“Seriously?” I asked. “In the first place, I’m the one who solved it—”
“It was all obvious once we considered the possibility that Mrs. Shufflebottom might have been lying,” my mom said. “The unreliable narrator is a staple of the genre.”
My dad nodded. “Pretty basic stuff, kiddo.”
“But she’s not a narrator,” I said. “She’s a librarian. And how did you get in here?”
“Picked the lock,” my dad said with practiced casualness.
I looked at Mrs. Shufflebottom.
“One of the latches doesn’t always catch,” she said apologetically.
My dad’s look of shocked outrage was priceless.
“That’s all well and good in theory—” the sheriff began.
“It’s true,” Mrs. Shufflebottom said. “It’s exactly as you said. I took the diary. Stewart was socertain. And the whole thing had felt…wrong from the beginning. Then the cupcakes fell, and everyone was distracted, and I realized it was my chance. At first I only wanted to stop the diary from going to auction. But then I started thinking, What if we were able to get the insurance money? That would have gone a long way toward keeping the library afloat. And nobody would have been hurt, not really.”
I wasn’t sure about that last part. I didn’t love the wholecorporations are people tooargument, but we were talking about a lot of money, and it didn’t seem like Mrs. Shufflebottom had been thinking clearly. To judge by the look on the sheriff’s face, I didn’t think she was persuaded either. All I said, though, was “The cupcakes definitely bought you some extra time. They also made us focus on the mayor, which was a mistake in hindsight. I bet if we asked Colleen, we’d find out the mayor was trying to get her attention—that’s why she was saying, ‘Excuse me.’ And Colleen pushed her or tripped her or something, trying to get away before she could be recognized, and that’s what sent us on a wild goose chase. It gave you plenty of time to bring the book here and hide it. The only problem was that when you came to the library the next morning—”
“The book was missing,” my mom said over me. “Someone had already found it.”
I said a few choice words. “I was getting ready to explain—”
“You didn’t know who could have taken it,” my dad said. “You didn’t have any idea where it could have gone. You couldn’t ask anyone if they’d seen it, not directly—not without revealing your own part in things. That’s why Millie saw you pick a fight with Stewart.”
“Exactly,” I said, “and Stewart wasn’t going to tell you the truth anyway because—”
“—Stewart was the one who found the book in the return chute and took it,” my mom said.
I said something under my breath that made the sheriff’s eyebrows shoot up, but all she did was turn to Stewart and say, “Is that true?”
Stewart’s face was bright red. Drops of sweat glistened at his hairline, and he shifted his gaze from the sheriff to me to my mom to the middle distance. He didn’t once look at Mrs. Shufflebottom. “No. No! Why would I—I would have said something. I would have called the police!”
“If it had been any other book,” I said, “maybe. But it wasn’t any other book. See, that was what bothered me about the whole case. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want the diary if it was a fake. But my parents reminded me of something very important: the best forgeries use materials that are authentic to the time period. That’s why George had old-fashioned ink, and that’s why he sewed the binding instead of gluing it—that kind of thing. But the trickiest part to pull off, with a book forgery, is the paper. Modern paper just isn’t made the same way. My mom and dad reminded me that forgers often use books from the same period to create their imitations. They’ll cut blank pages from the back, for example. Then the paper can pass any sort of appraisal because it’s authentic.” Stewart stared at me. The Coke-bottle glasses distorted his eyes, but his mouth hung open, and he was breathing shallowly. “I should have realized when I saw those emails in George’s account from antiquariansasking about the value of a rare manuscript that had come on the market. That’s a staple of the art heist genre: the diarywasvaluable,” I said. “but only because of—”
“—the book they used to forge it,” my dad said. “Sarah Gage’s diary, which was later published asAstor’s Arcadia. George cut a couple of pages from the back and wrote a few entries that could pass as Nathaniel Blackwood’s—enough that he could show them to Mrs. Shufflebottom and display them at the auction—but he didn’t forge an entire diary. He didn’t have time. The rest of the diary was undamaged.”
“You saw it,” my mom said. “And you knew it was worth a fortune to the right person. That’s why, when you found it in the return chute, you didn’t say anything to Mrs. Shufflebottom. And you certainly didn’t call the police. You took the diary, and you hid it.”
By that point, Stewart had recovered enough to shake his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never would have—I can’t believe—” But he couldn’t quite meet Mrs. Shufflebottom’s gaze when he said, “Agatha, youknowme.”
“What isAstor’s Arcadia?” the sheriff asked. “If it’s so valuable, why haven’t I heard of it before?”
“It’s the title they gave to the print edition of Sarah Gage’s diary,” Mrs. Shufflebottom said, her voice trembling with a riot of emotions. “A number of diaries were published in the nineteenth century. Sarah Gage’s was one of them, mostly because of regional interest. She detailed a lot of the abuses perpetrated by John Jacob Astor—the man for whom Astoria is named. Astor ordered the copies collected and destroyed, and by then, the diary was lost.”
“You’re suggesting that George Chin used this diary to create a forgery. But if Chin was an expert in antiquarian books, shouldn’t he have recognized how valuable it was?”
“Not unless he was an expert on local history,” I said. “As far as he was concerned, it was just the diary of a woman named Sarah Gage; that name might have rung a bell, maybe, but my guess is that by that point, George was in such a frenzy to get Wanda off his back that he only cared that the diary was old enough to pass a superficial inspection. He probably already had the diary on hand—something he picked up cheap at an estate sale without really knowing what it was, and something he considered relatively worthless. Perfect for something disposable like a forgery.”
“I didn’t do any of this,” Stewart said, edging toward the door. “I don’t even know what they’re talking about.”
“Stay right where you are, Stewart,” the sheriff said.
“That’s a strange thing to say,” I told him, “because out of everyone in this room, you’re the only one who knows enough about local history that youshouldknow aboutAstor’s Arcadia. I even saw you with a book by Sarah Gage’s granddaughter when I stopped by the library. But that’s not really the point. See, whether you admit it or not, it’s going to be easy enough to prove that you knew about Sarah Gage’s diary, that you had it, and that you were trying to sell it, because—”
“—you emailed several rare book dealers asking for a valuation of, quote, a holograph manuscript ofAstor’s Arcadia,” my dad said. “A holograph manuscript is one fancy way of saying, in this case, a diary. The sheriff will be able to track the IP address on those emails back to you.”
