The Magic Library Mysteries Collection: The Complete Series, Books 1-3

by Hillary Avis

  “Well, sometimes even in retrospect, it still doesn’t make sense.” Paul shook his head and put the rolling pin back in the deep drawer under the counter, pain behind his eyes.

  “Want to talk about it?” she asked. But he just shook his head and strode to the door to change the sign. Her job. He really didn’t want to discuss it, then.

  The memory faded. The delicious smells of flour, yeast, and frosting faded, too, and Allison placed the pen gently down on the table in front of her. Now that she knew the rolling pin had housed this pen all these years, it added new significance to the memory. Maybe Paul had been using it to recall something from his childhood—some painful event that he was trying to understand. She wished he’d been able to share it with her, but it seemed Paul had many secrets. His kidnapping. His family history. The Founders Tree and its magic. And this pen—this inheritance. And the library. He must have known about that, too.

  She didn’t know everything, but more and more pieces were falling into place.

  The Claypools built the gazebo. The Crisps made paper. The Bakers made a pen. All three families created the library that Allison was sworn to guard. And now Allison had more to guard than just the books—she had to guard the pen, too.

  Chapter 24

  Allison couldn’t just put the pen back into the box with everything else. She needed to stash it somewhere safe. Somewhere it wouldn’t get stolen or broken or lost. She cast around the room, scanning the crowded shelves and furniture for a good hiding place.

  At the back door, Willow’s nose pressed against the glass, leaving a smudge of dirt on one of the panes. Her white fur was gray up to the elbows; she must have been digging.

  Perfect. Nice and dirty on the night before her big adoption event.

  When Willow noticed Allison’s attention, she gave a small woof and nudged the door handle, so Allison let her in, brushing her off as much as possible so she wouldn’t track dirt all over the house. Willow promptly sniffed all around the edge of the dining table, pausing where the pen lay to give it a thorough olfactory inspection. She seemed to know it had just appeared on the scene.

  Allison rescued it before Willow decided it was a new toy. She stowed all the wooden objects—the thimble, the inlaid box, the destroyed rolling pin, the knick-knack box, the cooking spoon, and the back scratcher—in the box in the corner and headed upstairs to find a home for the pen. It almost seemed to pulse in her hand, daring her to use it and bring some memory to life. It was like a personal, portable version of the Founders Gazebo.

  Part of her wanted to put it in her pocket and keep it with her at all times, but it needed to stay here, in the library, until she could rent a safety deposit box. She couldn’t risk losing it.

  Willow bumbled up the stairs behind her as Allison made her way to the back bedroom. Maybe she was already getting used to the intuitive way the library was organized, because the pen seemed like it wanted to live on the desk with all the other pens and pencils.

  She slipped it in between the others and stood back to admire her choice. It was perfect. She’d never notice the pen there even if she knew what she was looking for.

  Hidden in plain sight, like a tree in the forest. Like the one Taylor had been up during the night he spent in the woods. It wasn’t hard to find that tree except it was among a hundred other trees.

  Allison yawned, suddenly exhausted. She navigated past Willow, who’d sprawled out in the doorway between the bedroom and hall, to the bathroom to brush her teeth and get ready for bed. She had to get up early and bathe Willow in the morning before she met Kara and Myra for brunch. The dog needed time to dry before her big meet-and-greet in the afternoon. By five o’clock tomorrow, Willow would have a new, loving home.

  This week was ending so much better than Allison had hoped.

  WILLOW’S BOOMING BARK shook the bed.

  Allison groggily checked the time. Just past midnight.

  “Shush—please,” she groaned, her eyelids fluttering closed again. Willow woofed again, and then she heard the dog’s claws scratch the floor of the hallway and then click their way downstairs. Her bark rang out again in the vicinity of the dining room.

  Allison rolled out of bed, wrapped her flannel robe around her and, without tying it, stumbled downstairs, yawning. Willow was staring intently at the back door, her hackles raised. Allison flicked on the outside light, illuminating a big fat nothing. The only movement on the patio was a few moths that fluttered wanly toward the bulb, so she turned off the light again.

  “That’s enough,” she admonished, looping her fingers through Willow’s collar and tugging her back upstairs. Willow followed her grudgingly and settled in her favorite spot—blocking the doorway so Allison would trip over her if she needed to visit the bathroom in the middle of the night.

  Oh well, this was the last night, she thought as she nestled back into the covers. Tomorrow, she’d get a blissful, full night of—

  She was jolted awake by another round of Willow’s urgent, rumbling barks. How long had she been asleep? Willow was already downstairs by the time Allison saw that it’d only been twenty minutes. Every cell in her body screamed for sleep, but she peeled herself off the sheets to retrieve the dog again.

  “You can’t yell at every bat and mosquito,” she scolded Willow on the way back to the bedroom. “Your new family is not going to appreciate it.”

  Willow yawned, snapping her jaws shut with a whine.

  “See? You’re tired, too.” Allison shut the bedroom door firmly behind them. At least if Willow barked again, she wouldn’t have to go all the way downstairs to get her again. Willow, for her part, did settle down. She made a nest on the rag rug near the bed, circling a few times before she relaxed into a puddle of fluff. And she didn’t bark again, although she grumbled and growled under her breath.

  Allison finally, blessedly, slept.

  Sunday

  THE MORNING CAME TOO quickly. Even Willow didn’t want to budge from her spot by the bed when Allison nudged her with her toe. The dog opened one eye and glared at her balefully.

  “See? Now you know how it feels,” she said smugly. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. “Come on, let’s rustle up some breakfast before we figure out how to wrestle you into the tub.”

  Willow huffed to her feet and trailed after her. She really was too big for the tub, even for the oversized, cast-iron bathtub in this house. Maybe it’d be wiser to hose her off in the yard. Willow would be all-too-happy to find a new home after that kind of bath. Allison grinned to herself as she made her way down the hall and through the dining room toward the kitchen. Specifically, toward the coffee.

  But she froze when she entered the dining room. Willow skidded to a stop behind her and bumped into the back of her legs, nearly buckling her knees.

  The back door was open. A cool breeze fluttered the curtains to each side of it and ruffled the pages of a book left open on the table. The box in the corner, the one marked “Emily,” was gone.

  Willow squeezed past Allison and galloped through the open door into the back yard. She ran straight to the back fence and began sniffing every inch of it, from the ground to as high as she could strain her neck. She was clearly trying to figure out who had been there. Who had broken into the house and stolen the box full of Paul’s family heirlooms. Who she’d been barking and growling at—if only Allison had listened.

  But Allison didn’t need the scent-tracking ability of a dog to know who’d done it. She already knew it had to be Elaine. Who else was keen to get her hands on a box of old knick-knacks? Elaine might even still have a key from her stint as guardian, which would explain how she got into the house without making a sound—or at least not a sound that a human ear could hear.

  Strangely calm, Allison went to the kitchen and made an extra-large mug of coffee while she watched Willow resume her excavation of the extra-large hole in the middle of the lawn. It hurt to lose those things, but Allison didn’t even care now that she’d found the Baker family�
�s pen. Even though Elaine had taken the box, she didn’t get what she wanted. It wasn’t until Allison returned to the dining room, the steaming mug in hand, that she picked up the book on the table and flipped it shut to see the title on the cover.

  Guardians of Remembrance Library.

  The only memories in this book were Allison’s. Which meant Elaine had read her memories and probably knew that she had found the pen. And she knew Allison had hidden it—

  Where?

  Allison racked her brain. She remembered sitting at the table, examining the wooden items from the box. She remembered Willow running off with the rolling pin and breaking it, then finding the pen hidden inside the hollow center. She remembered wanting to hide it, wanting to keep it separate from the other heirlooms. But as hard as she tried, she couldn’t remember where she’d put it.

  She set her coffee mug down quickly, feeling sick. Her hands trembled as she found the right page in the book and felt in the gutter between it and the next page. The rough edges of torn paper met her fingertips.

  Elaine had stolen another page from the library—but this time it wasn’t Paul’s memory. It was hers. Her knees gave out and she sank to the floor.

  Elaine knew exactly where the pen was hidden. And Allison didn’t.

  Chapter 25

  With growing horror, Allison realized that Elaine might already have the pen. The logical thing for her to have done once she learned where it was hidden was locate it right away. And with Willow locked in the bedroom, she’d had her run of the house.

  Allison walked slowly through the rooms on the first floor, scanning for anything even slightly out of place. Surely, she’d be able to tell if someone had moved a book on the shelf or rummaged through a drawer. Something slightly off-kilter would draw her eye. The ache in her throat grew when she ended up back where she’d started, at the dining table, with no more certainty than when she’d left the room.

  She had to report the burglary. Maybe Elaine would be arrested. If she had the pen, an arrest might be the only way to stop her from using it—because whatever she had planned, it couldn’t be good.

  Allison pulled her phone out of her bathrobe pocket to call Kara but then paused with her finger over the “call” button. If she made a police report, Kara would want to come inside the house to investigate, just as she had when Michelle’s place next door was burglarized. And if Allison let anyone inside, even a police officer, she’d lose her guardianship. Plus, what was she going to say—a pen was stolen? Since when do cops track down stolen office supplies?

  Allison almost dropped her phone.

  The break-in last weekend at Michelle’s house. The report said that the burglar stole paper. What if it wasn’t just a box of printer paper. What if it was memory paper—extra memory paper that hadn’t been made into books yet?

  She sprinted up the stairs to throw on some clothes. She found some sky-blue shorts and a matching plaid blouse, fumbling the shirt buttons so badly that she fastened them one-off and had to re-do them, muttering curse words under her breath the whole time. She left the back door open and dumped a scoop of dog kibble in Willow’s bowl to keep her busy, then dashed next door.

  Her heart hammered almost as loud as her knock on the frame of the screen door. Taylor opened it a few beats later and squinted at her.

  “Hi,” she said, unsure how to invite herself inside. Michelle appeared behind Taylor with a pancake turner in her hand, her eyebrows raised. Allison gave her a meaningful look. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Let her in,” Michelle directed Taylor as she turned her back on the door and headed down the hall. “I’m making flapjacks—do you want some?”

  “That’s OK—I already ate.” She hadn’t, but her stomach felt like a block of wood. Allison followed Michelle to the kitchen under Taylor’s watchful eye. The layout of the house was familiar. Not identical to her home—a mirror image. It was just as cluttered as the library, too, but rather than being cluttered with books, it was cluttered with mementos. Photographs lined every inch of the walls, eyes staring out at Allison from every frame.

  Watching.

  She shivered and Michelle shot her a questioning look from her place by the stove. “Chilly out this morning? You can come warm up by the stove if you want.”

  Allison shook her head and found a perch on a stool by the pantry.

  “Well, if you’re not here for breakfast, what are you here for?” Michelle’s tone seemed unusually jovial as she flipped pancakes and made a plate for Taylor with strawberries and whipped cream on top. She pushed it across the counter to him and he leaned to slurp up the top of the whipped cream, giving himself a fluffy white mustache.

  “Something happened last night.” Allison bit her lip, unsure whether to continue with Taylor in the room. She hoped he’d head for the dining room with his plate, but he was taking his time cutting his pancakes into bite-size pieces. She paused and when Michelle motioned for her to go on, she jerked her head toward Taylor. “In the library,” she added meaningfully.

  Michelle snorted a laugh. “Go ahead, he knows everything.”

  “You do?” Allison asked Taylor, who’d retrieved a bottle of Hershey’s syrup from the fridge and was transforming his whipped cream with rivers of chocolate, his face a picture of concentration.

  “Yep.”

  “I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice,” Michelle explained quietly. “I didn’t want to wait until it was too late. What if I died—”

  “Don’t talk about it like that,” Taylor said crossly. “I hate it.”

  “Sorry,” Michelle said flippantly. “But if I’d waited and something happened—”

  “Nothing’s going to happen.” Taylor’s voice was flat, like he’d recited the line before.

  Michelle ignored him and continued as though he hadn’t interrupted. “Then nobody would be watching the library. Someone has to watch it at all times.”

  “Except last night,” Allison said. “You weren’t watching last night, were you?”

  Michelle pursed her lips. “What are you talking about?”

  “Elaine broke in and stole a box of Paul’s old things. Well, she didn’t exactly break in—I think she still has a key.”

  Michelle paled. She slid the pancake pan off the burner and turned off the flame before turning toward Allison. “What was in the box? Do you have a list?”

  “The pen wasn’t in it, if that’s what you mean.” Michelle relaxed slightly, and Allison glared at her. “You could have told me about the pen—lucky for you, I figured it out. Why didn’t you just tell me Paul was a watcher, too?”

  “Author,” Michelle said automatically, and then seemed to regret it. “I couldn’t tell you—the whole point of the system is that we all know as little as possible about each other. The watcher, the author, and the guardian can’t get too close. That’s why our parents disapproved so much when Paul and I—”

  Michelle didn’t finish the sentence, but in a rush, Allison made a connection she hadn’t before. She’d seen Michelle as a young woman, in the books. “You were Paul’s first kiss!”

  Michelle nodded, a small smile creeping across her face. “We had a natural affinity for each other, even though neither of us knew about the library at the time. Our parents tried hard to keep us apart, though—and in the end, it worked.” She shrugged. “They were right. It was for the best.”

  “Forgive me for agreeing with you,” Allison said wryly. She wasn’t sorry that Paul stayed single until she got her summer job at the bakery, that was for sure. But curiosity got the better of her. “I know why I feel that way, but why do you?”

  Michelle shook her head. “What’s important now is that Elaine doesn’t have the pen. At least there’s that. You need to find somewhere to hide it—somewhere she can’t access. Maybe go down to the credit union and—”

  “She might.”

  “Might what?”

  Allison cringed. “Might have it. I hid it somewhere in the house, but s
he tore a page out of the Guardians book, so I don’t remember where. She may have found it already.”

  Michelle’s mouth dropped open and Taylor’s fork clattered to the floor. Michelle bent to pick it up, grunting slightly with the effort, and rinsed it in the sink before putting it back next to his place. She patted Taylor’s hand. “Eat your breakfast, darling. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. She doesn’t have it. Not yet.” Then she turned back to the stove and put the pan back on the heat. She waited a few beats for the pan to warm up and then poured a circle of pancake batter into it.

  Allison wanted to screech with frustration. Michelle was determined to keep her in the dark, but at the same time she and Taylor were clearly shaken by the idea that Elaine had the pen. “How do you know?!”

  Michelle flipped the pancakes and then turned to Allison, her face solemn. “Because if she did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  Chapter 26

  “You have to tell me everything. I can’t stand being one step behind.” Allison closed her eyes and a sickening image popped up—Elaine at Golden Gardens with her hand on Paul’s arm as they both smiled adoringly at Emily. She flicked her lids open to chase it away. “This woman has ruined my whole life, and I don’t even understand why. At this point, I deserve to know, don’t I?”

  Michelle and Taylor shared a look. Then Michelle turned off the stove, picked up her cane from where it was leaned against the dishwasher, and, motioning Allison to follow, thumped back down the entry hall to the living room. It was decorated in dusty rose and a deep teal—colors chosen in another decade even though they were pleasantly bohemian. Michelle pointed to a flowery chair. “Sit.”