The Bone Quill by Carole E. Barrowman, John Barrowman

rocks.
    After checking that the boy was still breathing, the stranger made sure Solon was as comfortable as possible. He stared down sympathetically.
    ‘I do hate to leave you like this, my young friend, but time is of the essence,’ he said.

TWENTY-SEVEN
     
    The Abbey
    Present Day
     
    W hen Matt was younger, he’d often sneaked out of bed early on Saturday mornings before Em woke so he could have some time alone in the flat with his mum. After a while, he felt that Saturday mornings belonged only to him and her – until his mum had been blackmailed into working for an international art-forgery ring, and their Saturday mornings together were abruptly brought to an end because she had to paint.
    After that, Matt stopped rising early on Saturday mornings.
    Now everything had changed again. No matter what everyone at the Abbey was doing together to find Sandie, Saturday mornings were Matt’s time to investigate what had happened to his mum – on his own.
    Jeannie was in the kitchen making scones when Matt came downstairs. Without saying a word, she handed him a glass of milk and a plate with one of Matt’s favourite handheld breakfasts on it – two flaky wheat biscuits with chocolate spread slathered between them. Weeks ago, he and Zach had come up with the idea of creating breakfasts that you held in one hand while you played video games with the other.
    ‘Mind ye don’t leave a trail of crumbs in all the books,’ Jeannie warned, as Matt headed off, plate and glass in hand. ‘Or I’ll be hearing from Mr R.’
    Inside the huge library, Matt set his plate on a table next to a cabinet with glass doors and shelves packed with over-sized leather-bound books. The cabinet held mostly old maps and prints that no one had looked at for years.
    With its smell of old books and lemon polish, this room was one of Matt’s favourites. It fed his obsession with old maps of the islands and ancient drawings of the Abbey, and held a wealth of both – thanks to the fact that all of the Calders in the past had been avid book collectors. Some of the drawings and maps that he’d recently been checking out were still spread across a table in the middle of the room. The walls were covered with books and, where there wasn’t a shelf, art. Carvings of local birds covered the great wooden doors. Sometimes when Matt caught his grandfather deep in thought or lost in one of the library books, the bulbous puffin in the middle bobbed its head knowingly.
    Busts of all the Calder ancestors who had lived on the island and owned the Abbey were carved in white stone and set into a series of small niches evenly spaced along the high stepped ceiling. Em thought it a little creepy that their ancestors were always watching them from above, but Matt found them comforting. His favourite was the guy with a scar down his cheek. He always saluted him when he entered the room.
    Matt unlocked the glass cabinet, sliding the door open as far as he could. Then he shifted the biggest of the map books on to the floor under the table. As he lifted out a ragged folder of prints, the corner of the folder caught the edge of his plate. As if in slow motion, the plate and glass of milk began to topple off the end of the table towards the precious stack of maps underneath.
    Matt flung the folder away from him like a Frisbee. He lunged at his falling breakfast, catching the glass in time and just saving the maps from a soaking. But he was too late for the plate, which clattered to the wood floor.
    While he was on his knees brushing crumbs on to a folded sheet of sketch paper, a burst of colour caught his eye. It was from one of the prints that had fallen from the folder when he’d tossed it.
    Balling up the paper, Matt dunked it into the bin across the room. He flipped through the prints as he returned them to the folder, searching for the one that had caught his eye. Most of them were impressions from medieval woodcuts, images of the monastery when it was founded. One