disappearance or the girl’s death, but they found nothing. Finally closing the heavy volume, Tad looked up at Eric and Kent. “We don’t know much more about Darby now than we did when we got here,” he said.
“No,” Kent said, “but now we have Tiffany Hanover, too. And doesn’t it seem weird that the paper would say her drowning and Darby’s disappearance weren’t connected? I mean, doesn’t that make it sound like people must have thought they were? Otherwise, why even mention it?”
Eric suddenly remembered the woman behind the desk who had told them where to find the old newspapers. Certainly she looked like she’d been working in the library for a whole lot longer than seven years — in fact, she could have been the original librarian when the place had been built almost a century earlier. “How about asking the librarian?” he suggested.
They replaced the book and approached the big mahogany counter just inside the front door, where Miss Edna Bloomfield — identified by a neat brass nameplate set discreetly by the book-return box — was sorting catalog cards in a long narrow drawer.
“Are you boys finding what you’re looking for?” she asked in a whisper, peering at them over the top of her wire-rimmed glasses. Though her hair was twisted up at the nape of her neck in a tight bun and she wore a long- sleeve dress that was buttoned all the way up to her chin, there was a glimmer of a smile in her eyes that belied the severity of her dress and hairdo.
“I’m living at the house called Pinecrest this summer,” Eric said, “and we were interested in finding out something about Dr. Darby.” He glanced at Tad and Kent, then spoke again. “I mean, like, what happened to him? Did he really just disappear?”
“And we’re wondering about Tiffany Hanover, too,” Kent added. “Did she really just drown?”
Edna Bloomfield gazed up at them, her eyes moving from Eric to Kent to Tad, then back to Eric, and Eric could almost see the gears turning in her head as she appraised them and decided how much — if anything — to tell them. Finally, she leaned back in her chair, took off her glasses, and let them hang on a chain around her neck. “Well,” she said, her voice rising slightly, “you boys seem to have happened onto the only two mysteries of Phantom Lake.” She clucked her tongue sympathetically. “That poor girl.” Now her voice dropped again, and she leaned forward, glancing in both directions as if to be certain nobody but the three boys was listening. “She was murdered, you know.”
“Murdered?” Tad echoed. “But there was nothing about that in the paper. At least nothing we could find.”
“This is a small town,” Edna Bloomfield said. “We rely on tourism.” She glanced around once more, and her voice dropped still further. “So sometimes everything doesn’t get into the paper. But everyone knows she was strangled, even if Gerry Hofstetter at the paper didn’t publish anything. And who can blame him? He didn’t want to scare people. And why hurt the town? After all, it isn’t like one of our people did it.”
“Then who did?” Tad asked.
Edna Bloomfield waved her hand at the question as if it were a pesky fly. “Well, I’m sure I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. Some reporter from Milwaukee came and poked around, trying to make everyone think it was one of those killers you hear so much about these days.”
An image of Old Man Logan and his strange boat with the cross mounted in the bow suddenly rose in Tad Sparks’s mind.
Miss Bloomfield put the index cards aside and leaned closer to the boys. “I heard he even suggested our nice Dr. Darby might have done it, just because he used to work with those killers at the hospital down in Madison. But none of us ever believed that, of course. Dr. Darby was such a fine man. He was a patron of this library, you know. Always in here, working on his research.”
“What kind of research?” Eric asked.
“Well, his specialty, of course,” Edna Bloomfield replied, as if Eric should have known. “Those terrible killers — what do they call them?” She glanced around distractedly, as if expecting to find the words she was looking for tucked away in some far corner of the library, then brightened as she found them. “
Her voice trailed off and she seemed to disappear into another world. Then she straightened up in her chair, and when she spoke again, her voice was much brighter. “I always liked Dr. Darby. I considered him to be Phantom Lake’s only genuine eligible bachelor. He was very nice and very well-respected. He had a fine mind.” She took a deep breath, replaced her glasses on her nose, and smiled up at the boys. “But he’s gone, and we’ll probably never find out what happened to him, will we?”
As she picked up her cards and began shuffling through them once again, Eric saw a sadness replace the smile in her eyes.
THE LAST OF the twilight faded quickly as Kent walked off the road onto a path that seemed to plunge directly into the densest part of the woods. In moments the forest had closed around him like a shroud, and a veil of fog seemed to have come out of nowhere. Even though he was only a few steps ahead of Eric, Eric still found himself barely able to see the other boy’s back as they made their way along what both Kent and Tad had insisted was a shortcut home. Squinting hard, Eric kept his eyes on the ground to avoid the roots, rocks, and thick mulch of rotted leaves that it seemed were conspiring to trip him. The path appeared to be little more than a game trail, one so seldom used and so overgrown that even the animals seemed to have abandoned it.
Soon the darkness obscured even the path, and now Eric had to rely on the sound of Kent’s footsteps in front of him — and Tad’s behind him — to keep him on the trail.
His mother was going to be furious that he wasn’t home yet.
Worse, she’d be worried, and once she started worrying, there’d be no stopping her. “Maybe we should have taken the boat to town,” he said.
Before either Kent or Tad could say anything, a twig snapped.
Eric froze, and a second later Tad’s hand closed on his shoulder, startling him so badly he whirled around, ready to defend himself.
“Did you hear that?” Tad whispered. “Someone’s behind us!”
Unbidden — and unwanted — images rose in Eric’s mind, and for a moment he was caught once more in the dream he’d had only a few nights earlier, when he was prowling through the same kind of darkness and mist that surrounded him now. He tried to force the memory down, but even as he reminded himself that he was only a few hundred yards from home, something in his memory kept trying to drag him back to the streets of London.
“There’s nobody there,” Kent said, his low, confident voice staving off the panic that had nearly overwhelmed Eric. “Just keep going.” Then Kent increased his pace, leaving Eric to try to keep up, stumbling along in the dark, Tad close behind him.
But a few seconds later another sound came out of the darkness, this time from the other side of the path, and all the images Eric had banished came flooding back. Now Tippy’s torn body floated in the night, and he could almost see bloodstained blades glinting in the darkness.
And what about the girl they’d read about only a few hours ago, who’d drowned in the lake?
If she’d really drowned at all.
What if the rumors were true?
What if someone had killed her?
And what if he was still out there?
What if he’d seen them in the library, and knew what they were doing?
Another twig snapped, closer this time.
From a few yards behind, Eric heard Tad utter a tiny yelp, and a second later Tad’s hand clamped onto Eric’s biceps so hard it sent a spasm of pain right down to his fingertips.
“Something’s out there,” Tad whispered. “It’s—” Before he could finish, a low growl came from their right, instantly followed by a violent thrashing in the brush.
