The next few pages were covered in clumsy sketches--doodles, really--of the furniture in the study. Occasional words and phrases were sprinkled among them, some of them recognizable as fragments of poetry, others utterly incomprehensible to Nancy.

At last she uncovered another yellow sheet of Ethan's furious, ink-blotched handwriting.

It's a funny thing (Ethan Laramie had written, in the dark months before his death). A funny thing, that Jonas Selkirk, who fought so desperately and so senselessly against Time itself, seems to have won his battle.

I say this not merely because his body was never found, but because he is still here.

You're crazy, Laramie.

But it's true. I've seen him—not his face, and not for long, but I've caught fleeting black glimpses of him in the mirror and from the corners of my eyes. Late at night, in the unholy hours between midnight and morning. It's the same mirror she comes from, but she comes to save me and he comes to collect his due.

It's unfair. He's the one, a hundred-and-however-many years ago, who sold his soul for eternal youth and yet we're the ones who must pay the price. He came for all my ancestors (greedily seizing both my parents at once) and now he haunts the halls of this moldering wreck of a house, waiting. Waiting for me.

I'm not sure that I believe in the devil but I believe in him because I have seen him, many times. He is patient for now but for how long? Time is his enemy, and Patience and Time are near kin.

I will know when my time has come because I will glance up from my work to see his face in the mirror. He will be smiling, like Death. My only hope is to discover why he was driven to pursue immortality, and how his ghastly work can be undone.

Nancy shivered and turned the page. Paper-clipped to the next sheet were two photographs, identical to those she had seen in the secret passage earlier. Elizabeth Selkirk, whose round face and cheerful expression belied the tragedy that awaited. Jonas Selkirk, younger than his portrait in the study but still—

And Nancy knew. Her hands shook as she stared into Selkirk's dark eyes, and a weighty dread settled itself around her shoulders. It's just a coincidence, she told herself, but every instinct was telling her that it was true.

It all made sense; the facts arranged themselves neatly in her mind, like pieces of a puzzle. Ethan, waiting. Jonas, waiting. The legend of the Selkirk treasure. What was it Celia had said at lunch yesterday? It seemed so many years ago, now. Her mother's family. The curse. And Isabel. Perhaps Isabel, too…

From downstairs, she could hear a dull, muffled thudding. Someone was knocking at the door. "Coming!" she heard Celia call. A sudden, frigid horror spread through Nancy. She could think of no one who would be at the door, except—

Leaping to her feet, she skidded across the room and down the hall, hugging the pages of Ethan's manuscript to her chest. She hurried down the stairs, the threadbare carpet deadening the sound of her pounding footsteps.

At the end of the hallway, as if drawn to the house by some dark instinct, loomed Brother Michael of the Anointed Brethren. Celia stood before him, her back to Nancy, and every line in her angular body indicated disgust. Isabel was standing by the study door, holding a paper plate with a peanut butter sandwich on it.

"Sisters," he said, indicating them all with a sweep of his hand. Even from the foot of the stairs, Nancy sensed the cold vacuum of his dark eyes. The foot of the stairs, she thought, her mind racing. Crossing from the back hall to the entryway. And the mirror.

"Why are you back?" Celia demanded, voice quivering.

"He's back because he felt it calling to him," Nancy said hoarsely, her voice sounding unfamiliar as it echoed in the arched hall.

Celia jumped, looking back over her shoulder to see Nancy for the first time. "What do you mean?" she asked, glancing from Brother Michael to the young detective with confusion written on her furrowed brow. The man stood unblinking, regarding Nancy with disdain.

"I mean," Nancy said, "that you couldn't resist coming back here. This house—Selkirk End—it calls to you, doesn't it? I'm sure Celia would agree." She took a few tentative, sleepwalking steps down the hallway. She was suddenly and preternaturally aware of each gasping breath she took, of each hesitant pulse of her heart. She hardly knew what she was saying, only that it was vital that she say it. The pages of the manuscript in her hands rustled nervously in a breeze that only she could feel.

"I don't know what you mean, Sister Nancy," he said smoothly. "I am here to see Sister Celia and offer her what comfort I can."

"Sister," Nancy continued thoughtfully. "Not sister, but cousin perhaps. She said she had an aunt who moved away before she was born. Are you her aunt's son?"

"Sister Nancy—"

"I think you are," Nancy said evenly. "The resemblance is uncanny, did you know that? Did your mother tell you?"

"Tell me what?" he said, his smoothly handsome face devoid of expression.

"How much you look like your ancestor Jonas Selkirk. I'm sure she was quite proud of it. I'm guessing your mother didn't just move away. Was she disinherited?"

Celia looked bewildered, but Isabel's mouth hung slightly open, as if she were about to speak. There was a look of dawning comprehension in her eyes.

"All right," Brother Michael said slowly, tilting his head to one side. "I don't know what you're getting at, but I think you'd better stop while you're ahead, missy."

"I saw you that night," Isabel said suddenly.

"Saw me where? When?" the man demanded, turning on Isabel. "What are you talking about?"

"In the hallway," Isabel murmured softly. "Right after I heard the mirror break. I saw something move in the dark, by the front door, but I thought it was a trick of the light. You musta doubled back through the hall and out the broken winda in the conservatory when I was—when I was in the study with Ethan."

"Are you saying that I killed him?" he spat. "Because that's ridiculous. He died of a heart condition. It said so in the papers."

"No," Nancy said. Brother Michael stared at her with contempt. "No," she repeated, her voice level and even. "You didn't murder him. You're not guilty of anything except breaking and entering.

"You were looking for the treasure. Your mother told you about it, am I right? She inherited all of Jonas' Selkirk's papers, except his journal. Ethan found that in the library. He wrote to her, wanting to borrow the rest of Jonas' notes, but I'm guessing she's dead. Please nod or something, Brother Michael, to let me know if I'm on the right track."

The man laughed, a wheezing, mirthless sound that echoed eerily in the dim-lit room. The sun had disappeared behind the heavy October clouds again, and weak grey light filtered exhaustedly through the grimy window on the front door.

"Good guesses, Sister Nancy," he said mockingly. "Yes, my mother is dead. To her last breath she cursed her father for sending her away. He was a feeble old man, and she'd looked after him devotedly. Given up the best years of her life for him. Listened to him complain and moan and predict his death every day for more than a decade. But he didn't have the decency to actually die. She said he just lived on and on and on."

Brother Michael grinned. "But you're wrong about one thing. I don't care about the treasure. There is no treasure, Sister Nancy, not in the way that you'd understand it."

"The house," Celia murmured, eyes wide. "You wanted—"

"My mother," he said, a steely note in his voice for the first time, "my mother served her dad—your grandfather--devotedly. The only joy she had was going to town on Saturdays to do the shopping. That, and researching their ancestors late at night in the study. The rest of the time he kept her running back and forth, helping him to the bathroom and cooking him oatmeal. He wouldn't even let her go to church on Sundays. Meanwhile, her sister—your mother—was off at college. Then she got married and ran off west, leaving my mother to wipe up the old man's drool."

"So you wanted revenge," Isabel said fiercely. "But Ethan didn't have anything to do with it. He never even woulda met his grandfather."

A change had come over Brother Michael; his cold beady eyes now glowed with anger, as if some long-smoldering rage deep inside him had burst finally into flame. "She served him like a slave! And what was her reward? When he found out I was going to be born, he threw her out of the house, the sanctimonious old—"

"And her sister came back," Nancy finished, "when she heard that her father was dying alone. He changed his will in favor of Celia's mother, who had brought along her husband and her son. To his other daughter he left nothing. That didn't sit well with your mother, did it?"

The man said nothing, but his whole being seemed to simmer with fury.

"So you came out here when she died. Just to see it. The house. The land. The inheritance she had been cheated out of years before. You hung around, met Celia in the guise of a door-to-door evangelist. Then you discovered the broken window in the conservatory and couldn't resist. This old house got quite a lot of traffic by night, apparently. How lucky for you that Ethan Laramie mistook your midnight rambles for evidence of his own madness."

"I didn't kill him," Brother Michael spat. "I didn't even know he was dead until I saw it in the paper."

"True," Nancy replied, not taking her eyes from the man's face. Her words came to her as a surprise, as if she were speaking for someone else. "You didn't murder him. But you killed him all the same."

There was no response from Brother Michael, but Celia clapped a hand over her mouth, half-smothering a cry. Isabel, her sandwich lying uneaten on the hall table, shifted her weight from foot to foot.

"He would have heard a noise in the hall," Nancy went on dreamily. In her mind she could see him, sitting at the desk facing the study doorway, bent over his notebook, scribbling furiously. "He looked up at the mirror, expecting to see Isabel."

"But it wasn't me," Isabel whispered, her huge brown eyes staring into nothingness as if she, like Nancy, was reviewing the scene in her mind. "It was you."

"But he didn't see you," Nancy said. "He saw Jonas Selkirk. It was the sign he was waiting for. The sign he was dreading. He picked up the paperweight from the desk and threw it. It shattered the mirror. You turned, saw Isabel, and ran." She paused for breath, but the force that was guiding her compelled her to go on. "Ethan Laramie saw his own death reflected in the mirror. And the shock was enough to kill him. A genetic heart defect—runs in your family, did you know that, Brother Michael?"

He was staring blankly at her, as if her words meant nothing to him. "It should have been ours," he said, the corners of his mouth drawn up tight. "That's what she always used to say. Before she'd tuck me in at night, she'd describe it like it was a fairy-tale world. The rose garden. The orchard. The lake. And the house, like something from a dream. 'Someday I'll show you,' she said. She used to get out the photos and the letters. Jonas' letters, the stuff she'd taken with her when she left. And when she died and I got the letter…it was a sign."

"A sign from God?" Celia demanded, her hand clenched around her locket, her voice shaking.

"Better," Brother Michael said, and the wan light from the window seemed to halo him for a moment. "A sign from Jonas. A summons to return and claim my birthright."

They stood silently a moment. Slowly, Nancy felt the glow of anger and discovery leave her. Freed from her trance, she was suddenly exhausted, and a weary resignation washed over her. "I'm calling Chief McGinnis," she said, lifting the phone and studying the rotary dial.

"I can't let you do that," his voice hissed, his stale breath hot at her ear.