They’re a clue my father left me a long time ago.
Looking at the cover of The Clue of the Incomplete Corpse, he wanted to start laughing, or crying, or shouting … anything to rid himself of this dreadful feeling. But he could barely breathe.
“That looks like the same copy I found in the museum,” Timothy whispered. “Flip through it. Find 102, 149, and 203.” Abigail opened the book. When she reached those pages, the faint pencil markings made everything clearer. “He said his father gave him a clue a long time ago. This book! Hesselius must have somehow gotten a copy. He wrote the names of his favorite players in it, expecting that his son would find the cards in his office. All Jack needed was their jersey numbers and field positions to figure out the combination. The thing was, Jack never found the office. He never learned what his father wanted him to know … until a couple of months ago.”
“But then where’s the journal …?” Abigail asked, her voice trailing off as she glanced past Timothy’s shoulder, her mouth dropping open.
Timothy spun toward the attic door. To his horror, Jack stood there wearing a strange smile. He was no longer hunched and wobbly; in fact, at his full height, he looked tall and strong. He held on to the doorknob, blocking the only way out. “Right here,” he said. With his other hand, he revealed a small leather-bound book. “Full of secrets.” Timothy felt Abigail grab his hand.
Jack reached into his pocket, pulling out the three baseball cards. “Earlier this week, after I dropped my book at the museum, I told you, Timothy, that you shouldn’t take things that don’t belong to you. You don’t listen well.”
Timothy felt his own skin shrink. It was him. The shadow man in the museum, and the locker room … maybe even the man he’d seen coming out of the Mayfair apartment building. This was the man with the jawbone, who had used Abigail’s fear of the Nightmarys to make her believe this was all her fault. And he was no ghost.
“Don’t worry, Abigail,” said the old man. “I was never going to hurt you—a lesson I learned from my father. I’m not even going to touch you. Now that you know the truth, now that you fear the place where your end will come, the journey is inevitable. You’ll probably just walk there yourself. Your fear will be your guide. And you won’t have Granny to stop it from happening this time.”
Keeping firm hold of her hand, Timothy stepped forward. “She has me,” he said as loudly as he could manage, which wasn’t very loudly at all.
“Oh, she has you, does she?” the old man asked, amused. “Well then, maybe you can go with her.” He paused, considering them. “It’s funny how things work out, don’t you think?” He stepped backward into the hallway and closed the door. The lock turned. His footsteps creaked down the stairs.
36.
Timothy pounded on the door, and Abigail kicked at it. For almost a minute, they shouted for Jack to come back up and let them out, even as Timothy realized how foolish they were being. As if the old man would really change his mind. They leaned against the door, exhausted and frightened. Timothy spent several seconds trying not to say “I told you so.”
Finally, Abigail turned to him and said, “Well, at least now we know.”
“Now we know?” said Timothy. “Know what?” He was shocked that Abigail could sound so matter-of-fact.
“Everything, pretty much,” she said. “And when you know stuff, you can use it against people.”
Abigail laid the puzzle pieces out. Jack had said the cards were a clue his father had given him years ago. A code. Christian Hesselius had gotten his hands on a copy of the Zelda Kite Mystery and used it to pass the code to his son. The writing in the book’s margins might have been the last message Christian had ever given to his son. That was why it was so important that Jack retrieve the book from Timothy’s gym locker.
“Right,” said Timothy. “A few months ago, when the college opened the wall in the library, Jack learned that the code opened the safe in the bookshelf. He finally had access to his father’s journal. The journal must have revealed the location of the jawbone.”
“Well, we know it was at the museum,” Abigail said. “Would Christian have donated it to such an obvious place?”
“Sometimes the hardest things to