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“Shit,” she said. “I think she’s warning us that the sheriff is here.” Cam and Francine began stuffing Cam’s cooking supplies back into her backpack. Avery did a half pull-up to peek out the window.

“He’s got his lights on at the end of the driveway,” she reported. “It looks like he hasn’t opened the gate yet. It’s probably locked. C’mon, let’s get out of here, ladies!”

Cam zipped the bag and hugged the manuscript and diary to her chest while Francine hastily shoved the bin back in its place. The trio quickly made for the staircase, snapping their flashlights off as they went. They found their way back outside, and Cam locked the door behind them.

“Go, go!” she urged, and the three women cut through the employee parking lot and out to the avenue lined with houses that ran parallel to Main Street. There, they settled on a pace that was rapid but not a run. If anyone spotted them out a window, they would just look like three women out for a power walk. At midnight.

A few minutes later, they finally burst through the door, giggling with excitement and adrenaline to find Birdie waiting for them, sitting in her armchair, nursing a brandy. Cam shut the door behind them in relief, and Parsley trotted over to greet her.

“Birdie, wait until we show you what we found!” Cam exclaimed, placing the manuscript and diary on the kitchen table with shaking hands. Her grandmother came over to look, and her face lit up as she read the title page.

“Well done, dear,” Birdie said, squeezing Cam’s shoulder. “I suspect that an emergency meeting of the Historical Society board is in our near future. And Roxy Shipman is going to have a fit,” Birdie added with a smile that indicated she relished the prospect. “I believe that’s enough excitement for me for one evening. I’m going to bed. You girls enjoy the rest of your night, and I’ll catch up on all the details in the morning.”

Cam reached for the bottle that her grandmother had left out. It was far too late to contact Miles. But she had reading to do.

“Brandy or coffee?” she asked Francine and Avery, who had stripped off their gear and clustered around the table to examine the spoils of their heist.

“Brandy,” the two women said in unison.

“Let’s keep it away from our treasures,” Cam said. “We wouldn’t want to accidentally destroy it after all our work. And all Ada’s work,” she added in case the ghost was listening.

They first tackled the diary, whose rusted lock seemed determined not to budge. Cam fished around for a paper clip and tried picking it.

“Do you even know what you’re doing with that?” Avery asked skeptically.

“I’ve seen movies,” Cam said, wiggling the pin and hoping it would spring open like it did for Daniel Craig.

“I found an instructional video online,” Francine said helpfully, showing them her screen.

Cam paused. “I think we shouldn’t force it. What if we damage something? As much as I am dying to read this, we should get these to the experts as soon as possible.”

“When are you going to tell Roxy?” Francine asked. “Birdie’s right. She’s going to hit the roof. First of all, because we were, strictly speaking, trespassing. And not to mention the big Marshall-palooza she’s planning.”

Cam considered their options. If she went to the mayor now, there was a chance Roxy could demand the return of the papers, which did belong to the Historical Society. When Ada had died, her possessions legally went to Marshall, who had left everything to the organization. Heck, Roxy, as the society’s president, might even be able to have them arrested. Surely she had sway at the sheriff’s office, just like she did everywhere in Silver Cove.

And then what could happen? She didn’t think Roxy would actually destroy the papers. But maybe she could stoop so low, Cam thought. Who knew what she might be capable of to protect the legacy of Marshall Merriweather, the man she revered?

No, Cam decided, it would be better if she waited to tell Roxy until after the manuscript and diary were in the hands of the people who could authenticate them. “I think we wait until we get them to Miles’s contact,” she said. “We’ll see what she says—and then, hopefully, we can drop the bomb on Silver Cove’s big centennial celebration. For Ada’s sake.”

The next morning, Cam was panning her phone across the front cover of Ada’s “new” manuscript, which still sat on Birdie’s kitchen table. On the other end of the video call was Vivian Sharpe, the lead investigator with Sotheby’s rare books and manuscripts division and Miles’s old classmate.

“Can you turn the page for me?” Vivian asked. “Carefully.”

Cam slowly flipped the yellowed paper with one hand as she held the phone with her other. Cam had told Vivian all about what she had uncovered, starting with the cookbook but leaving out any mention of Ada’s ghost. If she was going to convince this woman she had uncovered a historical literary scandal that sounded improbable, she better try to sound as sane as she possibly could, and rambling about a dead woman who appeared from a pot of soup was not going to help her case.

She sent pictures of the original Stormy manuscript, noting differences in the handwriting between the cover page and the rest. The book expert had seemed calm and perhaps a tad unimpressed. But then again, the woman had probably seen her share of people who had discovered what they thought were long-lost masterworks of F. Scott Fitzgerald or Edith Wharton in their attics that had turned out to be some random person’s old college scribblings. Not to mention fakes. Cam had read that, several years back, Vivian had been the one to uncover a forged Hemingway short story a scholar had tried to pass off as the real thing.

Cam turned the camera back around so they were face-to-face on the call.

“And you had two additional witnesses who can attest to its provenance, right?” Vivian asked.

“Yes, that’s right,” Cam said. She had also omitted from her account of discovering the manuscript and diary that she and her friends had not been officially sanctioned in their search. She had said, breezily, she was “with” the Silver Cove Historical Society, a detail she hoped Vivian wouldn’t question.

“I think you might just have something extraordinary there,” Vivian said.

Cam looked excitedly across the kitchen where Miles, Avery, Francine, and Birdie were gathered like a family awaiting news of a childbirth. They were doing dances and hugging each other, though they were doing their best to stay quiet for Cam’s call. Miles flashed her a big thumbs-up.

“Of course, I’ll need to examine them here in my lab in New York before I can make an official authentication,” Vivian said. “And I’ll be consulting with several experts on early twentieth-century children’s literature, including at the University of Virginia where the first Stormy manuscript is housed. This might be exactly what we think it is. But please don’t get your hopes up too high,” she cautioned. “I’ve seen a lot of disappointed people in my line of work.”