She looked at the library.
She felt herself beginning to see.
Allison Abbot was dead. Allison Abbott had been murdered, and almost certainly because of something to do with this case. She hadn’t just fallen off that cliff. It didn’t matter how she, Stevie, felt. Allison Abbott was not alive anymore, and someone had to do something. She had promised Allison she would get the diary—and then Allison died.
Which meant, logically, that someone thought that Allison was close to getting that diary.
It followed that there was something in that diary that was worth killing for. Which meant it was Sabrina Abbott—perfect, wonderful, hardworking Sabrina—who was somehow at the center of this.
The burgers and milk shakes came, and Stevie started in on them while letting her focus rest on the reading room across the street. She softened her gaze, letting the contours of the building blur. Sabrina. Reading. Writing. Checking out books right up until the time she died.
Her brain began to settle. Stevie reached for the tablet, trying to maintain the mental state, and flicked back to the pictures of the room of mementos in Allison’s house—all those tidily arranged things. Books, clothes, knickknacks, photographs, record albums. A teenage life, frozen in time in 1978. She looked at the picture of the interlibrary loan slips for the books Sabrina had requested right before she died: A Woman in Berlin and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Serious reading for a serious person, someone preparing for her future at Columbia University. She thought about Sabrina’s 1977 diary, with the list of subjects and amount of time studied. Sabrina was a detailed reporter of events.
The shadow of an idea danced through the halls of her mind again. And another, and another. Dancing shadows on the wall. Ghosts. Answers—intangible answers, taunting her.
“Shit,” she said.
“What?”
She tapped her palms on the table in disgust.
“I’ve seen it,” she said. “Bits of it. Little flashes. Like that time I saw a moose behind some trees. I’ve seen something. Or heard it. And I can’t work out what it is.”
“Sounds like writing,” he said. “It’s the worst.”
He took a long sip of his milk shake as Stevie set her forehead down on the table. Perhaps sensing that she wasn’t coming back up anytime soon, he kept talking.
“People ask stuff like ‘What’s your process?’ I don’t know what my process is. I sit down and type stuff about monsters. Or I think about it. Or I type-think.”
The shadows flashed back up on the wall, the edges clearer. More of a shape.
She lifted her head.
“What did you say?” she asked.
“What? When? Which thing?”
“Writing. Typing. Thinking. What?”
“What?”
“Stop saying what,” she said. “What do you mean? You type and think?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I kind of think with my fingers? That sounds bad. You know what I mean.”
“You type stuff,” she said. “You type. Shit, shit, shit. . . . Give me your computer.”
“Are you going to finish my book?” he said, pushing it over to her. “Because this is good news for me.”
Instead of typing, or even looking at the screen, Stevie instead stared at the keyboard, lightly running her finger from the L key all the way over to the return, then back again. Then she grabbed her tablet and frantically swiped back and back until she found what she wanted.
“Oh my god,” she said. “I have to go.”
“What?”
“Stop saying what! I have to go.”
“Stop saying you have to go,” Nate shot back, grabbing the bike lock key. “Go where?”
“Allison’s house,” she replied, waving her hand for the check.
“No. You can’t do that. Allison is dead.”
“So she won’t care,” she said. “Give me back the bike key. I know where Sabrina hid her diary. It’s not lost.”
“Stevie, explain.”
Stevie wriggled in frustration, but pulled up a photo.
“Here,” she said, passing him her tablet. “That’s a pic of the list of supplies ordered for the camp art pavilion in 1978 and how much it cost.”
Ceramics: ring boxes, earring stands, cats, dogs, cookie jars; trash cann, turtle, teddy bear, roller skate ($ 28)
“Typewriters sucked,” she said. “They didn’t have backspace keys. Look at this weird semicolon after ‘cookie jars.’ Stupid typo, right? And this was the seventies, so if you hit the wrong key, you couldn’t fix it easily. Now look at your keyboard. The semicolon and colon key are the same. You get a semicolon if you forget to hit the shift. If you hit the shift, it’s a colon, which makes more sense. A colon would mean . . .”
“It was a list.”
“Exactly. That means they ordered cookie jars in the following shapes—trash can, turtle, teddy bear, roller skates. Who typed this list? Sabrina. Who has to make projects as part of her job? Sabrina. Who loves turtles? Sabrina. Remember the big turtle in the reading room at the library?” She tapped on the glass of the window in the direction of the reading room. “Sabrina said the kids went through her things, so she made something to hide things in. She made a turtle cookie jar. And she wouldn’t have had that with her on the night she died. It was back in the bunk. And now . . .”
She flipped back through the photos again, finding the images of the room in Allison’s house. She turned the tablet back toward Nate triumphantly.
“Right there,” she said, pointing at the large turtle figure on one of the shelves. “What does that look like to you?”
“A turtle,” he said. “Possibly a turtle cookie jar.”
“Give me the bike key.”
“I’m coming with you,” he said.
“You hate coming with me on stuff like this.”
“I know,” he said. “And I know you. This is what you do. It’s your move.”
“I have to do it. It’s part of the job.”
“You love that shit, though.”
Stevie did not reply to this because she did, in fact, love that shit.
“You know I love you too, right?” she said.
“Tell it to my grieving family when you get me killed,” he replied, reaching for his wallet. “Let’s pay and go before I change my mind.”
24
THE DAY WAS FADING FAST. BY THE TIME THEY DRIFTED INTO ALLISON’S driveway, there was little light left, and she and Nate were sweating and heaving.
“When . . . we . . . get in . . . there,” Nate said between breaths, “I . . . am drinking . . . whatever . . . is in . . . the fridge. Don’t care. Maybe it’s . . . stealing. Don’t care.”
Stevie nodded heavily.
“We should probably hide the bikes,” she said.
“Why? There’s no one around.”
“In case anyone comes by. Because it’s still . . .”
She decided to omit the words breaking and entering. Nate regarded his friend with a look that walked the line between weariness and terror. They rolled the bikes into the trees and set them on their sides, then walked the rest of the way up the dark lane and into Allison’s driveway.