Absolutely Truly (22 page)

“What is this, kiddie day?” said the
Patriot-Bugle
's receptionist, looking up from her magazine and snapping her gum.

“Um, we'd like to look at old issues of the paper,” I said.

“Funny, young Clark Kent just said the same thing.” She pointed a scarlet-tipped nail toward the door at the end of the hall. “Archives are downstairs to the left. Know how to use a microfiche machine?”

Cha Cha and Lucas and I hesitated.

“I do,” said Jasmine.

“Good. Be sure and turn it off when you leave.” She went back to her magazine.

“Since when do you know how to use a microfiche machine?” asked Cha Cha as the four of us headed down the hall.

“Since my parents are lawyers, duh,” Jasmine replied. “They're always looking stuff up. Why are we here, anyway?”

“The next clue,” I told her. “I overheard the photographer talk about putting our story in the paper. She said it was ‘A-section material,' so it hit me that B-4 might be a section of the newspaper too.”

Cha Cha snapped her fingers. “Truly Lovejoy, private eye, strikes again!”

“Yeah, only not soon enough. Calhoun's trying to beat us to it.”

“Why?” asked Jasmine.

“I'm not sure.”

The lights were on downstairs, and Calhoun was deeply engrossed in the microfiche screen across the room.

“What are you doing?” boomed Cha Cha.

He jumped, then glanced back over his shoulder at us. “None of your business.”

“It is our business,” I replied as we went over to join him. “It looks to me like a rat trying to steal the cheese.”

His face flushed. “I would have told you if I found anything.”

“Yeah, right,” said Jasmine. “For a price.”

I looked over his shoulder. “So what is B-4, anyway?”

“Classified ads.”

Of course! The classifieds were the perfect place to leave a message for someone. “How far have you gotten?”

“I've checked through January, February, and March of the year the stamp was issued. Nothing so far.”

The four of us crowded around him as he continued to scroll through the back issues. There was lots of news that year, some of it involving people we knew: My dad's wrestling team won the state tournament. The covered bridge was scheduled to be repainted. Ella Bellow and her husband visited the Grand Canyon and gave a slideshow afterward at the library. The destination for the senior class trip was announced: Montreal! Reverend Quinn of First Parish Church lectured at Lovejoy College on the Paul Revere bell; Aunt True was interviewed about the gap year she was planning to take in Patagonia; Belinda Winchester went home to Maine to visit her sister. Also, Calhoun's father was accepted to Dartmouth, and Bud Jefferson was headed to UNH.

We finally found what we were looking for, on Wednesday the third in the first week of June.

“There it is!” said Lucas, pointing to a boxed item.
For B
was at the top, and below it was another quote:

When you depart from me, sorrow abides and happiness takes his leave.

Calhoun nodded. “Shakespeare,” he said, sounding pleased.

I looked at him. Something was up.

Beneath the quote was another capital
B
, of course, just like before, but no numbers this time, only words. Exactly two of them:
HIGH NOON
.

The five of us stared at the screen. Seconds ticked by.

“I've got nothing,” I said. “You guys?”

My friends shook their heads. So did Calhoun.

“You'd tell us if you did, right?” I asked him, and he nodded.

“ ‘When you depart from me'—it kind of sounds like the writer is talking about somebody taking a trip,” mused Cha Cha.

“There were a lot of people going places that year,” said Jasmine. “Ella Bellow. Belinda Winchester. The entire senior class.”

“I suppose Belinda could be one of our Bs,” I said doubtfully. It was still hard to imagine anyone writing a love letter to the former lunch lady, though.

My friends and I pondered this idea, then we all burst out laughing.

“Yeah, that's what I thought,” I said. My stomach rumbled. “We'd better get back. My aunt is counting on us, plus Lou's is catering lunch.”

Jasmine went directly upstairs to Aunt True's apartment, where she'd left Lauren and Annie temporarily in charge. The rest of us filed back into the bookshop.

During the hour that we'd been gone, the space had been transformed. The carpet had vanished; all the books had been boxed up and taken to the basement; and dropcloths had been spread over the floor to protect the newly exposed hardwood, which would be washed and waxed tomorrow once the volunteer paint crew was finished. They were already hard at work, spreading the yellow paint that Aunt True and Pippa had picked out on the walls.

“Wow,” I said.

“No kidding,” echoed Cha Cha.

“Check out the office,” said Hatcher, who was behind the sales counter handing out sandwiches and sodas.

I poked my head in to see Aunt True's entire wish list—armchairs, lamps, rugs, tables, and a bunch of other furniture—piled in the middle of the room. Belinda Winchester had brought Miss Marple back, and the dog was curled up on one of the donated chairs.

“People just keep dropping stuff off,” my brother told me, shaking his head.

“Wow,” I said again. Maybe there really was something to small-town living. “Where is Aunt True, anyway?”

My brother jerked his chin toward the back of the store. “In the children's section.”

As I rounded the sales counter to go find her, something caught my eye. I froze in my tracks.

“Aunt True!” I shrieked.

She came running. So did everyone else within earshot, including Miss Marple, who started barking furiously.

I pointed to the rare books cabinet. It was unlocked, and the glass door was standing wide open. The autographed first edition of
Charlotte's Web
was gone!

By the time Carson Dawson and his camera crew returned on Sunday afternoon, the bookstore shone. Its freshly painted walls glowed a sunny yellow, the washed and waxed hardwood floors gleamed, the windows and light fixtures sparkled, and the books were all neatly arranged on the newly repositioned shelves.

On the walls above them, just like Hatcher had suggested, Aunt True had hung colorful book posters, maps, and even some of Lola's artwork. Aunt True's vision of comfortable reading nooks scattered around the store was a reality now too. The donated rugs and armchairs and tables and lamps had been set up in several corners, and there was even a makeshift window seat in the children's room created from a blanket chest flanked by a pair of bookcases. Lauren had installed herself there among a pile of plump throw pillows, deep into a copy of
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
.

There was only one thing missing:
Charlotte's Web.
The book had disappeared, and our excitement about what Carson Dawson was calling “the Bookshop Blitz” had evaporated along with it.

“This looks like a whole new store!” gushed the TV host. Pausing to face the camera, he added, “Folks, you couldn't ask for a cozier bookshop in all of New England!”

“Books bring people together, and people bring communities together,” said Aunt True with a stoic smile.

“Great quote,” said Carson Dawson. “I like that.” He quickly replaced his big grin with a concerned expression, though, when Aunt True went on to tell him about the missing copy of
Charlotte's Web.

“Looks like there's trouble,” he intoned to the camera, “right here in River City—I mean Pumpkin Falls. Anyone having information about this crime should contact the local authorities.”

The police—actually, Pumpkin Falls only had one policeman—interviewed Aunt True and dusted the cabinet for fingerprints, but with so many people coming and going all day, there were too many of them and they were too jumbled and smeared to be of any help.

“What about video footage from the security cameras?” asked Carson Dawson.

Aunt True snorted. “I don't think there is such a thing in Pumpkin Falls. We certainly don't have one.”

The TV host's eyebrows shot up. “Well, then perhaps the dog saw something?” He winked at the camera, which promptly panned over to Miss Marple. But if she knew who took
Charlotte's Web
, she wasn't telling.

“Not much of a watchdog, I take it,” chuckled the TV host.

“It's not Miss Marple's fault,” said Lauren, rushing over to put her arms around the dog's neck.

“I never said it was,” said Carson Dawson hastily. He turned to face the camera again. “That's it for this weekend's update, folks! From frozen waterfalls to a literary makeover, Pumpkin Falls is a happening place. And don't forget to check out next month's Winter Festival! It's the celebration's one hundredth anniversary, and I hear there's lots of fun in store. Until next time, this is Carson Dawson signing off for
Hello, Boston! 
”

“Good-bye and good riddance,” said Aunt True after he and his camera crew left. “What a phony.”

She was even madder at him later that evening, though, when we turned on the TV at dinner and discovered that while Mr. Dawson had technically kept his promise—he hadn't leaked any footage of our remodeling project—somehow word had gotten out to the local news affiliate about the missing copy of
Charlotte's Web.

The result was that Dad knew all about it by the time he got home.

“I never should have left you in charge!” he hollered at
Aunt True, thirty seconds after he came through the front door.

I understood why he was upset, of course—he was counting on the money from the sale of the book to help pay off the bank loan. Everybody was. But blaming it on Aunt True wasn't fair.

And if any of us had thought that a new high-tech bionic arm would magically transform Silent Man into the father we knew and missed, we were wrong. Way wrong.

“Can we see it?” begged Danny as we all crowded around, dying of curiosity.

“Later,” Dad said shortly. “Right now I need to talk to your grandparents. They're in for an unpleasant surprise.”

And before he even took off his jacket, he steered Aunt True to the living room, where he set up a videoconference under the watchful eyes of Nathaniel Daniel and his wife Prudence.

Dad was the one who ended up being surprised, though.

“We don't have an autographed first edition of
Charlotte's Web
,” Lola said after he'd finished talking.

“Of course you do, Mom,” Aunt True told her. “I saw it with my own eyes. Truly did too, right?”

I nodded.

My grandmother shrugged. “Well, I certainly don't remember it.”

“Me neither,” said Gramps. “And trust me, we'd remember something like that.”

As for the rare books cabinet, it turned out that there was a key stashed on a hook behind it. A key everybody in town knew about it. It was there just in case any customers wanted to take a closer look at something in the cabinet and nobody was around to show it to them. Like the “mystery swap,” the rest of Lovejoy's Books operated on the honor system too.

My father shook his head in disgust. “Great,” he said. “That means anybody could have taken it.”

He got up and stalked out of the room. Mom hurried after him. The rest of us crowded around the computer, eager to talk to our grandparents. They gave us a quick tour of their house—more of a concrete hut, really—in Namibia, told us a bit about the classes they were teaching and the library they were helping to build at the local school, then asked for all the news from Pumpkin Falls.

“Ella Bellow ith a bithybody,” Pippa informed them, which made everybody laugh.

“You're a smart cookie, to figure that out so fast,” said Gramps.

“Truly told me,” Pippa replied, and my family laughed again.

“Has the January thaw finally arrived?” asked Lola.

“Nope,” said Danny. “Everything's still frozen solid.”

“A TV news crew came up from Boston over the weekend to film the falls,” Hatcher told them. “They filmed us at the bookstore too.”

“Really?”
Lola looked surprised to hear this. “Why?”

Keeping her voice low and checking over her shoulder to make sure our parents were out of earshot, Aunt True filled Gramps and Lola in on the bookshop makeover.

“Well done!” said Lola, when she finished. “Our instincts were right to hand over the reins. We knew you and your brother would do wonders with the business.”

Gramps looked out at me from the computer screen and smiled. “So, have you added anything to your life list, Truly?”

“Not much,” I told him. “It's been too cold and snowy. There've been lots of cardinals and jays and chickadees around the feeders, of course, and I spotted a woodpecker the other day.”