By the Book (The Last Picks #7)

Chapter 8

Tourist season was one of the few times I was grateful for the bike Bobby had given me (it was powder blue and actually super cute, with the minor downside that it required me to, you know, use my legs). Besides, with the Jeep totaled, it was also my only means of independent transportation. August was the busiest time of year for our small town, and tourists thronged the streets. Understandably so, of course. The town was postcard perfect, built right on the water, with a charming mixture of old Victorians and timber beach bungalows and even the occasional concrete-and-glass coastal modern monstrosity that, somehow, seemed to work. Today, the glorious weather only brought out more people, with the sun clear in the sky, and the air perfectly warm and sweet with balsam and the crepes from Crepe You Very Much and the smell of the candied nuts at Seafoam Sweets (they used a fan to blow the aroma into the street, and let me tell you, my knees went weak).

I zipped past cars caught in stop-and-go traffic, grateful for the cool breeze in my face. Happy couples and families spilled out of the shops and galleries, often crossing willy-nilly, which meant cars had to lurch to a stop to avoid a fun little summer bout of vehicular manslaughter. Outside Ancient Mariner Antiques, an eight-year-old boy was trying to look through a telescope he’d obviously just bought (and which was clearly not an antique). A couple of middle-aged women were sharing a funnel cake and an enormous lemonade under the canopy of a sidewalk table. The line for Two Girls and a Scoop (the best ice cream in the world, plus it was a food truck, so in my fantasies, the ice cream came to me) ran almost a full block. It was such a beautiful day, and everyone looked like they were having so much fun, and all that biking was making me a little, uh, flushed, that I was sorely tempted to forget this mess I’d gotten myself into. (Also, that funnel-cake-and-lemonade combo looked seriously good, and I’d used up all my glucose in that weird kind-of-fight with my mom.)

Because I’m a responsible adult, though, I didn’t.

The Hastings Rock Public Library was a long, low building, and it had come from the glorious architectural tradition of “build it cheap and build it fast”—hardboard siding (brown), asphalt shingle roof (brown-ish), small windows, and an extremely uninspiring bulletin board. It had all the aesthetic appeal of a cardboard box. (Actually, that’s not entirely fair to cardboard boxes, because have you seen the ones Crate and Barrel uses to ship their stuff?)

One of the things I’d wondered when I’d moved here was why a charming town like Hastings Rock, which worked so hard to be picturesque, had such a dumpy little library. At the time, I’d assumed it had something to do with limited public funds. Now, I wasn’t so sure. The library took up a lot of land—it had been built, I guessed, before the town had become a tourist destination, and before property had become valuable. It even had its own private parking lot, with signs posted all over warning tourists not to park there. (Incidentally, it was such a temptingly convenient spot that tourists inevitably did park there anyway, and Bobby and the other deputies came through about every quarter hour to ticket and, eventually, tow. Bobby was too kind to use the phrase “fish in a barrel,” but he did have a surprisingly wicked grin when he talked about it sometimes.)

In the light of what I’d learned in the last day, I saw the library differently. It was prime real estate. And to people like the mayor, who thought about the town in terms of seasonality and tourist dollars and—shudder—revenue streams, it probably looked like a waste of space. I mean, on either side of the library, businesses were clumped together, squeezed next to each other as closely as people could manage without a code violation. When a developer did get permission to tear down a building, what went up in its place was usually a multi-storefront structure—basically a tiny strip mall. Because the more stores, the more dollars. If the library did close, the land alone would be worth millions—I wondered, if I’d been at the city council meeting when they’d finally defunded the library, if you could see the dollar signs roll up in the mayor’s eyes.

I locked up my bike and headed toward the library. Then I stopped.

A car was idling at the curb, and behind the wheel, a woman was watching me. Staring at me, actually, and not making any attempt to hide it. She was sitting in a sedan, apparently unconcerned that she was holding up traffic. It took me a moment to recognize her as the woman I’d made accidental eye contact with the night before—solidly built, a crew-neck sweatshirt, a bob of graying hair. And then I realized the sedan was a Chevy Malibu, just like the car that had followed Bobby and me to the mayor’s house.

I turned toward the car with the vague idea of confronting her—at the very least, asking who she was—but she accelerated and cut down the next street. Her license plate was conveniently splashed with mud.

I thought about calling Bobby. But Chevy Malibus were common cars. And even if it wasn’t a coincidence, what was he going to do? She was long gone. So, I headed into the library.

Inside, you could see the same signs of years of neglect—cheap carpeting, even cheaper furniture, fluorescent lights that were simultaneously harsh and dim. It smelled the way old buildings do near the water—when the salt air has engrained itself in the structure—as well as the more familiar, comforting library smells of old paper and hot toner and coffee. Mrs. Shufflebottom had tried to gussy it up. There was a cute back-to-school display near the entrance, and a pennant banner farther back said BOOK IT TO THE BEACH, complete with a little bucket and shovel and beach ball. But it was obvious she was doing the best she could with what she had—which, I now realized, must have been almost nothing.

There hadn’t been a cruiser in the parking lot, and I didn’t see any sign of the sheriff or her deputies. For that matter, I didn’t see Millie either. I had a brief vision of some sort of hostage-style situation, with Mrs. Shufflebottom holding Millie at gunpoint and demanding that the library funding be restored. (Millie would be the world’s worst hostage, of course, and Bobby would rescue her. In the process, his shirt would probably fall off.) But I didn’t see a single SWAT team in action. A steady beep-beep-beep drew my attention to the circulation desk where Stewart was scanning books. He looked tired. Beaten down, even. I thought about slithering away before he could—

“DASH!”

I mean, in Millie’s defense, she probably thought she was whispering.

A hand clutched my arm, and as I swallowed my heart again, I let Millie lead me around the corner and into the children’s section. Keme lurked behind her, clearly ready for someone—probably me—to try something—like complain about a ruptured eardrum.

“OH MY GOD,” Millie whispered—kind of. “ARE YOU OKAY? WHY ARE YOU SO RED?”

Keme’s smirk said he had a good idea why I might be, uh, glowing.

“I’m fine,” I said and yanked my arm free. “What’s going on here? Mrs. Shufflebottom got arrested?”

Keme shook his head.

After a vexed noise, Millie said, “YES! I SAW!”

I tried not to shush her. I really did. Then I gave up and did it anyway. I mean, we were in a library. I kept expecting Mrs. Shufflebottom to swoop down like a vampire bat and carry us all away. (Or something. Did I mention my inner nerd comes out when I’m overheated? It’s the body’s self-defense mechanism against exercise.)

Keme shook his head again—this time with a scowl for me.

“Tell me what happened,” I said. And again, because I couldn’t help myself, “Quietly.”

“I was working at Tidepool Toys across the street,” Millie said. That was news to me, but it didn’t surprise me that Millie might be picking up shifts at businesses around town—everyone in town knew each other, and while Millie might not have excelled at detail work, she was great with people. Especially people of, uh, a certain age. “And I was helping this lady take all the stuffing out of a teddy bear to see if it was biodegradable—”

No, I told myself. Do not ask. Don’t even try to figure it out.

“—and then the sheriff came out of the library with Mrs. Shufflebottom, and they got in the sheriff’s car and drove away.”

“Was she in handcuffs?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Millie said. “But she looked SCARED! And then I texted Keme, and he said he was already in the library because he was studying—”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What?”

Keme’s glare leveled up to a ten, and a hint of red came into his cheeks.

“—and Keme said he saw Mrs. Shufflebottom and Stewart get into a big fight before the sheriff arrested her.”

When I checked Keme, he shrugged.

“What were they fighting about?” I asked.

“They weren’t really fighting.”

And that was it. That was all he said.

“Then what happened?” I asked.

“Mrs. Shufflebottom asked him what he’d done. Had he checked in the books from last night. Had he reshelved the books. What time had he clocked in.”

And that was it. Keme stopped. Again.

“And?” I asked.

Keme stared blankly at me.

He does this to me on purpose, by the way.

“What happened?” My frustration made my whisper a little more tightly wound than usual.

“Stewart answered her questions.”

“That doesn’t sound like a fight,” I said.

“It was their tones,” Millie said—although how she would know, I had no idea.

I turned a dark look on her.

“Kind of like your tone,” she informed me. “Like remember that time Fox ate the last twice-baked potato, and you said, ‘I hope you enjoyed it,’ only because of your tone, everybody knew you didn’t mean that you really hoped they enjoyed it.”

Keme nodded. “You meant go—”

“It doesn’t matter what I meant,” I said in a rush.

“Mrs. Shufflebottom was mad ,” Millie said—apparently based on her much lengthier communication with Keme. “And Stewart too. And Keme and I have a PLAN!” She bounced on her toes as she said it. “Are you ready? You go talk to Stewart, and then I’m going to DISTRACT HIM!”

At that volume, I thought, it would be hard not to be distracted. For that matter, it would be hard not to be concussed.

“A plan for what?” I asked.

“Just go talk to him, you donkey,” Keme said.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was that.

I gave Keme and Millie sixty seconds to get a head start. And then I headed toward the circulation desk, where Stewart was checking in books and organizing them on a cart. Thrilling reading: 1902 History of the Town of Hastings Rock and Alphabetical List of Ship Registers, Astoria, Oregon , and Klikamuks Bay, being an ancient neighborhood of Hastings Rock, with an Historical Address , and yes, I’m sure you were wondering, even The History of Ridge County, as told by Sarah Gage to her Granddaughter .

When Stewart saw me, he said, “Dash!” It wasn’t exactly a shout, but it was certainly an enthusiastic whisper. His fatigue seemed to be forgotten, and now he looked a little too excited to see me. When I got closer, he said in a slightly less enthusiastic whisper, “I’m so glad you’re here. I wanted to talk to you.”

“If it’s about the mayor, I can’t say anything. The sheriff asked me not to talk about it.” That wasn’t quite true, but I thought it sounded plausible. “Stewart, I heard Mrs. Shufflebottom—”

Stewart adjusted his Coke-bottle glasses and spoke over me. “I wanted to talk to you about Hemlock House.”

In my mind, I jumped from Stewart’s previous conversation about Hemlock House to the topic of Nathaniel Blackwood’s diary. I decided to go with it. “Well, I don’t know anything about the diary, either.” Then a thought occurred to me. “Wait, did you tell me they never let you look at it?”

With a shake of his head, Stewart said, “Not even a glance. The ‘expert’ said he didn’t want a layman to damage it. Layman?” Outrage made the Coke-bottle glasses tip forward on Stewart’s nose. “I told him I work in the rare books room all the time. I mean it’s not actually a rare books room, but look.” He motioned to the books on the cart. (Another one was The Lives of the Van Deusens, Hastings Rock, Ridge County, Oregon. It sounded like the stuff extremely dry nightmares were made of.) “It’s our genealogy room, but still. In Hastings Rock, that means dealing with valuable items. Most of these books are irreplaceable.”

“But you let people check them out?” I asked.

“No,” he shook his head. “These were on loan to the historical society. I’m making sure everything’s here. Some of our members are, uh, overzealous about protecting our heritage.”

For a moment, I entertained the possibility that someone from the historical society might have taken the diary. But since I had no idea who was in the historical society, that didn’t seem helpful.

Stewart was still talking, I realized, and I tuned in to catch the end of what he was saying. “—he didn’t like that. And he really didn’t like it when I told him Nathaniel Blackwood couldn’t have left a diary because his widow burned all his papers.”

“Who, George?”

Stewart nodded.

“But it’s possible, right?” I asked. “I mean that happens sometimes. She might have missed the diary. Or he might have hidden it. A servant could have found it or rescued it. It could have stayed in a family for generations before someone decided to sell it.”

“But why would it have been in that woman’s family?” Stewart asked. “The Hastings Rock Historical Society—I’m the president—has done a lot of good work over the years on Hemlock House. Lots of research into how it was built and furnished. When the house fell into disrepair, we saved a lot of the original paperwork. We helped with the restoration projects. And Vivienne always consulted us before she made any changes. Well, she did ignore us when we told her she couldn’t add cable, but most of the time she was very respectful.”

“And you’ve never heard anything about a diary?”

Stewart gave another—even more emphatic—shake of his head. “But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“It wasn’t?” That seemed hard to believe—if there was a hotter topic than the mayor’s murder and a stolen rare book and Mrs. Shufflebottom being arrested, nobody had told me. If this conversation ventured into “you wear glasses too, so we should date” territory (it’s happened before), I was going to book it (PUN! Wait, is that a pun?), even if it meant crawling out a return chute.

“Have you ever thought about turning Hemlock House into a historical site?”

“Uh, no. Should I?”

“You definitely should. It’s a fantastic way to ensure adequate funding to preserve locations of historical significance.”

The only part of that sentence I heard was adequate funding . “What would that mean?”

“Well, mostly you’d charge money for people to tour the property. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think it’s got great potential. You have a built-in customer base because so many people come here during the tourist season. Plus, you’d have a big advantage because a lot of our visitors happen to be older, and that demographic tends to be more interested in cultural experiences, like a tour of a unique historical home. Think about all the people who don’t have anything to do on a rainy day—I bet you’d sell out. Plus, you could still use the house for events, which I understand you’ve been considering.”

“Huh. I guess I’ll have to think about it.”

“You’d have to move out of the house, of course, and you’d need to figure out how to set up a business, transfer the deed, get some sort of historical status or designation. I could help you with all that.” He seemed to hear himself, and a blush set his face on fire. “Mrs. Carver did a lot of good things for our town, but I always wished she’d let more people see Hemlock House. It’s an amazing space, and there’s really nothing else like it. A lot of people who do this find a way to stay on or near the property—I know that the coach house has its own flat, so you wouldn’t even have to find somewhere new to live.”

No, I thought, but I’d have to kick out Indira. And it would mean not living in Hemlock House. And even though the house was insane and way too big for one person and, let’s face it, was occasionally seriously spooky the nights when Bobby had to work and I was all alone (I mean, it’s a Class V haunted mansion)—it was my home. And the thought of letting all those people tramp through my home—the first place that had ever felt like mine —made me sad in a way I hadn’t experienced before.

On the other hand, money. Enough money to keep the lights on (literally). Enough money, maybe, that I could keep trying this writing thing and see if I could get it to work.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll have to think about it.”

“I can show you some similar places,” Stewart said. “And I have a friend you could talk to if you wanted to know more—he’s worked at a few different preservation societies, and I bet he could help with some of the business side of things.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll think about that.” I glanced around. At this hour of the day, the library was even quieter than usual, with only a handful of patrons in sight—Aric Akhtar, reading one of those newspapers-on-a-stick thingies; a young mom I’d seen before, whose three boys were excitedly overturning book bins in the children’s area; and a woman I knew belonged to the extended Archer clan, who was nose deep in—sigh—one of my mom’s books. ( The Girl Who Was Murdered , in case you have to know.) The familiar blanket of silence lay over everything. This was my chance to try again, so I said, “Someone told me Mrs. Shufflebottom got arrested.”

Stewart nodded. “Oh, you know what else you should consider? Merch. I bet people would love a T-shirt of Hemlock House.”

“Hold on—she did get arrested?” I did another quick check—the boys in the children’s section were now climbing on the display cubes, but otherwise, there was none of the hue and cry I’d been expecting. “Why is everyone so calm?”

“Well, the sheriff took her away in her car. But it’s Mrs. Shufflebottom, you know? It’s not like she made a scene. You should do 3D puzzles, too. Can you imagine how cool that would be, a 3D puzzle of Hemlock House?”

“Uh, right.”

“STEWART!”

Guess who?

A heartbeat later, Millie came around the corner at a power walk. She was waving both arms—you know, in case we hadn’t heard her—and continued, “STEWART, COME QUICK! THE WATER FOUNTAIN IS LEAKING!”

It wasn’t a library voice.

It wasn’t an inside voice.

It wasn’t even an outside voice, not unless you were on an artillery range.

Stewart’s eyes got huge, and he dropped the book he’d been about to check in and left the scanner dangling by its cord. He hurried toward Millie. I decided this was my chance to escape further Hemlock House-related conversations, but Stewart turned back, waved impatiently, and called, “Come on!”

Millie was already leading Stewart deeper into the library, so I trudged after them. As soon as they turned the corner, Keme appeared, coming in the opposite direction. He must have been waiting for them, because he caught my arm, turned me back toward the circulation desk, and added—unnecessarily, in my opinion—“Not you, you donkey.”

“I’m so confused right now.”

He marched me behind the desk toward a door marked LIbrARIAN. Then he gave it an experimental rattle. Locked.

“If you can buy me enough time,” I said, “I might be able to pick it—”

Keme took out his wallet, produced a Fred Meyer’s card, and loided the lock in one easy movement. The door popped open.

“Are you James Bond?” I asked.

He smirked and nodded for me to go first.

Inside, the office was dimly lit and smelled like Lipton tea. It was even quieter than the library’s main area, and the click of the door shutting punctuated the silence. An L-shaped desk occupied most of the space, the desktop covered by an enormous monitor, a printer, and avalanches of paper. (I have yet to meet a single librarian who fully believes in the benefits of going digital.) A pair of chairs and several filing cabinets filled the rest of the space. On one of the filing cabinets, a wooden sign said BEING A LIbrARIAN IS AS EASY AS A-B-C. Vinyl letters on the wall behind the desk informed us THE BOOK IS BETTER. And a poster showed an old-fashioned picture of a man’s face. It had been x-ed out in stylized red spray paint, and below it were the words DOWN WITH DEWEY.

Keme chose that moment to kick me in the ankle.

“Ow!” When he made an impatient gesture, I said, “I’m getting a sense of the space. And you aren’t doing anything either.”

He tried to kick me again, so I hurried behind the desk.

“Look for anything connected to the mayor,” I told Keme. “Or the library budget. Or the fundraiser auction. Or the book. Oh, and see if you can find my patron record, because I know I returned Fat Catz 3 on time, and I’m not going to pay another fine—”

A tea bag hit me in the face.

(Keep your mind out of the gutter.)

I decided to choose love and embrace forgiveness and walk the higher path. Then, when Keme wasn’t looking, I threw the tea bag back at him. I missed, but only because those things are totally not aerodynamic.

While Keme worked his way through the filing cabinets, I attacked the mounds of papers on the desk. Mrs. Shufflebottom was obviously an amazing librarian. She probably had a medal somewhere. And a plaque. And a trophy. So I was sure there was some kind of method to her madness. But since I didn’t know what that was, instead, it looked like she was super stressed and overwhelmed and might have, maybe, let things slide.

Some of the papers were clearly important—invoices from book vendors, packing slips, utility bills, payroll reports. Others were…less so. There was a flyer for the library’s beachcombers’ club. There was a page of notes that must have been from a few years ago, because it was Mrs. Shufflebottom’s introduction for Vivienne Carver at a library reading. And there was a child’s craft—a paper plate meant to look like a face, with strips of paper glued on for hair. I was guessing it was supposed to be Mrs. Shufflebottom. I also guessed that if a child made a craft of my face and it turned out like that, I would have taken a bottle of gin to the back of the stacks and screamed into a dictionary for, say, an hour.

A soft metallic noise made me look up. Keme was leaning against one of the filing cabinets, tapping on an open drawer. It was stuffed full of documents.

“Good job, buddy,” I said in the tone I knew would annoy Keme the most. “That’s a filing cabinet. You’re doing so well!”

Do you know how with cats, sometimes you know when they’re about to pounce?

Yeah, Keme’s like that.

He chose to restrain himself, though, and wiggled one of the folders free from the drawer. Then he turned it so I could see it.

LIbrARY BUDGET was printed on the folder’s tab. And then FY 2017.

Because I was a genius (according to my parents), I immediately understood that FY stood for fiscal year. I was less clear on what a fiscal year actually was, but it sounded promising.

Keme made a gesture to indicate the rest of the drawer, which I took to mean the other files were also budgets. I nodded and said, “Better start reading.”

Outrage flooded his expression.

Just to be safe, I turned my face down and pretended to look at the papers again. If he saw me grinning, it would probably start World War III.

As Keme dug into the budget files—hey, better him than me—I continued to search Mrs. Shufflebottom’s desk. I struck gold by pure, dumb luck: I grabbed the stack of papers that were still in the printer tray, and then I stared at the printout of an email that, according to the timestamp, had been sent that morning. (Remember what I said about librarians wanting hard copies of everything ?)

The email had been sent by Mrs. Shufflebottom to [email protected]. The text was terse— This is the third email I’ve sent this morning, in addition to eight phone calls. No one answers when I call, and I have yet to receive a response to my messages. THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. (Side note: I was starting to understand why Millie was her favorite.) I EXPECT AN IMMEDIATE REPLY. I AM DOCUMENTING THESE ATTEMPTS TO CONTACT YOU .

The next page in the stack was a printout of the previous email. And then the email before that. (Apparently, she hadn’t been kidding about documenting this stuff.) I took out my phone and tried to go to www.heritageguard.com, but I got one of those dumb pages where they tell you someone else already owns the domain name, but they’ll be happy to sell it to you for thousands of dollars.

That definitely wasn’t good—whoever Heritage Guard was supposed to be, they didn’t seem to exist. It didn’t take me long to figure out why Mrs. Shufflebottom was freaking out. A little farther down in the printout tray, I found an insurance policy issued by Heritage Guard. The only thing covered by the policy appeared to be Nathaniel Blackwood’s diary, and it looked like it had cost Mrs. Shufflebottom ten thousand dollars.

There was no way that was right.

But on the next page, there was a copy of a check, drawing on the Hastings Rock Public Library’s account. The check was for ten thousand dollars, and it was written to be paid to George Chin. In the memo, it said, Heritage Guard .

I took a moment to let my mind be fully blown.

Mrs. Shufflebottom had paid George Chin ten thousand dollars for an insurance policy that, I was guessing, was a total fake. And if the insurance policy was bogus, what did that say about the diary?

Flipping through the rest of the pages was like moving backward through a snapshot sequence of the events that had brought us here. George Chin’s offer to broker the appropriate insurance—Mrs. Shufflebottom could write the check directly to him, he assured her. And before that, Colleen Worman’s message stating that she was thrilled the library would accept her donation, but on the advice of her attorney, could they insure the diary until the auction was complete?

I wasn’t exactly a financial wizard (this coming from the guy whose electricity had been shut off), but I didn’t think even I would have fallen for it.

On the other hand, though, maybe I was being too harsh. Mrs. Shufflebottom had been desperate to save the library. And desperate people did desperate things.

How far did that desperation go? If Mrs. Shufflebottom had believed that the mayor had stolen the diary, would she have killed to get it back? I wanted to say no. But people had killed for less.

I finished reading through the emails and assembled my best approximation of a timeline. From what I gathered, it looked like Colleen Worman had contacted Mrs. Shufflebottom out of the blue in early June. The timing seemed significant; by that point, Mrs. Shufflebottom must have known that the city council was planning on defunding the library. Under any other circumstance, she probably would have been suspicious of an unexpected—and unsolicited—offer, especially one as generous as Colleen’s. In hindsight, Colleen’s explanation that she was a widow, her husband had been a collector of rare books, she wondered if she might donate a book of local interest, perhaps the library could use it to raise funds if they weren’t interested in keeping it permanently in their collection, looked way too convenient. To Mrs. Shufflebottom, in her hour of need, it must have felt like the heavens had opened.

They’d begun a process of working out the details of the donation and auction. Colleen had recommended an appraisal from a rare book dealer she’d used before. Enter George Chin. After a week, which Mrs. Shufflebottom must have spent on pins and needles, George wrote back, happy to confirm that the book was authentic and would bring, in his estimate, somewhere in the high six figures. I wasn’t sure if antiquarians normally provided figures like that, but in this case, it was clear why George had done so—to set the hook.

In her next email, Colleen asked that, considering the unexpected value of the diary, a portion of the auction proceeds go to a literacy charity called Oregon Read-a-Thon. Big surprise, when I did a search on my phone, Oregon Read-a-Thon didn’t exist.

Because I was so smart, I was starting to suspect that the diary wasn’t real. The whole thing stank—Colleen showing up out of nowhere to offer the diary, her recommendation of a book dealer who could authenticate and appraise it, the insanely expensive insurance paid directly to George Chin, the request to split the proceeds of the auction. When I did a search on Colleen Worman, I got a few results—someone at the University of Colorado, an elementary school teacher, etc. No wealthy benefactresses. George Chin, on the other hand, turned out to be a real book dealer based out of Portland. The picture on the website matched the man I’d met at Hemlock House. That was interesting, but I wasn’t sure what it meant. If he really was a rare book dealer, had he done this kind of thing before?

Regardless of whether he had, it all made a crooked kind of sense. Colleen and George had been in on the scam together, and they’d even gone so far as to show up in person to the auction to carry off their con. If things had gone according to plan, they would have walked away with ten thousand dollars, plus whatever their cut of the auction price turned out to be. Not bad for a couple of months’ work.

What I didn’t understand, though, was their endgame. Sure, they’d get some money. But if the diary was a fake, wouldn’t someone eventually figure it out? Were they going to take the money and disappear? Or did they think the forgery—or whatever it was—would hold up to scrutiny?

I was still turning that question over in my head when something—no, some one —bumped the door. Keme’s head whipped up. I froze, clutching the printouts. A second passed. Then another. No sounds came.

I hurried over to the door and pressed my ear against it. I didn’t hear anything, so after another second, I inched the door open. Stewart was hustling away from Mrs. Shufflebottom’s office, pushing a book truck so fast he was about to break the speed limit. He was probably trying to act natural, which he totally spoiled by glancing over his shoulder. Our eyes met. And then he really started to haul, uh, butt as he raced toward the stacks. One of the book truck’s casters was squeaking so loudly I thought it was going to fly off.

Keme had come up behind me, so I shoved the printouts at him. “Make sure Millie’s okay,” I said. “And make copies of these.”

He opened his mouth, but he snapped it shut again and nodded.

I was making my way around the circulation desk when my parents crept into the library. Crept doesn’t do it justice. They snuck. They sneaked. They skulked (should it be skulkt?). It was this bizarre, hunched-over, scurrying hustle, and if they’d been dressed in trench coats and fedoras with billowing scarves wrapped around them, they couldn’t have stood out any more painfully. For what felt like a small eternity, all I could do was stare at them and think that this was where my genetic material had come from.

They, on the other hand, didn’t even seem to see me. They rushed across the open central area of the library toward the stacks. My dad whispered—loudly—“I saw him go in there.”

“I know, Jonny,” my mom whispered back—loudly. “I saw him too.”

And with a sinking feeling, I realized they weren’t here as some horrible joke or through cruel, cosmic chance.

They were snooping.

“Hey!” I said.

(Okay, it was a little louder than just saying it.)

Aric Akhtar looked up from People and shushed me.

By that point, my parents were already disappearing into the stacks, so I hurried after them. From ahead of me, their whispers floated back, wordless but still unmistakable, and underscored by the squeak-squeak-squeak of the book truck. The aisles between the bookshelves were narrow and dim. Usually, I liked the shadowy stillness—it was peaceful, and I could pretend I had the library all to myself. Right then, though, I was wondering how long you had to be dating someone before you could ask them to help you cover up a murder. Bobby and I had only been together for a couple of months, but we’d known each other for over a year. That had to count for something, right?

At the next intersection, I stopped and listened. Voices came from my right, so I turned toward them. As I did, I caught a glimpse of movement behind me. I stopped, but whatever it was, it was gone now—someone walking one of the intersecting aisles, I decided.

I hurried after the voices. As they grew louder, I realized the squeak-squeak of the caster had stopped. I turned down another aisle and found myself looking at the door to the library’s genealogical and historical research room. The door was open, and the lights were on. My parents’ voices floated out to me.

Their words became clear as I drew closer.

“—give you five more seconds,” my dad said. “Make the smart choice. Tell us what you know.”

“But I don’t know anything,” Stewart said. “I don’t even know—”

“Confess!” my mom shouted.

Let me tell you: it caught us all off guard.

Stewart screamed.

My dad said a word you can’t say during story time.

I jumped halfway out of my Mexico 66s. Then I stumbled into a run. As I headed into the genealogy room, I caught that flicker of movement at the corner of my eye again, but before I could focus on it, my attention was gripped by the scene in front of me.

It looked like my parents had caught Stewart in the midst of returning the genealogy books to the shelves. Stewart’s face was flushed, his eyes were wide, and a hint of sweat glistened at his hairline. Even though my mom was shorter than Stewart by at least six inches, she’d somehow managed to corner him. Stewart had wheeled the book truck between them as improvised cover, and he held out his hands like he could fend them off. He’d put on white cotton gloves since the last time I’d seen him, and they made him look like a clown. Or a mime. Or maybe like a magician.

My dad had worn a corduroy jacket, which he was now pushing back to reveal the gun holstered at his side. It was actually way less scary than my mom—I would have picked the gun any day.

“What in the world is going on in here?” I asked. “Are you two insane?”

“What are you doing here?” my dad asked.

“Dash, you need to leave,” my mom said. “We’re taking care of this.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said.

I was about to say more, but sometimes life has a way of punctuating sentences.

Because that was when the door to the genealogy room slammed shut.