9.

Timothy and Abigail didn’t tell Mr. Crane who threw the water balloon; they couldn’t prove it.

After they had joined the rest of the class, Zilpha Kindred had kissed her granddaughter goodbye and quietly slipped back downstairs. Mr. Crane forced both Abigail and Timothy to accompany him, as the rest of the students were now free to roam and gather information regarding their projects. As they wandered, silently, Abigail had refused to glance up from the ground, lost once again in her own private world—a world where Timothy, apparently, was not allowed.

On the ride back to school, he sat by himself in the front of the bus, well away from both Stuart and Abigail. By then, he’d nearly dried off and was able to recall what had happened inside the museum. Timothy wondered if he’d momentarily gone bonkers, but he knew that couldn’t be the case, not entirely. He had nearly forgotten the proof of the shadow man, which was currently pressed like a cold hand into the small of his back.

He pulled the book out from his pants. It was slight, the paper jacket was torn halfway down the back, and the entire bottom right corner was missing. On the cover was a simple painted illustration of a rosy-cheeked, dark-haired girl dressed in a calf-length blue skirt, socks pulled almost all the way up to her knees, a white sweater, and a red silk scarf wrapped around her thin neck. She knelt before the opening of a small dark hole that had been carved into the slope of a hill in a mossy forest. She looked over her shoulder curiously, as if she’d noticed someone creeping up behind her. In the background, silhouettes of several gothic buildings poked out from a hillside, looking like College Ridge up near Edgehill Road. Was this book a New Starkham story? Now Timothy was even more intrigued. He looked closer. The title stretched across the top of the book. The Clue of the Incomplete Corpse: A Zelda Kite Mystery. Someone named Ogden Kentwall had written the book.

Weird names. Weird book.

Timothy had the impression that the sight of the old woman had startled the shadow man, and in his haste to leave, he’d somehow dropped the book. Surely the man had meant to return and pick it up once everyone had gone. Too late, thought Timothy.

Unless he comes to take it back.

Goose bumps tickled Timothy’s scalp. Maybe I should have left it there, he thought.

Quickly, he glanced over his shoulder, peering above the heads of his classmates and out the rear window of the bus, trying to see through the mist and the rain to make out if there was a pair of headlights following close behind. There was nothing. He immediately turned and hunched his shoulders, trying to become invisible himself.

As the bus bumped back across the Taft Bridge toward New Starkham, Timothy opened the book’s cover and began to read.