Another staircase went up to the third floor. At the top was only one room, empty except for a dirty, unkempt bed. Artemis went straight to the dusty curtains and peeked through. The windows faced west, not out toward the street, and the western strip of the Goldmine, all the way to Hillcroft House, was visible.
Artemis turned on her light, and dozens of photos scattered across the floor were caught in it.
The photos were clustered to the left of the bed, trailing toward the door. Artemis kneeled, sweeping her light over each one, examining them without touching them. Sadie kneeled beside her and pointed to a spot on the floor. Artemis swungher light back. A rectangular area free of dust sat among the other pictures.
“Tad got the one of Mom from here,” Sadie said. “And look—his footprints.”
I kneeled. The photos ranged from Polaroids to drugstore-developed prints. A partially torn CVS envelope poked out from underneath the bed. Some were of people, some of places around Addamsville. The bridge. The church. The old town hall. The coal mine entrance. The crowds at the homecoming parade. Bach’s black Mustang, parked by the graveyard. Aunt Greta as a teenager with the old town council members.
Artemis started flipping them over. All had years scrawled on the back in the same handwriting. She started lining them up by year. “Maybe someone was trying to tell a story.”
I reached for the CVS envelope and any other photos still scattered under the bed, shining my own small flashlight through the cobwebs and dust, and found a section of one of the floorboards resting beside the hole it should have covered. Had Tad pulled it up earlier and not put it back, or had whoever left the photos cleared out in a hurry and Tad hadn’t looked under the bed? Frowning, I spread out on my stomach, swiped the cobwebs out of the way, and crawled beneath the bed frame.
Inside the hole was an open shoebox, and in the shoebox was an old map, a mouse skeleton, more photos, and a small tan notebook.
I grabbed the box and wriggled out from under the bed. Artemis glanced inside and uttered a soft, “Effing dead animals.” Sadie took out the map.
“It’s old,” she said, spreading it out on the floor. “From a few decades ago. See, the old town hall is still there. What do these mean, though?” She motioned to scrawled pen lines all across the map, areas of town that had been circled in red, lines drawn from one place to another in black. The most obvious marks were several fat blackXs.
“Those were the locations of the Firestarter Murders,” I said, and my spine knotted up. I handed the new photos to Artemis to look at while I skimmed through the notebook. There was no clue as to who owned it. The handwriting inside matched the writing on the photos, scrawled and loopy, like the person writing couldn’t be bothered to restrain the strokes of the pen. Some of the writing wasn’t legible. There were lists of names, first or last but never both; truncated sentences likein the trees?andbeen here too long;and occasionally pages headed by a location and filled in with small observations.
Old Town Hall Lot 10 12 12
5
Little movement
All red
My glove groaned as my hand tightened around the spine of the notebook. Each one of these pages listed the location ofone of the Firestarter Murders. Each page named the number of ghosts at that location and their behavior. The writing was so vague, no one except the writer would understand what was being recorded.
One marking on the map, in the woods just a little north of where Mom had disappeared, was labeled withPg. 53. Just to see, I flipped the notebook to page fifty-three and found an entry there that was dated and said,Fnd Chvy.
“Is there anything else in there besides dead rodents?” Sadie asked, peering into the box. “I was hoping—I thought maybe we could find something for Grim. Something about the will.”
I shook my head, numb. “I don’t think we’re going to find the will here. Look at this. Do you... do you recognize this handwriting?”
Sadie glanced over the entries in the notebook. Her eyebrows furrowed. “That’s Mom’s. That’s exactly hers.”
I looked around at the mess. The photos. The map. The little notebook crammed from cover to cover with the strangest notes. “This was hers,” I said. “When she went out at night, this must have been where she came. Or at least where she stopped before she went out to find... all of this.” I motioned to the pictures, the notebook.
Sadie sat back, looking lost. “I thought she just went out to clear her head. She was trying to solve the Firestarter Murders?But why? And what do these notes mean?”
Artemis and I glanced at each other. She’d been trying to find Bach’s entrance, and she’d hidden all her notes here. TheFnd Chvypage was dated shortly before Mom and Dad got married, and had to mean “Found Chevy”—so Mom hadfoundthe Chevelle, not made it into what it was. There were pages in the notebook dedicated to Grimshaw House specifically, but I couldn’t make out what she’d been trying to say—she’d been investigating this place, too, and maybe that was why she’d used it as a base of operations. But Sadie couldn’t be allowed to know that.
“Look at these.” Sadie plucked two photos from the floor. The first was Bach’s black Mustang at the graveyard. “This is dated 1996. Bach is a senior at Harrisburg, right? He wouldn’t have even been born.” Before we could reply, she held up the second picture. “1973.”
It was a fuzzy Polaroid of a manor house nearing completion in a clearing surrounded by trees. Construction workers moved in the background, and in the foreground stood a woman holding the hands of three children. All three kids looked like the woman, but the older boy and the girl were smiling, and the littler boy just looked scared.
“Hermit Forester’s wife and kids?” I asked.
“No,” Artemis said. “Hermit Forester is the little boy, with the darker hair and eyes. He would have been our age duringthe Firestarter Murders. He’s in his forties now. The girl is Valerie, who haunts the Now Leaving Addamsville sign on Valleywine. The older boy is Brandon, who’s supposed to be in the woods. Their mom is Lenore.”
Forester’s human mother. Not the firestarter mother.
“No, butlook.” Sadie pointed to a figure in black watching the construction crew work. Black hair. Sunglasses. Pale skin. The picture quality wasn’t great, but I knew Bach at a glance. “He’d have to be fifty, sixty years old.”
“Maybe the Foresters have a biased hiring process,” I said. “You know. ‘Only pale-skinned, black-haired teenagers need apply.’”
