to suggest so.
    And what would his desertion mean for fragile, yet terrifyingly capable, Rose?
    Was it even possible for her to slip further in the shadows of madness? How deep did those shadows go?
    The questions fire in my brain like they were catapulted there by a well -trained assassin, but a larger problem loomed. It was as I feared: I flipped the page, and without warning I had come to the last of the writing. The following pages were clean and bare and blank. The rest of the diary was empty.
    ********************
    I tell Mr. Connelly of the abrupt ending of the diary when I see him next, several days later. I had mused and contemplated and hashed out whether or not to speak to him of her at all, but I found my relief at seeing him stride through the door at Bedlam so great that I nearly tripped over my words in a rush to get them out.
    He listened to my tale with a grave (or was it simply a tolerant?) expression. “I see,” was his response when I ended with Rose’s abandonment at the Bodleian Library. “And this leaves us where exactly?”
    “ I don’t know,” I stammer, then find enough pluck to meet his eyes. “But since you seem to have misplaced her, I thought her past might shed some light on her whereabouts.”
    He regards me with something like amusement in his beautiful eyes. “I misplaced her, did I?” he echoes, with a chuckle. “And here I thought the hospital might have kept a more careful eye on her. Allow your patients to go wandering about, do we? Check themselves out and join society whenever they feel the need, do they? Step out for some air and not come back in, hmm? Happen often, does it?”
    “ No, of course not!” I feel a chill as I realize the implication in his words. Had Bedlam lost her? There would be a scandal.
    “ Don’t fret.” His mouth turns up in a smile, and I realize he is only teasing. “Rose goes where she likes, and she’s free to do so. She’ll be back.”
    I think back to the night with the tossing of the diary and the writing on the wall. To me, words come unbidden in my head:
    Or maybe she’s never left.
    Could she be hiding in the old asylum?

8
    I worry about the scandal a lost patient could cause for us. Not the least Miss Helmes and me, but for the great doctor, the great doctor who I am hoping to impress eventually with my skills as a nurse, if he would just glance my way with something other than the desire for the fetching of sandwiches. While no one fetches sandwiches like I fetch sandwiches, I really hope to turn his head with something decidedly less pathetic. I decide to ask Miss Helmes point blank about Rose Gray. If we ’ve misplaced a patient during the move, I should know about it.
    She seems less than alarmed about the whole thing.  “I remember Rose, yes. Little thing. Precocious. Violent.”
    “ And was she released? How long ago?” I persist.
    “ I’m hardly the file keeper, am I?” she retorts, mildly. “I’m only the glorified house keeper.”
    “ But why don’t I know her? I know all the patients.”
    “ I don’t know why you don’t know her,” she minces her words, slowly, as though I’m an imbecile. Her pinched nostrils flare with the effort it