Chapter 18
Even with all the lights on, the library felt spooky this late at night. Our footsteps whispered against the high-traffic carpet, and the fluorescents hummed overhead: Sheriff Acosta, Mrs. Shufflebottom, Stewart, and I.
“I don’t understand,” Mrs. Shufflebottom said. “What’s the emergency? What’s going on?”
“Why are we here?” Stewart asked.
“Bear with us,” Sheriff Acosta said. Her tone suggested that she herself was exercising a rapidly diminishing reserve of patience, and I could feel her gaze on me even when I wasn’t looking at her.
I led the way into the stacks, following the path I’d taken—God, earlier that day? The day before? It seemed like an eternity ago. The sound of our steps changed in the narrow aisles, muffled by the books that surrounded us. The smell of old paper grew stronger.
The genealogy room was locked, but Mrs. Shufflebottom opened it for us. We stepped inside. Someone had replaced the register on the vent, but otherwise, it looked unchanged from the last time I’d been here. Stewart’s book truck was even still there—apparently, he’d never gotten around to putting away the rest of the books.
“I really don’t—” Mrs. Shufflebottom began.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll explain. It all started when—”
“You stole the diary!” my dad shouted. He charged into the genealogy room with my mom at his side.
Stewart’s eyes bugged out. Mrs. Shufflebottom flinched, and the color drained from her face. Sheriff Acosta looked like she wasn’t thrilled with this sudden development.
“Hold on,” I tried.
“It’s the oldest trick in the book, so to speak,” my mom said. “You were the one who discovered the book was missing. That means we all had to take your word for it that the book was already gone when you unlocked the door. But it wasn’t, was it? It was still there. And you took it!”
“I know this is exciting for everyone,” I said, “but explaining what happened is kind of my thing.”
“Stewart was so adamant about the diary being a fake,” my dad said, “that you worried he might be right. And if you auctioned off a fake, it could come back to bite you—and the library.”
“Better for everyone,” my mom said, “if the book was stolen. And then you could claim the insurance money, and no one would get hurt.”
“You didn’t know the policy was a scam, though,” my dad said. “But that didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting the book. And as soon as you could safely get away, you did the only thing you could think of: you came to the library and dropped the book in the return chute. The sheriff saw you on the security footage. You thought it would be safe there until you collected it the next morning. That’s why you were so cagey about where you went the night the mayor was killed; you didn’t want anyone to wonder why you’d stopped by the library.”
“Seriously?” I asked. “In the first place, I’m the one who solved it—”
“It was all obvious once we considered the possibility that Mrs. Shufflebottom might have been lying,” my mom said. “The unreliable narrator is a staple of the genre.”
My dad nodded. “Pretty basic stuff, kiddo.”
“But she’s not a narrator,” I said. “She’s a librarian. And how did you get in here?”
“Picked the lock,” my dad said with practiced casualness.
I looked at Mrs. Shufflebottom.
“One of the latches doesn’t always catch,” she said apologetically.
My dad’s look of shocked outrage was priceless.
“That’s all well and good in theory—” the sheriff began.
“It’s true,” Mrs. Shufflebottom said. “It’s exactly as you said. I took the diary. Stewart was so certain . And the whole thing had felt…wrong from the beginning. Then the cupcakes fell, and everyone was distracted, and I realized it was my chance. At first I only wanted to stop the diary from going to auction. But then I started thinking, What if we were able to get the insurance money? That would have gone a long way toward keeping the library afloat. And nobody would have been hurt, not really.”
I wasn’t sure about that last part. I didn’t love the whole corporations are people too argument, but we were talking about a lot of money, and it didn’t seem like Mrs. Shufflebottom had been thinking clearly. To judge by the look on the sheriff’s face, I didn’t think she was persuaded either. All I said, though, was “The cupcakes definitely bought you some extra time. They also made us focus on the mayor, which was a mistake in hindsight. I bet if we asked Colleen, we’d find out the mayor was trying to get her attention—that’s why she was saying, ‘Excuse me.’ And Colleen pushed her or tripped her or something, trying to get away before she could be recognized, and that’s what sent us on a wild goose chase. It gave you plenty of time to bring the book here and hide it. The only problem was that when you came to the library the next morning—”
“The book was missing,” my mom said over me. “Someone had already found it.”
I said a few choice words. “I was getting ready to explain—”
“You didn’t know who could have taken it,” my dad said. “You didn’t have any idea where it could have gone. You couldn’t ask anyone if they’d seen it, not directly—not without revealing your own part in things. That’s why Millie saw you pick a fight with Stewart.”
“Exactly,” I said, “and Stewart wasn’t going to tell you the truth anyway because—”
“—Stewart was the one who found the book in the return chute and took it,” my mom said.
I said something under my breath that made the sheriff’s eyebrows shoot up, but all she did was turn to Stewart and say, “Is that true?”
Stewart’s face was bright red. Drops of sweat glistened at his hairline, and he shifted his gaze from the sheriff to me to my mom to the middle distance. He didn’t once look at Mrs. Shufflebottom. “No. No! Why would I—I would have said something. I would have called the police!”
“If it had been any other book,” I said, “maybe. But it wasn’t any other book. See, that was what bothered me about the whole case. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want the diary if it was a fake. But my parents reminded me of something very important: the best forgeries use materials that are authentic to the time period. That’s why George had old-fashioned ink, and that’s why he sewed the binding instead of gluing it—that kind of thing. But the trickiest part to pull off, with a book forgery, is the paper. Modern paper just isn’t made the same way. My mom and dad reminded me that forgers often use books from the same period to create their imitations. They’ll cut blank pages from the back, for example. Then the paper can pass any sort of appraisal because it’s authentic.” Stewart stared at me. The Coke-bottle glasses distorted his eyes, but his mouth hung open, and he was breathing shallowly. “I should have realized when I saw those emails in George’s account from antiquarians asking about the value of a rare manuscript that had come on the market. That’s a staple of the art heist genre: the diary was valuable,” I said. “but only because of—”
“—the book they used to forge it,” my dad said. “Sarah Gage’s diary, which was later published as Astor’s Arcadia . George cut a couple of pages from the back and wrote a few entries that could pass as Nathaniel Blackwood’s—enough that he could show them to Mrs. Shufflebottom and display them at the auction—but he didn’t forge an entire diary. He didn’t have time. The rest of the diary was undamaged.”
“You saw it,” my mom said. “And you knew it was worth a fortune to the right person. That’s why, when you found it in the return chute, you didn’t say anything to Mrs. Shufflebottom. And you certainly didn’t call the police. You took the diary, and you hid it.”
By that point, Stewart had recovered enough to shake his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never would have—I can’t believe—” But he couldn’t quite meet Mrs. Shufflebottom’s gaze when he said, “Agatha, you know me.”
“What is Astor’s Arcadia ?” the sheriff asked. “If it’s so valuable, why haven’t I heard of it before?”
“It’s the title they gave to the print edition of Sarah Gage’s diary,” Mrs. Shufflebottom said, her voice trembling with a riot of emotions. “A number of diaries were published in the nineteenth century. Sarah Gage’s was one of them, mostly because of regional interest. She detailed a lot of the abuses perpetrated by John Jacob Astor—the man for whom Astoria is named. Astor ordered the copies collected and destroyed, and by then, the diary was lost.”
“You’re suggesting that George Chin used this diary to create a forgery. But if Chin was an expert in antiquarian books, shouldn’t he have recognized how valuable it was?”
“Not unless he was an expert on local history,” I said. “As far as he was concerned, it was just the diary of a woman named Sarah Gage; that name might have rung a bell, maybe, but my guess is that by that point, George was in such a frenzy to get Wanda off his back that he only cared that the diary was old enough to pass a superficial inspection. He probably already had the diary on hand—something he picked up cheap at an estate sale without really knowing what it was, and something he considered relatively worthless. Perfect for something disposable like a forgery.”
“I didn’t do any of this,” Stewart said, edging toward the door. “I don’t even know what they’re talking about.”
“Stay right where you are, Stewart,” the sheriff said.
“That’s a strange thing to say,” I told him, “because out of everyone in this room, you’re the only one who knows enough about local history that you should know about Astor’s Arcadia . I even saw you with a book by Sarah Gage’s granddaughter when I stopped by the library. But that’s not really the point. See, whether you admit it or not, it’s going to be easy enough to prove that you knew about Sarah Gage’s diary, that you had it, and that you were trying to sell it, because—”
“—you emailed several rare book dealers asking for a valuation of, quote, a holograph manuscript of Astor’s Arcadia ,” my dad said. “A holograph manuscript is one fancy way of saying, in this case, a diary. The sheriff will be able to track the IP address on those emails back to you.”
The color drained from Stewart’s face.
“Those emails are the reason George Chin is dead,” my mom said. “When you reached out to those rare book dealers, one of them—maybe more—contacted George. People knew George. He had a good reputation in the area. They wanted to know if he was familiar with this book. I’m guessing that they even forwarded him your original email, although George would have been careful to delete that. He must have recognized Sarah Gage’s name from the diary he’d used. And he realized he’d let a fortune slip through his fingers.”
“See, Wanda was still breathing down George’s neck,” my dad said. “But Sarah Gage’s diary was worth enough money that George thought maybe—just maybe—he could take it himself and make a run for it. That’s why he told Wanda and Colleen that there was a valuable book hidden at Hemlock House. That’s why they trapped us in here—so they’d have time to search. And the search kept them busy while George went to your house and tried to find the diary.” Something changed in my dad’s voice—it was deeper, more solemn, as he said, “You found him going through your belongings when you got home.”
“None of this is—” Stewart tried to draw himself up. “This is insane. I’m a librarian.”
“You’re a library assistant,” Mrs. Shufflebottom said. “No librarian would do this. Librarians serve the community, Stewart. Not the other way around.”
“It’s all a theory. You can’t prove any of it.”
“The emails—” my dad said.
“Screw the emails!” (Stewart used, uh, an ampler vocabulary.)
“It’s not only the emails,” I said. “The sheriff found tire tracks where George’s body was dropped. They’ll match those tracks to your car. There’ll be other physical evidence, more details that begin to line up. We’ll check the library’s security system, and it’ll show that you were the first one in the library the morning after Mrs. Shufflebottom hid the diary here. And we’ll see what the deputies can turn up with Luminol.”
Stewart was still shaking his head, the movement rote, almost mechanical. “None of this is true. You can’t prove any of this.”
“This is your chance to confess,” my mom said. “The sheriff seems like a reasonable woman.”
“I’m not confessing anything!”
“If that’s how you want to play it,” my dad said.
The moment hung. Stewart’s baffled expression suggested he wasn’t sure what was happening or why. He glanced at the door and took a sidling step.
“Oh, Stewart?” my dad said. “There’s just one more thing.”
(If you’ve never heard someone say that in real life, it’s incredible .)
My mom’s smile was cold and thin. “Your fingerprints are on the diary.”
“I told you,” Stewart snapped, “I don’t have the diary. I’ve never had the diary.”
“Of course you did,” my dad said. “We know you have it because once we realized Mrs. Shufflebottom brought it to the library, there was only one other person who could have taken it. Mrs. Shufflebottom must have suspected you as well, but she couldn’t confront you without revealing her own guilt. But we also know because we saw you with it.”
Mrs. Shufflebottom’s wide-eyed gaze came to me.
“I didn’t realize it at the time,” I said. “It wasn’t until I remembered—”
“The gloves,” my mom said.
I bit my tongue. Hard.
“Stewart didn’t have any qualms about handling the genealogical books on the cart,” my mom said, “but when we confronted him in here, he was wearing cotton gloves. He wouldn’t have put them on unless he’d already recognized the diary and realized how valuable it was.”
“The kind you wear to handle rare books,” I said to the sheriff. Nodding to the locked bookcase, I said, “Second row from the top, Mrs. Shufflebottom, if you’d do the honors.”
After searching through a ring of jangling keys, Mrs. Shufflebottom unlocked the sliding glass panel. She studied the books on the shelf. And then she drew out a slim blue volume. You could tell it had been knocked around a bit over the years, the corners bent, the cover scuffed. When she opened the cover, the ink was brown with age, but you could still read what it said: Sarah Gage, her diary . She leafed forward, barely touching the pages. At first, there was only more of the same: dated entries written in the same neat, slanting script.
And then the handwriting changed, and I knew I was seeing George’s forgery. It looked like no more than a few pages—barely enough to create the illusion of a complete diary, and doubtless the reason why no one had been allowed to examine the book. Still, it had worked.
“I shouldn’t be touching this,” Mrs. Shufflebottom said, and she held the diary so gingerly that for a horrified moment, I thought she was going to drop it. “I should be wearing gloves.”
“Let’s not handle the evidence,” the sheriff said. “I’ll get a bag—”
“No.” The voice was raspy, and it sounded like a lot of bad nights in a lot of bad places. It made me think of lounge lizards and colored lights turned low and the mindless crooning of people who didn’t know when to shut up. “Nobody move.”
I’d seen her before, the woman in the doorway. That was my first thought. In an I LOVE HASTINGS ROCK sweatshirt with matching sweatpants, and with her graying bob, she could have passed at first glance for one of the mall walker brigade. But then the other details stood out: the mud staining one leg and both sneakers; the twig snarled in her hair; the extremely well-defined biceps. And then, of course, there was the gun.
She pointed it at the sheriff and said, “Drop your weapon.”
Moving slowly, Sheriff Acosta lifted her gun out of its holster and lowered it to the floor. Then she displayed her hands in an open, easy way. After a moment, she said, “You must be Wanda.”
Wanda made a peremptory gesture with the gun. “Put the book on the table. The rest of you, shuffle over there. Everyone plays nice, and we’ll all get out of this just fine.”
“There are a lot of people looking for you right now,” the sheriff said. “Why not make your life easier? Put down that gun, and we can talk about this.”
“Looking for me?” The sneer showed in her voice, if not her face. “Why? You heard him—the librarian killed George.”
“Library assistant,” Mrs. Shufflebottom said primly. “He is not a librarian.”
With quiet calm, the sheriff said, “If that’s true, then you don’t have anything to worry about. Put down the gun—”
Her laugh sounded like steel burrs. “Nice try.” She made that gesture with the gun again. “I said everybody move, so move.”
We started to shift toward the back of the room, and as we retreated, Wanda advanced. When she reached the diary, she cast me a sharp smile. “I know George thought he was being smart, sending me after you like an idiot while he got the diary for himself. But he wasn’t entirely wrong, was he? Here I am, and here you are, and here’s the diary.” Her smile broadened. “Sorry about the house.”
As she reached for the diary, her hand holding the gun drifted down—a kind of automatic balancing as she bent and stretched.
My dad brushed back his corduroy jacket.
“Dad!” I shouted. “No!”
But it was too late. My dad was already drawing his gun. Alerted by my cry, Wanda reared back. Her gaze swept the room and settled on my dad, and the gun in her hand barked. Then my dad fired—and kept firing. He must have fired ten cartridges, squeezing off each shot without slowing down. Wanda, for her part, threw herself on the floor, her own gun forgotten.
When my dad’s slide locked open and he was out of cartridges, my ears were ringing from the gunfire. A faint hint of gun smoke hung in the air, the taste acrid and invasive. Wanda got to her feet. She patted herself down, and she seemed as surprised as any of us that she was uninjured. I checked my mom and dad. They were fine too.
“Hold on,” I said, “you missed every single time?”
“My shooting stance—” my dad began.
Wanda grabbed the diary and sprinted toward the exit. As she passed through the door, someone wheeled a book truck into her path. Wanda crashed into it, flipped over the top, and landed on her back. A moment later, Bobby appeared in the doorway, and his frantic gaze found me first.
“I’m okay,” I said. I breathed in the tang of gunpowder. I breathed out. I realized my legs were shaking, but I managed a smile for Bobby. “We’re okay.”