Free The Oxford Inheritance by Ann A. McDonald

architecture and new. She must be under the courtyard, she realized, heading back in the direction of thecloisters. A maze of tunnels and vaults below the surface of the college, out of sight, secret from the world.
    Her footsteps echoed fast on the stone until she reached the end of the hallway and stepped through a doorway into the main room: a long, low-ceilinged space filled with old bookshelves and filing cabinets.
    She was in.
    Cassie flipped on the lights, illuminating storage boxes and archive shelves stacked neatly against every wall, the vast collection extending deep underground in the distance. The floor had a slight slope downward, and Cassie could imagine it continuing for forever into the shadows, a vast archive the size of a football field at least, buried under the main college grounds.
    Pulling out her notebook, Cassie began to make her way down one of the aisles, looking for some kind of system to the storage. She found a reference desk midway down the aisle, with a diagram showing the filing system: the years she wanted were buried in the middle of a set of library stacks, in boxes marked with the date and color coding.
    Cassie settled cross-legged on the floor in the aisle between the shelves and got to work, checking each box in turn and sifting through their contents. Rutledge had been right: everything related to college life was stored down here, with little thought to consequence or order. In one box she found a stack of menus from the dining hall bundled beside chaplain’s reports and handwritten minutes from a meeting of the bursars; in another, a collection of snapshots from a lively college dance and a haphazard stack of student essays.
    She was thorough and methodical, hunting carefully through the night for any mention of Joanna Blackwell, but still Cassie found nothing. She saw the same student names appear over and over, until she felt intimately acquainted with the class of ’95, but the one name she longed to see more than anything still eluded her.
    Finally Cassie lifted her head from the files and yawned. She checked her phone. There was no reception here underground, but her clock toldher it was after 1 A.M. She deliberated how much longer she could keep searching. She shouldn’t stay out too long; Evie’s hours were erratic, and there was no telling when her roommate might come home, or go looking through her purse for something and find the pass-card gone.
    Cassie assessed the boxes around her. Just another couple of hours, that should be long enough to find something. If there was anything here to find at all. She stretched her aching muscles and bent her head again to check the next box, reaching for a file marked “Yearbook.” Inside lay a stack of loose photos, remnants from that year, she supposed. Now-familiar faces flashed past as she flipped through the scenes: students in the bar, sporting teams, formal dinners. The fashions were grungy and draped, and Cassie noted with amusement that she’d seen several groups of students around town that afternoon outfitted in a similar way, the cycle of fashion turning full circle.
    Then she froze, her blood turning to ice in her veins.
    Joanna.
    Her mother had been snapped in a candid photo wearing the crimson-and-black Raleigh sports uniform, a hockey stick slung over her shoulder. She was turned away from the camera, only her head glancing back, as if someone had caught her attention at the last moment.
    She was real. It was true. Cassie’s heart pounded as she flipped the photograph over.
    Margaret Madison. Raleigh Hockey X11.
    Margaret? Cassie blinked. But before she could check the box again, she heard the sound of a door closing, loud in the thick silence of the vaults. She froze, looking wildly around. Heavy footsteps were approaching down the stone corridor, getting closer to the library.
    There was no time to get the lights, or clear the mess of boxes and papers she’d pulled down. Cassie tucked