KillSwitch ─ s. rogers ✓

ten

RANDOM street girl was right; Alexandra did know the library when she saw it. A massive stone building cast its intimidating shadow over the street above, and sure enough, the sign out front confirmed it. She had a few memories of a place called 'the library' that resurfaced, but what she remembered wasn't at all like this. People in her memories looked so different from everyone filtering in and out of the big double door. Their clothing, their hairstyles, and even their makeup bore no resemblance to what she was seeing right now. It made her ache for something she didn't remember.

"Hey, uh..." she said to a guy of about sixteen staring at what she was fairly certain was a cell phone. He looked up. "Where would I find information about...something?"

"It's a library, man." The guy shrugged. "There's information everywhere."

He started to walk away.

"Wait!" Alexandra exclaimed, and the guy paused and swiveled his head so that he was facing her. "If I wanted to research a name, where would I go? Like, someone who went missing."

"You can probably just Google it." He shrugged again. "Any old articles should show up, especially if that person was never found." He rolled his eyes. "True crime fans love a good cold case. There are computers when you turn right as soon as you go inside. Good luck, dude."

The guy walked up the steps and disappeared inside. Alexandra exhaled heavily and followed suit.

Everything in the library was quiet. People sat reading at tables and browsing gigantic shelves filled with books. Alexandra turned right the way the guy told her to, finding two back-to-back rows of four computers each. She had only limited experience with computers, seeing as she wasn't any sort of hacker, but it couldn't be too difficult to figure out. She chose a computer on the end and sat down in front of it. It was already open to "Google," and beneath it there was a white bar with a blinking black line inside it. She mimicked everyone else in the row and put fingers on the keyboard. She hit the letter 'a' with her pointer finger, and an 'a' appeared in the box. Alexandra proceeded to type in the name Sasha gave her: Alexandra Carter.

What now?

"Um...excuse me?" Alex said meekly to the woman on her right side. "How do you search something after you typed it in? And how do you pick what comes up?"

The woman eyed her suspiciously.

"You hit the 'return' key to search, and you move the mouse around to move the cursor. You move the cursor above the result you want and click it with the right side of the mouse."

"Thanks."

Alexandra turned back to the screen and pressed 'enter.' Several results popped up. The first result, published in two-thousand-five, was titled "Fifty Years Later: The Mysterious Disappearance of Alexandra Carter." She moved the mouse until the tiny arrow was right above the blue underlined text and pressed the right side. The article opened up.

Fifty Years Later: The Mysterious Disappearance of Alexandra Carter

Published December 15th, 2005

On December 15th, 1955, in New York City, eleven-year-old Alexandra Sarah Carter (pictured below) walked home from school with her friend Jacqueline Russel as she did almost every day. She was at Jacqueline's house until after sundown, which wasn't out of the ordinary for her. Both Jacqueline and her mother, Marie Russel, watched Alexandra leave their home at around 8:30 that night.

That was the last confirmed time anyone saw Alexandra Carter.

When Alexandra didn't return home that night, her mother, Margaret "Peggy" Carter, immediately became worried. She and her husband, Alexandra's step-father Daniel Sousa, contacted the Russel family at 9:15 in hopes that Alexandra was still there, but the Russels told them that Alexandra left 45 minutes ago. Frantic, they reached out to every person who might have information and no one had seen her. They notified the police that she was missing, and when Alexandra didn't turn up in the next two days, they began an investigation.