Heathcliff rolled his eyes. I stifled a laugh as I watched the scene. Of course Mum got her way in the end. She’d weaseled into life at Nevermore Bookshop.
Like someone else I know,Quoth teased inside my head. I glanced over to where he sat on top of the armadillo, and shook my fist at him.
It was two days after Helmut convinced Greta to turn herself in to the police. A quick talk with Sylvia Blume had cleared up the remaining threads of the mystery. Her husbandhaddied from eating hemlock, but it was a terrible accident. They’d foraged for wild celery, which they’d both eaten in a stew that evening. The next day, numbness crept from her husband’s toes through his body, eventually reaching his heart. Sylvia hadn’t eaten as much of the stew, and she’d recovered. However, what hadn’t recovered was her reputation. She was already the local ‘witchy woman,’ and now her husband had died of poison. Her herbalism business dried up overnight. She changed her name, moved to Argleton, and made a new start for herself.
Sylvia explained to the police and to us that Ginny had discovered her true identity by accident while digging for more dirt on Dorothy Ingram. She’d been helping Harold Winstone with his hospital history project, which was how they met, and so she had access to all the old hospital records, including death certificates.
Sylvia also explained that Mrs. Winstone had purchased one of her walking sticks a couple of weeks ago as a gift to Harold for when he returned from a research trip to London. Analysis by Jo revealed the dried blood on the stick belonged to Harold. It was the murder weapon, which Brenda Winstone had also used to beat herself and then thrown in the bushes in the hope it would incriminate Dorothy Ingram when the police discovered it. Since they overlooked her carefully-planted evidence, she’d had to direct me toward it.
Jo said Mrs. Winstone would be unlikely to go to jail. Her lawyer would be arguing for insanity, and the jury would be sympathetic, given her age and state of mind.
As for Greta, she wouldn’t get off so lightly. A search of her home revealed some containers and equipment with an arsenic residue. The chimneys in Helmut’s forge were scraped clean, and the collected powder compared to the poison found in Mrs. Scarlett and the Terror of Argleton. They matched perfectly.
That was that. Another mystery solved, another couple of murderers brought to justice. All in a day’s work at Nevermore Bookshop.
If only we were closer to solving the biggest mystery of all. The mystery I cared about most, because it involved three people I adored. Why did Nevermore Bookshop bring fictional characters to life? What did the time-traveling room upstairs have to do with it? And why did Mr. Simson instruct the guys to protect me, and fromwhat?
I slipped into the shadows of the first floor, clicked on my newest purchase – a fuzzy Snoopy lamp with a glowing red nose – and returned to the stack of books I was shelving in the Aviation section. I nearly reached the end of my stack when a noise behind me made me look up.
At first, I couldn’t see anything amiss. No one was up here snapping pictures of book covers to buy on their e-reader later, no kids climbed up the bookshelves, no cheeky shop cats darted between the stacks. “Hello? Is someone there?”
No one answered. I squinted into the room beyond. In the middle of the floor sat a small leatherbound book.
My skin prickled. The air in the room chilled, raising goosepimples along my arms.
Did one of the guys leave it here or something?I hadn’t left that book there, and it was a weird place for it to have fallen – the shelves weren’t close enough for it to have toppled into the center of the room. It sat at an exact right angle to the door, facing me so I couldn’t help but notice it.
It looked… as if it had been placed there.
But by whom? And why?
“Hello?” I called again, crawling across the floor on my hands and knees to stare down at the book. The prickling along my spine increased as my fingers traced a stamped design in the leather.The same design on the cover of that empty book in the occult room.The spine had been hand-stitched, and the edges of the pages were rough and yellowed. This book was old. Antiquarian. Maybe valuable.
Maybe… maybe it was connected to Herman Strepel’s old bindery—
“I’m off, dear!” Mum called up the stairs. “Thank you for arranging this today.”
“It was all you, Mum. I’m all dusty so I won’t come down. I’ll see you tonight!” The shop bell rang, signaling her departure. My heart racing, I slid the book into my lap and flipped open the cover. The pages were hand-written – rows of Greek letters and bright illustrations of a mouse and a frog. In another image, an entire army of mice marched into battle armed with swords and shields.
I flipped to the back of the book. A gasp escaped my throat as I recognized the name and markings. I scrambled to my feet and rushed downstairs.
Downstairs at his desk, Heathcliff was barely visible behind a wall of animal language dictionaries. “I see my mother has recruited you into her pyramid scheme,” I said.
“That woman is the real Terror of Argleton,” he growled. “What’s a pyramid scheme?”
“Never mind that now.” I threw the book down on the desk. “I think the shop is trying to tell us something.”
“How do you figure that?”
“First that mouse shows up and terrorizes the neighborhood, the upstairs room opens up, the mouse re-appears in our suspect’s house, you reveal to me that Mr. Simson told you about me all along, and just now I foundthislying in the middle of the floor upstairs.”
“So some wanker left a book on the floor. They do that all the time.”
“I don’t think so.Lookat it.”
Heathcliff slid the book across the desk and flipped open the cover. “Yes. As I suspected. It’s an old, smelly book.”
I jabbed my finger at the pictures. “Look. Mice! And here…” I flipped to the back and showed him the bookbinder’s markings. “Herman Strepel. Don’t you see? It’s a sign.”
