Ghost Town

Jennifer had stolen the chair from, who was still standing. “Here,” she said. “I’m leaving anyway.”

Now he really looked confused. So did Monica and her Monickettes, as if the concept of givebacks had never crossed their path before. Claire sighed, shifted the weight of her backpack, and prepared to leave, mocha in hand.

“Hey!” Monica’s grip on her elbow dragged her to a stop. “What the hell? I want you to stay!”

“Why?” Claire asked, and jerked her arm free. “So you can needle me for an hour? Are you really that bored?”

Monica looked even more confused. Nobody ever turned down being part of the queen bee’s inner circle. After that second of vulnerability, though, her face hardened. “Don’t diss me, Danvers. I’m warning you.”

“I’m not dissing you.” Claire sighed. “I’m ignoring you. There’s a difference. Dissing you implies I think you’re actually important.”

As she walked out, she heard someone behind her laugh and clap. They were quickly hushed, but it still warmed her just a little. She didn’t often get up in Monica’s grille that directly, but she was sick of the games. Monica just needed to move on and find somebody else to poke her pins into.

The mocha was still delicious. Maybe even just a little bit more delicious for being outside in the open air, come to think of it. Claire nodded to a few people she knew on the street, all of them permanent residents, and strolled down the block. She wasn’t in the mood to shop for clothes, but the little faded bookstore farther down beckoned her.

Book Mad was a dusty hole-in-the-wall, crammed floor to ceiling with stacks of volumes in—as far as Claire had ever been able to tell—only a vague sense of order. Generally, nonfiction was at the front and fiction at the back, but you really could never tell. The stacks never seemed to get any smaller, nor was the dust ever disturbed, but she was always finding new stuff she hadn’t seen before.

That was weirdly entertaining.

“Hi, Claire,” said the proprietor, Dan, a tall guy about her father’s age. He was thin and a little nerdy, but that might just have been the glasses, which were either wickedly retro or seriously lame; Claire could never decide. He had on a funny T-shirt, as usual. Today’s featured a cartoon figure running from a giant T. rex, and it read EXERCISE: SOME MOTIVATION REQUIRED. She tried not to smile, but lost the battle. It really was funny. “Got some physics stuff that just came in. It’s over there.” He gestured vaguely off into the distance. Claire nodded.

“Hey,” she said. “Where do you get the books? I mean, they’re old. Some of them are really kind of ancient.”

He shrugged and looked down at the antique register on the counter, and brushed some dust off the keys. “Oh, you know. Around.”

“From a storage room in the library? Maybe on the fourth floor?” She had him. He looked up at her, eyes narrowing. “I’ve been in there. I was wondering what they were going to do with all that stuff once they were done with it. So, who gives you the books?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dan said, and all the warmth was gone suddenly. He looked uncomfortable and suspicious, and the funny T-shirt suddenly didn’t fit his mood at all. “Let me know if you find anything you want.”

The fourth floor of the school’s library had been a locked maze of boxes of old books, gathered from who- knew-where by the vampires. At the time Claire had visited—well, broken in—vampires (no doubt reporting to Amelie, the town’s Founder) had been combing through looking for one particular book. She’d wondered what they’d planned to do with all the rest once their quest was finished.

Naturally, it turned out Amelie was making money off of the extra books. Vampires were nothing if not practical.

As Claire was thumbing through the dusty stacks, squinting to read faded titles, occasionally sneezing from the smell of old paper, she found a slim, leather-bound volume that was still in pretty good condition. No title on the spine, so she pulled it out and looked at the front. Nothing on the front, either.

Inside, on the first page under a sheet of old onionskin, was a black-and-white photograph of Amelie. Claire blinked and took her time looking; yes, it really was her. The Founder of Morganville looked young and fragile, with her white-gold hair piled up in a complicated style on top of her head that showed off her very long, elegant neck. She wore a black dress, something from the 1800s, Claire guessed, with lots of sleeve and tons of skirts and petticoats. There was something about her eyes—the photograph had made them even lighter than the icy gray they usually were.

It was deeply spooky.

Claire flipped a page and read the title:

A HISTORY OF MORGANVILLE

Its Important Citizens and Events

A Chronicle of Our Times

She blinked. Surely they hadn’t meant for this to end up in the used bookstore, where anybody could pick it up and find it. She’d never seen anything like it before.

And, of course, she had to have it. She’d been burning up with curiosity about Amelie ever since she’d met her; the Founder seemed to have so many secrets that it was hard to know where they started and stopped. Even though Amelie had, from time to time, helped her out, and had given her Protection that had saved her life at one time, Claire really didn’t know that much about her, except that she was old, regal, and scary.

The penciled price on the inside of the cover was only five dollars. She quickly found a few more obscure science titles, buried the history in the stack, and hauled the books up to the front.

Dan snorted. “You’re never going to cram all that in your backpack.”

“Yeah, probably not,” she agreed. “Could I have a sack?”

“What do I look like, Piggly Wiggly? Hang on.” He rooted around behind the counter, sending up choking clouds of dust that made even him cough, and finally handed over a battered old canvas bag. She started counting out money, and he quickly flipped open the books and added up the totals. He wasn’t paying attention, which was good; he just added it up and said, “Twenty-seven fifty.”

That was an awful lot, pretty much all she had at the moment, but she kept smiling and handed it over. As soon as the cash had left her palm, she grabbed the bag and started stuffing things inside.

“What’s your hurry?” he asked, counting out the fives and ones. “It’s not close to sundown.”

“Class,” she said. “Thanks.”

He nodded, opened the register, and put the cash inside. She felt him watching her all the way to the door. It occurred to her that she didn’t know which vampire owned this business, or how he or she might feel about the sale of the book . . . but she couldn’t worry about that now.

She really did have class.

TWO

It didn’t take long at all to read the book. She stopped in a park on the way home and sat in a sun-faded rubber swing seat and rocked slowly back and forth as she flipped pages.

It was about people she’d never heard of . . . and people she knew. Amelie, for one. Amelie’s disputes with various vampires. Amelie’s decisions to sentence this person for his crimes, spare that one. There were other vampires profiled, too. Some she’d never heard of; she supposed that they’d died, or left, or maybe they were just reclusive. Oliver wasn’t in the book, because he was a latecomer to town. Neither, curiously, was Myrnin. She supposed Myrnin had been a closely guarded town secret from the very beginning.

It was weirdly interesting, but overall, she didn’t know what good it was going to do her to know that Amelie had once filed a complaint against a man who owned a dry-goods store (what was a dry-goods store?) for cheating the human customers. And that the complaint had gotten his store taken away from him, and he’d opened the town’s first movie theater.