Page 71 of By the Book

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 havebeen 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 diarywas 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’sincredible.)

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.”

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