Ghost Town Page 0,4

good condition. No title on the spine, so she pulled it out and looked at the front. Nothing on the front, either.

Inside, on the first page under a sheet of old onionskin, was a black-and-white photograph of Amelie. Claire blinked and took her time looking; yes, it really was her. The Founder of Morganville looked young and fragile, with her white-gold hair piled up in a complicated style on top of her head that showed off her very long, elegant neck. She wore a black dress, something from the 1800s, Claire guessed, with lots of sleeve and tons of skirts and petticoats. There was something about her eyes--the photograph had made them even lighter than the icy gray they usually were.

It was deeply spooky.

Claire flipped a page and read the title:

A HISTORY OF MORGANVILLE

Its Important Citizens and Events

A Chronicle of Our Times

She blinked. Surely they hadn't meant for this to end up in the used bookstore, where anybody could pick it up and find it. She'd never seen anything like it before.

And, of course, she had to have it. She'd been burning up with curiosity about Amelie ever since she'd met her; the Founder seemed to have so many secrets that it was hard to know where they started and stopped. Even though Amelie had, from time to time, helped her out, and had given her Protection that had saved her life at one time, Claire really didn't know that much about her, except that she was old, regal, and scary.

The penciled price on the inside of the cover was only five dollars. She quickly found a few more obscure science titles, buried the history in the stack, and hauled the books up to the front.

Dan snorted. "You're never going to cram all that in your backpack."

"Yeah, probably not," she agreed. "Could I have a sack?"

"What do I look like, Piggly Wiggly? Hang on." He rooted around behind the counter, sending up choking clouds of dust that made even him cough, and finally handed over a battered old canvas bag. She started counting out money, and he quickly flipped open the books and added up the totals. He wasn't paying attention, which was good; he just added it up and said, "Twenty-seven fifty."

That was an awful lot, pretty much all she had at the moment, but she kept smiling and handed it over. As soon as the cash had left her palm, she grabbed the bag and started stuffing things inside.

"What's your hurry?" he asked, counting out the fives and ones. "It's not close to sundown."

"Class," she said. "Thanks."

He nodded, opened the register, and put the cash inside. She felt him watching her all the way to the door. It occurred to her that she didn't know which vampire owned this business, or how he or she might feel about the sale of the book . . . but she couldn't worry about that now.

She really did have class.

Chapter Two

TWO

It didn't take long at all to read the book. She stopped in a park on the way home and sat in a sun-faded rubber swing seat and rocked slowly back and forth as she flipped pages.

It was about people she'd never heard of . . . and people she knew. Amelie, for one. Amelie's disputes with various vampires. Amelie's decisions to sentence this person for his crimes, spare that one. There were other vampires profiled, too. Some she'd never heard of; she supposed that they'd died, or left, or maybe they were just reclusive. Oliver wasn't in the book, because he was a latecomer to town. Neither, curiously, was Myrnin. She supposed Myrnin had been a closely guarded town secret from the very beginning.

It was weirdly interesting, but overall, she didn't know what good it was going to do her to know that Amelie had once filed a complaint against a man who owned a dry-goods store (what was a dry-goods store?) for cheating the human customers. And that the complaint had gotten his store taken away from him, and he'd opened the town's first movie theater.

Boring.

In the end, Claire dropped the book into her backpack and thought about mailing it anonymously to the library. Maybe that was where it really belonged, anyway. She thought about it on the way home, but she ended up worrying about whether vampires could somehow sense she'd handled it. CSI: Vampire. Not a comforting thought.

"You're late," Michael remarked, as she walked into the Glass House through the kitchen door. He was standing at