“What a time to be alive,” Walt says.
Indeed.
I turn to my friend. “You have your appetite back, I see.”
With a nod, he scarfs the rest of the sandwich, then brushes biscuit crumbs from his hands. “So, what had you running late?”
I shoot a glance at Walt, then look back at Twigwith wide, excited eyes. “Let’s go downstairs and I’ll catch you up.”
Walt gives another harrumph. “Top secret stuff, huh?”
I grab Twig by the elbow and pull him toward the stairs. “Enjoy your biscuit, Walt,” I call over my shoulder. “Share a bite with Poe!”
Descending the steps of Maggie’s bookstore always makes me feel like I’m Mike fromThe Goonies, sneaking into the basement of the Fratelli’s restaurant with a map I found in my attic. The staircase is narrow with a single overhead bulb flickering uncertainly against the stone walls. At the bottom, the air is damp and cool. We sit in chairs salvaged from upstairs and do our work at a large, scarred wooden table, where wires snake across the surface and connect to microphones and sound equipment. In the shadows, old wooden crates sit like silent sentinels, their contents a mystery.
Twig plugs in his laptop. “I have to be at robotics in forty minutes.”
I slap my forehead with my palm, feeling a fresh wash of shame. In several short weeks, Twig and Naomi will be leaving me for one of the most important competitions of their lives. Last spring, their robotics team was extended an exclusive invite to attend the Future Innovators STEM Symposium at Carnegie Melon University. The three-day conference will be culminating in The Catalyst Cup, and if their team wins, every member will geta tenthousanddollar scholarship toward their college education. They’ve been up to their ears in prep work, and yet, never once has Twig showed up this late on a Saturday.
“I am such a jerk,” I mutter.
“You aren’t a jerk,” he says. “You just tend to lose track of time, especially when you’re wrapped up in something fascinating. So … what had you fascinated?”
I tell him everything. The tense encounter between Rafe and Jude at Willowmere Park last night. Goinginsidethe manor so Jude could show me something in his bedroom. And then the portrait itself—Ezra’s Obsession.
“She looked like you?” Twig says.
“She wasidenticalto me.”
“Did you take a picture?”
“I didn’t have my phone. But even if I did, I don’t think snapping a pic would have gone over too well.”
I tell him the rest—the story behind the painting, the symbol on the locket my doppelgänger was wearing, and how we found it again, on the sketch of Molly. I tell him, too, how both were familiar. Somehow, I’ve seen them before—Molly and the symbol.
“What did it look like?” he asks.
I grab a pad of sticky notes along with a nearby pencil and draw a simple sketch. “Do you recognize it?”
He shakes his head.
I lean back in my chair. “I don’t know, Twig. I feel like something big is going on.”
“What do you mean?”
“The timing of everything. The Vandenbergs have been MIA from Foggy Hollow for the past thirty years, and now they’re back. This portrait shows up. Dante’s comet is on its way. The last time it made an appearance, Ezra was alive. It all feels connected somehow.
We sit and stare at one another, our podcast long forgotten, when the bell jingles upstairs and footsteps echo overhead, followed by a greeting that’s muffled but unmistakably Maggie’s. If anyone in town is going to recognize a symbol on a locket from the early 19thcentury, it’ll be her.
Twig and I race each other up the stairs.
Maggie Henshaw is a painfully thin, hawkish woman in her late seventies who has mousy gray hair and dresses in layers, even in the summer. Maxi skirts on bottom. Cardigans and scarves on top with bizarre accessories, like preserved insects encased in brooches or a necklace made from a tiny bird skull. She’s never without her journal, which is stuffed with handwritten notes, to-do lists, and loose scraps of paper. She has the kind of voice you have to lean in to hear, yet she’s always telling me and Twig to speak up.
We find her and Walt bickering in one of the narrow aisles.
“Maggie, you haveFrankensteinshelved next toThe Federalist Papers.”
“They were published in the same era,” she replies, “and they both start with F.”
