"Gone?" Nancy asked blankly, following her friend into the study. "What do you mean, 'gone?'"
"I mean," snapped Celia, "that he always kept it in the roll top desk, and he laid it there before he died, and that it is now missing."
Nancy walked over to the desk and put her hand on its surface. She noted with surprise that it was not facing the wall, as one might expect, but rather towards the open door into the hall. There was nothing on the desktop except an ink-stained calendar from July 1963, a mug full of dulled pencils, a pocket watch stopped at half-past three and a pair of safety scissors.
"Was the desk closed and locked?" she inquired, turning to face Celia again.
"It was never locked," she replied, pinching the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. "I don't even know that there is a key."
Nancy sighed and sank onto a low ottoman in the center of the cavernous room. Wan sunlight, starred with a million motes of dust, streamed through a row of tall, east-facing windows. On all four walls, bookshelves towered toward the ceiling, with ladders to allow access to the top shelves. Besides the desk, there was a massive pie safe on the far wall, a few faded wing chairs and a large library table in the center of the room. A framed drawing on the wall next to the pie safe caught Nancy's attention, and she rose to examine it.
"That's always been here," Celia said, joining her in front of it. It was a pen-and-ink map of the grounds of Selkirk End, showing the house and the gardens behind, and beyond them, Lake Augusta, fringed by woods.
Beside the map hung a portrait of a dour old man with a walrus moustache. He was frowning, and his beady black eyes flashed a warning to the viewer.
"That's Jonas Selkirk, my mother's great-great-grandfather," Celia said. "He built the house over a hundred years ago. Everyone always said he hid a treasure here, in a secret passage or something. Ethan and I always used to look for it when we were little, but we never found anything."
"I see," Nancy said thoughtfully.
"Can you help me find the manuscript?" Celia demanded.
"I can try," Nancy replied. "But I do have another question." She turned to face Celia and put a hand on the girl's elbow. "Celie, back in the cemetery, yesterday, you said that there was a mystery surrounding Selkirk End. What were you referring to?"
Celia slowly crossed the room, leaving Nancy standing alone next to the pie safe.
"No mystery, really," she said. "I mean, besides the old story about Jonas Selkirk's treasure. It's just that—"
"That what?" Nancy prompted.
"The night before he died," Celia said, gazing out the window onto the brown, weed-choked lawn below, "he called me in here. He was sitting at the desk, writing on his book, like he always did. He liked to write on yellow legal pads with a regular old Bic pen. He put it down when I came in. I sat in that chair, opposite the desk, and he looked at me very seriously."
"Did he seem troubled?" Nancy asked.
"No more so than usual," Celia replied slowly. "He was always sort of gloomy when he was writing. But that night, he asked if he could see my locket. I took it off and handed to him. He looked at the front for a moment and then opened it and turned around. I couldn't see what he was doing, and I asked what was wrong. He turned back and fastened it around my neck again.
'Just wanted to look at it,' he said.
I asked him why. He was evasive, and I let it drop. Then he sat down again and leaned forward, like he was going to whisper something to me.
'If anything happens to me,' he said, 'I want you to do something for me.'
I was scared, and I told him not to be stupid, that nothing was going to happen.
'Read my manuscript. You'll know what to do,' he said. 'Trust me.'
He said nothing else about it, and I went to bed. The next morning I found him—" Her voice broke, and Nancy felt a surge of pity for the abandoned girl.
"I-I found him lying on the floor by the desk. I called an ambulance. In the twenty minutes it took to arrive I knew that he was dead and had been for some hours. There was no blood, no sign of a struggle, nothing. The doctors said that he must have had an undiagnosed heart condition, that it had probably only been a matter of time."
"Do you believe that?" Nancy asked quietly.
"No," Celia admitted. "I stayed that night in River Heights, with an old friend of my mother's, an elderly lady. I was distraught and alone, and I forgot about what he'd told me about the manuscript. I only remembered this morning, in the car. When I heard that song."
"Why did it remind you?" Nancy asked, puzzled.
"I don't know," Celia said. "There was something about it, though…" she trailed off.
Nancy was intrigued, but privately doubted whether Celia was telling her the entire truth.
"There is one more thing," Celia added. "Last night, before bed, I looked at my locket again. I removed Ethan's picture, and I found this behind it." She opened the locket and pulled out a tiny gold key, no larger than a paper clip.
"Is it the key to the desk?" Nancy asked, examining it.
"I tried," Celia said. "But it doesn't fit. I've never seen it before in my life."
"So," Nancy mused, sitting down on the ottoman, "there are three mysteries here. The key, the missing manuscript and Ethan's death." She glanced up at her friend to see how she would react to Nancy's cold appraisal of the situation, but Celia betrayed no emotion. "Does anyone else have a key to the house?"
"No," Celia said. "The original locks were on the house for years, but they were getting rusty and my parents had them changed right before they died. We--I--have the only keys."
"Do you have any relatives nearby?" Nancy asked suddenly.
"None," Celia said.
"Friends? Neighbors?"
"No," the girl said, "Our nearest neighbors live on the other side of the lake, and we barely know them. Mrs. Hartford, the lady I stayed with after Ethan died, would call occasionally, but I wouldn't say we're close."
Nancy thought a moment, looking up at the untidy piles of books stacked on the shelves. "Why don't you show me around a little, Celia? That way I'll get my bearings."
"I'll show you to your room," Celia replied, and Nancy followed her into the foyer. As she did, she noticed something that had escaped her when they had first arrived. Hanging in the hall, opposite the study door, was an empty frame. On the hardwood floor beneath it lay hundreds of jagged shards of glass, glittering like new-fallen snow.
Beware the shattered mirror!