Cooney, C. B. (1990). The face on the milk carton. New York, Bantam Books.

Who was H? Her mother was Miranda, her father Frank, she was Jane. None of the four
grandparents had been an H either.
An old Christmas-tree holder, three splayed feet and a cup for the trunk, lay gathering
cobwebs. Janie wedged its metal foot behind the long, narrow lock-plate of the trunk and
yanked.
The lock broke
How old it must be, thought Janie. It’s rusted through.
She lifted the heavy lid carefully, tilting it back against the wall. The trunk was filled with
papers and photographs. She was immediately bored. Old school reports, old term papers,
old fill-in-the-blank maps and quizzes. Somebody named Hannah. She had never heard of
anybody named Hannah.
How could an unknown Hannah merit this stack of attention? Janie felt irritable and
coughed again from the dust and the mothballs.
Beneath a sixth-grade report on “The Beginning of Mankind: Mesopotamia,” and a sheaf
of mimeographed maps where Hannah had wrongly penciled in Germany on France, was a
school photograph. Janie recognized the cardboard folder immediately: the kind that
offered your parents six different purchase agreements, so many wallet sizes, so many
eight-by-tens.
She flipped open to see what Hannah looked like. A pretty girl – perhaps twelve or
thirteen- looked back at her. Sweet, blond, mild, the kind Sarah-Charlotte would refer to as
a Used Rag Doll. “Not much staffing in that one,” Sarah-Charlotte liked to say of girls who
were short on personality.
The dust was annoying Janie’s lungs. It would be the pits if it turned out she had a dust
allergy along with a milk allergy. How would she survive in this world if everything made her
choke and cough?
From behind all the papers, a little piece of fabric stuck up.
White cloth.
Tiny dark polka dots.
With hands of ice, Janie plucked at the material, shifting the layers of school papers until
she could pull it up.