Opening the cover, she caressed the title page. A pins-and-needles feeling excited her fingertips, seeming to jump off the smooth, creamy paper. Saphron was still watching her expectantly, but Darcy had no idea what her friend was expecting her to do. If there was supposed to be something here to see, it certainly wasn’t obvious.
Turning page after page, Darcy read snippets of paragraphs. A love affair gone bad. Two families in turmoil. A man trying to find himself. She smiled as she turned another page. This particular genre had been all the rage, once upon a time. In a way, stories like these had been stepping stones leading up to the romance novels of the nineties, the ones that launched Fabio’s career with their whimsical covers of scantily dressed women—and men—in steamy poses that had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual plot. In turn, those romance novels had led to the cozy mysteries that Darcy enjoyed so much. In today’s world, a book like this one in her hand wouldn’t do all that well, financially speaking. Today’s readers preferred it when the damsel could save herself, even if she let the hunky guy in her life think it was all his idea…
She stopped reading, pausing to stare when she realized the author’s words weren’t the only ones on the page.
In the margins, and even in between some of the paragraphs, someone had scrawled handwritten notes in neat, straight lines. Frowning, she flipped a few more pages with her thumb, landing somewhere in the middle randomly. It was the same here. Random notes, arrows pointing to circled passages, underlined words.
“Just like Maura,” one note read. It was underlined and circled, with a curving arrow pointing to a paragraph where the author described the female protagonist’s sweet tooth. She was sneaking candy bars to a formal dance in her purse, unable to last even a few hours without a bite of chocolate.
As far as Darcy could see, there was no Maura in this story. So, who were the notes referring to?
“Maura takes candy from the donation box,” was written on another page.
“She thinks nobody knows.”
“Secrets never stay secret in Misty Hollow!”
That last one was a little creepy, written like some sort of proclamation. Darcy finally set the book aside, putting it right back into the box with the others. She closed the cover, too. Not to keep the creepiness of it away, but because she knew better than to lay a book down on its open pages. Doing that was a good way to break a book’s spine. Especially a book with this much age on it.
Her finger tapped thoughtfully against the cover as she considered the notes someone had written inside. Someone had gone to a lot of effort to draw comparisons between this story and someone named Maura. Someone who was from…Misty Hollow? Wasn’t that what it meant, when it talked about secrets in Misty Hollow? This town certainly had a few of those, but no more so than any small town in New England, or anywhere else for that matter. This was a nice little place to live, where everyone knew everyone else’s business, just like she’d said earlier.
Then what did the person scribbling in the book mean?
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