The Empty Desk

A student vanishes. A desk sits empty. Every five years.Five years earlier. Mara Bellamy is a teen photographer at Hawthorne's summer arts program, and she has found something in a filing cabinet that should have stayed locked: a yellowed clipping. LOCAL TEEN MISSING AFTER SUMMER ARTS PROGRAM. Then a second one, in a bound volume of old papers. A student missing in 2016. The names change. The explanations change. The intervals don't: five years. Five years. Five years. Five years. Five years - 1996, 2001, 2006, 2011, 2016. Conversations stop when Mara walks up. Questions about old photographs get doors closed in her face. And Graham Voss - the instructor who praised her rare eye for empty spaces and overlooked things - is the gentle, familiar voice outside classroom E-14 at night, asking her to open the door. We only want to talk.Now. Payton Ellis is sitting in E-14 herself, in Graham Voss's photography class, working his first real assignment: find something ordinary, and photograph it in a way that makes it unsettling. The old desk he told her not to photograph is ordinary. The carvings underneath it - a name, MARA, and dates where only a seated person could reach them - are not. Rolly, whose instincts have never once lied to her, refuses the desk outright. Payton's photograph of it, the wide shot from across the room, is the best thing she's ever taken. She titles it The Empty Desk - because Reserved sounded too much like the seat was waiting for someone.Five years is a pattern. Patterns end. And this one is due.THE EMPTY DESK - A Payton & Rolly Tale. A YA paranormal mystery about the seats that stay empty, the photographs that prove why, and what a place does to keep its receipts.