"You killed him?" Celia shrieked, her face livid, her hands shaking uncontrollably.

"Wait!" Nancy commanded, laying a steadying hand on her friend's arm. "She didn't say that, Celie. Go on, Isabel."

"I was comin' down the hall by the stairs, like I usually did," Isabel said slowly, her red-rimmed eyes fixed on the doorway behind Celia, "and I heard somethin' crash, like glass breakin'. I rushed into the front room there and that mirror that always useta tilt toward the stairs, the one he always saw me comin' in, it was broke all over the floor. 'Ethan?' I said, real quiet, and went into the study. He was lyin' on the floor by the desk—"

"You're lying," Celia hissed. "I didn't hear the mirror break that night."

"You also didn't hear me screaming for you when I caught Isabel sneaking around earlier," Nancy pointed out. Celia looked abashed.

"—lyin' on the floor by the desk," Isabel forged on, "and I knelt down to see what'd happened. He was starin' at the ceiling, and his eyes were all glassy. But he knew I was there, because he felt around beside him and grabbed my hand. And then he said somethin' strange—"

"What was it?" Nancy asked curiously.

"He said, 'The sand—the sand.'" Isabel flushed apologetically. "At least, I think. Then he was quiet a second and he started gasping for breath. His face turned sorta grey and I said his name, I think. Then—well, then I knew he was dead, and I lost my mind a little. I musta started running. Next thing I knew, I was standing in the orchard out back, out of breath and crying."

Celia whirled to face Nancy, face disfigured with fury. "Do you believe this, Nancy? This—this story she's made up?" She turned on the cowering girl, her eyes narrowed to angry slits. "You just want attention, don't you? Sneaking around in our house, stealing from us"— she grabbed the front of Ethan's shirt—"and now telling lies about my brother."

"Wait," Nancy commanded. "What part of her story don't you believe?"

Celia faltered a moment, biting her lip and worrying the locket back and forth on its chain. She soon recovered her composure and said, quieter and with more restraint, "Nancy, Ethan was a writer and very creative and very…unusual in some ways, but he wasn't crazy." Celia's eyes shimmered with tears. "You have to believe me."

Nancy guided Celia to the vanity stool and gently nudged her onto the seat. "Celia," she said softly, "Isabel isn't claiming your brother was crazy. You said yourself that you could believe what she said about how they met."

Celia sniffled a little. "But…what she said…about when he died…"

Nancy felt a rush of understanding. Of course Celia would be affronted that Isabel was with Ethan when he died. But Nancy was inclined to believe Isabel's account; the young detective had seen many liars in her short years, and Isabel's face was blank and guileless, her story clear and unadorned. A liar, Nancy thought, would have embroidered the tale and downplayed the less-believable aspects.

She looked down at the sheaf of yellow legal paper in her hands and then back at Isabel, who was rocking back and forth on the blanket chest, knees pulled up under her chin. Celia, arms crossed, was staring at the darkened window. The clock in the hall struck two and its chimes echoed in the emptiness, their desolate, aching sound somehow more mournful than Isabel's smothered sobs.

"Why don't we go to bed," Nancy suggested. "We can discuss this in the morning. Isabel, with your permission of course," she said, nodding toward Celia, "can stay here if she likes."

"Fine," said Celia through clenched teeth, and Isabel unfolded her gawky limbs and hurried into the shadowed hall without another word. When her quick little footsteps had receded into the distance, Celia rose and fixed Nancy with a livid glare.

"Why does she have to stay?" she demanded.

"She has important clues," Nancy replied, meeting her furious gaze. "If we let her leave, she could disappear entirely. And I believe her story, although I can understand your reluctance to—"

"Reluctance?" Celia breathed. "You think this is just reluctance? She broke into our house! And if she didn't kill Ethan, she isn't denying that she was here the night he died!"

"Celia," Nancy sighed, sitting down on the blanket chest, "really, let's go to bed. We can talk it over in the morning."

Celia looked as if she were about to protest, but turned on her heel and flounced out of the room, the tails of her bathrobe flapping. Instead of turning out the light, however, Nancy climbed into bed and pulled up the covers, resting Ethan Laramie's manuscript on her knees, and began to read.

She pulled off the binder clip that bound the pages together. The first sheet was blank except for the words "SELKIRK CURSE" in large, angry capitals. She turned the page and struggled to decipher the spidery, ink-blotched handwriting.

I have been privileged to discover (he wrote), among the cracked and yellowed pages of Jonas Selkirk's journals, the first known account of the Selkirk Curse. Jonas brought it upon himself, but it is his unfortunate descendants who have borne the consequences of his vanity and monstrous pride. I will, beyond all doubt, become its latest victim. Before that time, however, I will endeavor to bring to light the chain of mistakes and mischance and (here his heavy scrawl was smudged beyond recognition) have plagued Selkirk End.

Nancy turned the sheet over, hoping to read more, but the reverse was blank and a page appeared to be missing. Instead she found a rough sketch of a familiar symbol: an hourglass wreathed in flame, like that on the front of Celia's locket. Beneath he had scribbled "The Birth-mark?"

Jonas Selkirk emigrated to Illinois from Massachusetts with his wife Elizabeth and their three children in 1851. He built Selkirk End on the shore of Lake Augusta, and quickly became wealthy through shrewd investment in the railroads. His true love, however, was the study of chemistry, then in its nascence.

Here a paragraph had been scribbled out so thoroughly that he had punched holes in the thin paper with the nib of his pen.

His journals are filled with triumphant discoveries. Selkirk was particularly fascinated by the medicinal possibilities of certain plants native to the Illinois prairies, and his accounts of his findings are typically self-congratulatory. In February 1857, upon discovering a compound that seemed to be effective in curing his nagging toothache, he wrote, "Imagine! Through my own industry and the analytical power of my own mind, I have triumphed over Nature herself." Selkirk built himself a modest laboratory in the cellar of the house, with the entrance secreted behind a favorite print hanging on the east wall of the study.

A secret passageway! Nancy thought. Perhaps that was how the murderer had gained access to the study! She turned the page, only to discover an entire sheet blanketed in dense, almost undecipherable writing; in places, the words became mere jagged lines.

The girl the hourglass the sand trickling down. A king of infinite space, time's fell hand the girl the hourglass the sand trickling down. Selkirk and the far-seeing mirror the past and future a single thread. Atropos and the scissors and the thread spun thin. The hourglass. The sand, the sand…

The sand…it was possible, of course, that Isabel had picked up on this phrase from reading the manuscript, but, believing her account of Ethan's last words, it seemed to Nancy that Ethan had been severely troubled in the months before his death. Shivering, she turned another page.

Jonas Selkirk was, by all accounts, a handsome man, and he was inordinately vain. In his daughter Hepzibah's papers, I have uncovered evidence that he corresponded with East Coast doctors and researchers who hoped to discover the secret of eternal youth. It would be simple to attribute this to mere vanity, but I believe that there was a far subtler motive behind Selkirk's quest. He had little patience for weakness in others; he is said to have severely beaten his eldest son, Eli, when the boy became the target of the town bully. He despised illness and refused to visit his mother on her deathbed. In 1854 he noted, "Wm. (one of his business associates) is in poor health. Getting past sixty. Quite feeble. Someone ought to put the wretch out of his misery."

The wind had picked up outside, and bare branches clawed at the window. Nancy leapt, startled. Her eyelids were beginning to droop, and the light in the room seemed hazy and indistinct. She struggled to focus on Laramie's crabbed writing. Then, at the bottom of the page, a paragraph leapt out at her.

In 1859, Elizabeth, his beloved wife, died suddenly; she had been in perfect health and one day simply collapsed while reading in the study. The doctor could find no explanation for her demise and attributed it to a heart condition…

Nancy felt as though a fist had closed around her throat.

Afterward Jonas fell into a decline, refusing to leave the house and spending days on end in his basement laboratory. Hepzibah heard him muttering to himself late at night, and his journals entries are obscure and incomprehensible. Finally, in late 1860, he disappeared entirely. He is believed to have drowned himself in Lake Augusta.

But I don't believe it.

Much of Jonas' notes and writings are missing. My mother mentioned once that her sister, a genealogy enthusiast, had taken them with her when she left the family and moved to the East Coast. I have written to her at her last known address, but received no answer. Even without these additional clues, the message is clear: Jonas Selkirk, and his accursed ambition, have doomed us all.