I checked Sarah’s customer register. .
“Your Aunt Violet was perfect at finding exactly the book you needed—even if you didn’t know it yet. Before Noah’s dad and I split up, she told me what to read. They were just novels, but somehow, they prepared me exactly for what was coming.And with Noah? I swear she knew exactly what would make him happy. Like she was reading his mind.”
I blinked.Reading his mind.Of course.
Finding the next book in the series Noah had started was easy. His mother, on the other hand, was a little trickier.
I should have checked my aunt’s notes upstairs, but I hadn’t thought to do so. Now, I was going to have to wing it.
Maybe I’d inherited some of that magic as well. You never know until you try.
I gave Sarah and her son each a cookie—one with the non-magical ingredients. Noah didn’t appear to be in any pain, and Cosmo had warned me not to overdo it.
Then, I turned my attention to finding Sarah a book.
I closed my eyes, reaching deep inside myself, waiting for something to call out to me. A particular bookcase, maybe? Some invisible pull?
Nothing.
How about the old-fashioned way?
I paced back and forth, the wooden floor creaking softly under my steps. Nearby, Noah was already lost in his book, the sound of rustling pages filling the quiet.
And then I stopped.
Right in front of me stood a bookshelf where Aunt Violet had kept all my personal favorites.
Why not give those a try?
I reached for an old book written by a British schoolteacher—a story about life in a small village, filled with its trials and tribulations. Not much happened, yet everything somehow worked out in the end.
"I have no idea if you’re going to like it," I admitted to Sarah. "But I did. It was… soothing."
"That sounds perfect," she said. "Thanks."
"You’re more than welcome."
I waved them goodbye, locked the door behind them, and turned to Cosmo.
"We only just opened," he pointed out.
"I know," I agreed, scooping him up into a hug. "But you and I have more important things to do."
He squirmed in protest until I finally put him down. "Okay, buddy. Let’s go." I sat at the library computer and pulled up all her customer notes. Once I’d finished that, I cross-referenced them with the books she had listed under each name.
Since I couldn’t be sure which books had been chosen by the readers themselves and which ones she had handpicked for them, I wrote down allof them, for the last two years.
Now came the trickiest part. I had to find the novels and read them or at least skim through them. If my hunch was right, my aunt had identified her killer. Not by naming them, but by pointing at them through the books she’d selected.
Cosmo's eyes grew wider and wider as the stack grew.
"You're not going to read all of them," he said.
"I have to."
"You could get help.”
“And tell them what? That my aunt magically knew people well enough, inside and out, that she could finger a culprit, or at least their motive, by giving them a book?"
