a cold hand into the small of his back.
He pulled the book out from his pants. It was slight, the paper jacket was torn halfway down the back, and the entire bottom right corner was missing. On the cover was a simple painted illustration of a rosy-cheeked, dark-haired girl dressed in a calf-length blue skirt, socks pulled almost all the way up to her knees, a white sweater, and a red silk scarf wrapped around her thin neck. She knelt before the opening of a small dark hole that had been carved into the slope of a hill in a mossy forest. She looked over her shoulder curiously, as if she’d noticed someone creeping up behind her. In the background, silhouettes of several gothic buildings poked out from a hillside, looking like College Ridge up near Edgehill Road. Was this book a New Starkham story? Now Timothy was even more intrigued. He looked closer. The title stretched across the top of the book. The Clue of the Incomplete Corpse: A Zelda Kite Mystery. Someone named Ogden Kentwall had written the book.
Weird names. Weird book.
Timothy had the impression that the sight of the old woman had startled the shadow man, and in his haste to leave, he’d somehow dropped the book. Surely the man had meant to return and pick it up once everyone had gone. Too late, thought Timothy.
Unless he comes to take it back.
Goose bumps tickled Timothy’s scalp. Maybe I should have left it there, he thought.
Quickly, he glanced over his shoulder, peering above the heads of his classmates and out the rear window of the bus, trying to see through the mist and the rain to make out if there was a pair of headlights following close behind. There was nothing. He immediately turned and hunched his shoulders, trying to become invisible himself.
As the bus bumped back across the Taft Bridge toward New Starkham, Timothy opened the book’s cover and began to read.
10.
By the time lunch ended back at school, Timothy had managed to get through the first couple of chapters. The story began with the description of an ordinary girl named Zelda Kite whose best friend, a fellow school newspaper reporter named Dolores Kaminski, had disappeared while on assignment at the local antiques shop. The mystery was simple, and the writing was fine, if not exactly literary like the stories Mrs. Medina made them read for English class. Timothy wondered what the man in the museum had been doing with an odd little book like this.
In fact, Timothy was so distracted by it, he didn’t consider that Stuart Chen had neglected to sit with him at their usual table in the cafeteria. He also didn’t notice the girl who regarded him curiously from the lunch line, her red hair finally lightening as it dried into stringy ringlets upon her hunched shoulders.
At the end of the day, Timothy was standing at his locker, leafing through the final few pages of the fifth chapter of The Incomplete Corpse when he came across a name written in the margins, scribbled in pencil just below the page number 102.
Carlton Quigley
At first, Timothy didn’t even notice the writing. It had been written so lightly that it seemed almost ghostly compared to the text in the rest of the book. He held the pages like a flipbook, zipping through to the end in case there happened to be any more writing.
To his surprise, Timothy found two names further along. Bucky Jenkins stared at him from page 149 and Leroy “Two Fingers” Fromm from page 203, the second to last in the book.
Carlton Quigley. Bucky Jenkins. Leroy “Two Fingers” Fromm.
Timothy flipped, again and again, looking at the writing. Who were these people? he wondered. Why had someone written their names there?
Timothy grabbed his backpack. The faint scent of chlorine filled his nose as he unzipped it. That morning, somehow, he’d remembered to shove his swimsuit, goggles, and towel inside before leaving the house. Now he placed the strange new book on top of his swim gear and zipped up the bag.
Outside, to Timothy’s surprise, he noticed Mrs. Chen’s burgundy minivan waiting at the curb. Stuart sat in the front seat and actually waved at him. Timothy trudged down the stairs to the sidewalk. Stuart rolled down his window, and Mrs. Chen leaned past her son, obviously oblivious to the events of the day.
“Hi, Timothy!” she said. “Hurry up. Get in. Don’t want to be late!” Timothy hesitated. “What are you waiting for?” she added.
“Yeah,