The Little Lost Library

Book 7: Secret, Book, and Scone Society Novel

by Ellery Adams

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Big clues come in small packages as Miracle Books owner Nora Pennington and the Secret, Book, and Scone Society attempt to solve a series of murders connected to a bibliophile’s missing books in the latest cozy mystery from New York Times bestselling author Ellery Adams . . .

When an elderly Miracle Springs resident, Lucille Wynter, arranges for Nora to deliver an order of books to her creepy, crumbling Southern Gothic mansion on the outskirts of town, Nora doesn’t expect to be invited in. An agoraphobe, Lucille doesn’t leave Wynter House. But when Lucille doesn’t come to the door to collect her books, Nora begins to worry.

Forcing her way into Lucille’s dilapidated home, Nora is shocked to find rooms bursting with books and a lifeless Lucille at the foot of her stairs. After reading a note left behind by Lucille, Nora wonders if her death was an accident. Did she fall or was she pushed by someone seeking a valuable item hidden within Wynter House? Lucille’s children are clearly confident the house contains something of value, because they hire Nora to sift through the piles of books.

Nora’s obsession with Lucille’s collection becomes cause for concern among her friends in the Secret, Book, and Scone Society—she’s even neglecting her bookshop! But Nora does find something valuable deep inside Wynter House—a revelation about Lucille’s terrible past . . . and a secret worth a small fortune. But there’s someone who’d do anything to keep the truth buried amid the moldering tomes, and it’s up to Nora and her friends to track down a murderer before Wynter House’s lost library claims another victim . . .
 

Release date: October 22, 2024

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

Nora Pennington parked her 1973 mail truck in front of the town’s haunted house and cut the engine.

Her truck, which was canary yellow with a rainbow of colorful books dancing across both side panels, looked out of place on the lonely street. A funeral carriage drawn by a pair of black horses would be more fitting.

Nora grabbed the paper shopping bag stamped with the MIRACLE BOOKS logo and let out a sigh. It had been a long day and she was ready to go home. Instead, she was delivering used books to one of her most eccentric and unusual customers.

Few residents of Miracle Springs, North Carolina, had seen the woman who lived alone in the Gothic mansion next to the old cemetery. Because of that, all kinds of rumors surrounded Lucille Wynter.

People called her a snob. They called her a witch. They decided she was too ill or too infirm or too paranoid to leave her crumbling estate. They complained about her overgrown yard and the deplorable condition of her house. Children dared one another to touch the front door or batter the shale-gray clapboard with raw eggs on Halloween.

Nora had been delivering books to Lucille for several years now, and after visiting her once or twice a month, she’d learned that the old woman was a recluse. She never left Wynter House. Never. And no one was ever invited inside.

Not even Nora.

Though she was one of the few people who regularly visited Lucille, she’d never made it past the boot room. This small, square chamber behind the kitchen was uncomfortably cold in the winter and oppressively stuffy in the summer. The only furniture was a pair of cane chairs and an old piano stool that served as a table. A threadbare rug covered the dusty floorboards. Cobwebs gathered in every corner and clung to the window glass. Insect corpses cluttered the sills.

Year after year, the room remained unchanged. As did Lucille’s rules.

From Day One, she’d told Nora to do exactly as she said. If Nora made a single misstep, she’d no longer be welcome on Lucille’s property.

The first rule was to enter the boot room and ring the doorbell outside the kitchen door. After that, she was to sit down to wait, anywhere from five to fifteen minutes.

Lucille Wynter was old and frail. She did not move quickly, and her routines were as rigid as a steel beam. For example, she always asked Nora to identify herself before she’d crack the kitchen door. After peering out to confirm that Nora was who she claimed to be, Lucille always said, “Stay where you are. I’ll make the tea.”

The preparation would take another five to ten minutes, but eventually Lucille would appear in the doorway, a dainty porcelain teacup balanced in her trembling hand. The cup would rattle on its saucer until tea sloshed over the rim, but Nora had learned to stay seated and to keep her mouth shut. Lucille didn’t like anyone to come too close, and offers of assistance put her in a foul mood.

“My home is my whole world,” she told Nora the first time they’d met. “I don’t want outsiders in my world. That chair is for outsiders. You can sit there—and only there.” She’d pointed at the chair closest to the back door. “That’s as close to the inside of my house as you’ll ever get. Don’t ask to use the phone or the powder room. Don’t ask if I need help carrying things. The answer to all of those questions is no.”

Lucille was a tiny woman. Her body seemed as light and hollow-boned as a bird’s. Her hair, which she wore in a Gibson girl bun, was white and wispy. The scent of rose eau de toilette clung to her moth-eaten cardigans and corduroy skirts. Beneath the heady floral notes was the fragrance of decay. And of loneliness.

It was the old woman’s solitude and fragility that brought Nora to her door once or twice a month. She’d sit in her chair and drink weak tea and eat two of the four Lorna Doone cookies Lucille arranged on a dessert plate. The teacups, saucers, and plates never matched. Though often chipped or riddled with hairline cracks, they were still beautiful.

Lucille’s financial situation was a mystery to Nora. She had no idea if the old woman was filthy rich and extremely frugal or living on a fixed income. The only thing she knew for certain was that Lucille Wynter wasn’t a fan of change.

Like Miss Havisham, she wore clothes from earlier decades. She didn’t care what colors or patterns she paired together, whether her blouses were missing buttons, or if her house slippers were held together by duct tape.

Wynter House was as disheveled as its mistress. It, too, was worn at the edges and spotted with age. Its unkempt lawn led to a tall, tangled hedge border. Tulip poplars lined the driveway, their branches creating a disjointed archway over the sparse gravel. Crows haunted the trees. Bats roosted in the attic. Snakes slipped through the tall grass, hunting the mice nesting in the basement.

There were only two structures on all of Still Wood Lane. Wynter House and a small stone chapel overlooking the town’s oldest cemetery.

“The best neighbors are dead neighbors,” Lucille liked to say.

Though the old woman seemed lost in time, she knew how to use a computer. Whenever Nora updated her used-book inventory, Lucille received an email notification. She’d immediately peruse the newest titles, make her selections, and add them to her online shopping basket. She never chose books costing more than five dollars and, nine times out of ten, paid her bill by applying credits she’d received the previous month by selling other, and sometimes more valuable, used books directly to Nora.

There was no telling what Lucille would offer Nora in exchange for a bag of fairly unremarkable books. Most often, she sold back the titles she’d bought from Miracle Books, but every now and then, she offered Nora something truly unique or valuable.

Nora was no saint, and there’d been times when she resented having to spend thirty minutes in Lucille’s grungy boot room just to earn a few bucks, but she kept returning to Wynter House. And as the years passed, she added goodies to every bag of books.

Today, for example, she had a box of homemade lemon poppy-seed shortbread cookies, courtesy of Hester, owner of the Gingerbread House Bakery. And Nora’s friend June had knitted Lucille three pairs of socks. June suffered from insomnia, and when she couldn’t sleep, she either went out for a late-night stroll or worked on a knitting project while watching survival reality TV shows.

Lucille accepted Nora’s offerings with minimal thanks. Nora knew she’d wear the socks and eat the cookies, but she only became animated when Nora presented her with the books she’d ordered.

The old woman’s face would light up like a child’s as she rummaged through the bag. It wouldn’t matter if the book was a James Patterson hardback from 2010, a mass-market Harlequin paperback with yellowed pages, a Pulitzer Prize winner, Oprah’s book club pick from March of last year, or a collection of stories by relatively unknown writers. She gazed at each book like it was made of gold.

Lucille loved every format and all genres. She read fiction and nonfiction. The only thing she wouldn’t buy were books for young children.

“I get through them too quickly,” she explained. “Except for the old fairy tales. I like those. When I was young, I was like the pretty maiden in my tower, waiting for my prince to come. Now I look more like the fairy godmothers. Or the witches. But I love a story with a quest. A hero determined to save the girl or find the treasure. Those have always been my favorite, even though I don’t want to be rescued and this house is already full of treasure.”

This statement had raised so many questions, but Nora had learned to curtail her curiosity. Lucille wasn’t looking for a friend or confidant. She was a very private person and used her words sparingly. She would talk about books and that was all. She didn’t care about Nora’s personal life, and she didn’t care about what was going on in the outside world.

She served tea because she was a Southern lady and the rules of hospitality were too deeply ingrained in her to be ignored. And while she never seemed especially glad to see Nora, she was always openly delighted to receive her new batch of books.

Hoping to bring a smile to Lucille’s face, Nora had added two free mass markets to today’s order.

She climbed the back steps, noting that another brick was loose on the top step, entered the boot room, and rang the doorbell.

She sat in her chair for five minutes. Then ten.

After fifteen minutes, she moved to the kitchen door and called, “No Lorna Doones today, Ms. Lucille! I have something even better!”

When there was no response, she returned to her seat, took out her phone, and began reading her new email messages.

When another fifteen minutes passed, with no sign of Lucille, Nora rang the doorbell again.

Putting her ear to the kitchen door, she listened for sounds from inside the house. There was nothing.

An eerie stillness had settled over the whole place.

Get a grip, Nora told herself. It’s seven o’clock at night. The heat hasn’t let up all month. Everyone’s inside, trying to stay cool. Lucille’s probably napping and can’t hear the bell over the hum of some ancient fan.

Nora wished she had a fan. Or a cold drink. The air was as thick as oatmeal. Air-conditioning units were whirring all over town.

But not at Wynter House.

Here, nothing stirred. It was closed up tight, as if bracing for a storm. There were no cracked windows. No doors were thrown open, with only a flimsy screen door guarding the inhabitants from the bugs. No thrum of spinning ceiling fans.

Lucille didn’t own a cell phone. Nora knew this because the old woman often came out to the boot room with the handset of her 1990s-era cordless phone poking out of the pocket of her cardigan.

Nora once asked her if she had a way of calling for help during a power outage or a medical emergency.

“I have a rotary phone in my bedroom,” she’d said. “It’s such a pretty thing. White with pink roses. And a gold dial. I’ve had it for ages, but it works just fine. They made things better in those days, you know. Things were solid. Now everything’s made of plastic. It’s all junk. My father made so many beautiful things with his own two hands. He inherited his skills from my grandfather. He even designed this house. My house.”

Lucille never missed the opportunity to remind Nora that Wynter House was hers.

Nora didn’t mind. She could see why Lucille was so attached to the place. She and the house were like two aging spinsters. They’d been together for so long, Nora couldn’t imagine one without the other.

The house sheltered Lucille. It kept her warm and safe and dry. In return, she padded over its floors and gently opened and closed its doors. Her breath drifted up to its ceilings and her voice sank into its walls.

Still, Nora worried that the old mansion wasn’t structurally sound. Because no one was allowed inside, neither repairs nor routine maintenance had been done to the furnace, the fireplaces, or any of the appliances. Electrical or plumbing issues were left unresolved.

Nora pictured uneven floorboards, frayed wires, and clogged chimneys. She imagined loose stair treads, shaky banisters, and slippery tile. She heard dripping taps and the groan of rusted hinges.

Standing outside Lucille’s kitchen door, Nora wondered if the old woman had had an accident. She’d never taken this long to come to the door.

“That’s it. I’m breaking a rule.” Nora took out her phone and logged on to Miracle Books’ website. Because she was the site administrator, she was able to look up Lucille’s account. In addition to her purchase history and street address, the account included her phone number.

Nora dialed the number and heard a phone ring from somewhere deeper inside the house.

It rang and rang.

Ten times.

Then twenty.

“Where are you?” Nora murmured into the sticky air.

Finally she hung up. Pocketing her phone, she tried to peer through the window panel into the kitchen, but the glass was completely covered by a shade, which had turned a brownish yellow with time. The color reminded Nora of a nicotine-stained tooth.

Nora tried to recall if Lucille had ever missed an appointment before, but she knew she hadn’t.

Something was wrong. She could feel it in her bones.

Nora banged on the door. She called Lucille’s name. She pushed the doorbell again and again. When the house remained quiet, she took out her phone and called the landline again.

It rang and rang. And then, abruptly, the ringing stopped.

With the phone pressed to her ear, Nora strained to hear a noise on the other end of the line. All she heard was the sound of her own breathing.

She went very still. And in the stillness, she felt a presence.

Someone was in the house.

Someone had answered the phone.

“Lucille?” Nora whispered.

A weighted silence echoed through the phone speaker. It was like the hush of dead air in the middle of a broadcast.

In the silence, Nora heard someone draw in a soft breath.

“Lucille? Can you hear me?”

A faint whimper whispered through the line.

“Lucille!” Nora raised her voice. “It’s Nora Pennington. Can you answer me?”

Nora held her breath and waited for a response, no matter how subtle.

And then she heard a soft exhalation. It sounded like someone blowing a dandelion seed off their palm. A word was carried on the back of this sigh. “Help.”

“Okay, Lucille.” Nora spoke calmly and clearly. “I can hear you, and I’m going to call for help. I need to put you on hold, but I’ll be right back—”

Lucille whined like a terrified dog. “Help me. Please!”

The urgency of Lucille’s plea struck Nora like an arrow. Was she hurt? Or scared? Or both? Nora had to call 911. She had to get help. And yet she didn’t want to leave a terrified old woman whispering into the silence.

“Hold on, Lucille. Help is coming.”

Nora switched her phone to speaker mode and reached out to press the hold button when Lucille spoke again. Her voice sounded so small and distant that Nora wasn’t sure she’d heard anything at all. But then the words sank in, and Nora’s blood turned to ice.

“Too . . . late.”

“No,” Nora argued as she dialed 911. She explained the situation to the emergency dispatcher as quickly as she could before switching back to the other line.

“Hold on, Lucille! Please hold on!”

A map of Miracle Springs popped into Nora’s head. She saw the closest fire station. It was almost ten minutes away. The sheriff’s department was fifteen minutes.

“Too late,” Lucille had gasped.

Nora couldn’t let that be true. She couldn’t stand outside her door and wait for someone else to get to the old woman. She had to act. She had to break every promise she’d made to Lucille. Every one of her rules.

She had to get inside Wynter House.

Nora was a middle-aged bookseller. Before that, she’d been a librarian. She had no experience forcing her way into someone’s home. However, she’d been in a relationship with Sheriff Grant McCabe long enough to know that there was a strategy to kicking in someone’s door. She could hear his voice, quiet and calm, telling her exactly what to do.

“Kick as close to the knob as you can. You’re trying to dislodge the locking mechanism without breaking your ankle. Use the heel of your strongest leg.”

“I’m coming, Lucille!” Nora shouted.

She raised her right leg and sent her foot crashing into the door.

The wood cracked in protest, and she felt something give under her shoe, but the door didn’t fly open like it did in an action movie, so Nora kicked it again.

This time, there was a splintering sound. The door gave way, revealing a gap half a foot wide.

Nora widened the gap and stepped inside.

“Oh, my God,” she gasped.

She scanned the room, her eyes confused by what she saw.

And then the smell hit her.

She clamped a hand over her mouth as a wave of nausea rolled up her throat. She gagged once, drew in a breath through her nose, and moved forward.

In the next room, which she assumed was the dining room based on the chandelier dangling from an ornate ceiling medallion, she picked her way over a well-worn path in the floral rug, removing her hand just long enough to call Lucille’s name.

Through the door at the other end of the dining room, she entered a dimly lit space with a staircase to the right and darkness to the left.

“Lucille!” she shouted.

Her voice didn’t echo up to the high ceilings. It sank like a stone in water.

As she moved toward the staircase, which hugged the left wall and curved away into blackness, she saw Lucille.

The old woman was crumpled at the bottom of the staircase.

“Lucille!”

Nora turned on her phone’s flashlight and held it over Lucille.

A moan rose from Nora’s throat as she took in the paper-white oval of Lucille’s face and the unnatural slackness of her jaw. Her lips were parted, but when Nora lowered her cheek to Lucille’s mouth, she couldn’t feel even a whisper of air. The old woman stared up at the ceiling, her glacier-blue eyes fixed on some point beyond Nora’s comprehension.

“No, no, no.” Nora took Lucille’s bony hand in hers. It was still warm, which meant Nora had waited just a few minutes too long. “I’m so sorry.”

She didn’t know how long she sat there, holding the old woman’s hand and crying, but when someone spoke her name, it seemed to come from very far away.

It took a light touch on her shoulder to bring her back to herself.

Nora turned to find Deputy Jasper Andrews leaning over her.

Speaking in a hushed tone, Andrews said, “Ms. Wynter. Is she gone?”

Nora nodded.

The town recluse had finally left the confines of her house, floating away from all that once held her to the earth. But as Nora glanced up at the narrow staircase, it occurred to her that the old mansion was far more than Lucille’s home.

It had been her prison.

Andrews took Nora’s elbow and helped her to her feet. He kept holding on after she stood up, and for a long moment, they both gazed down at Lucille’s body.

“Did you know?” he asked softly. “That she lived like this?”

Nora glanced up the staircase. There were stacks of books on every step. Clothes were draped on top of the books, as were linens, hangers, shoes, tissue boxes, food containers, and more.

“I had no idea,” she said.

Andrews followed her gaze. “She kept that path next to the railing clear, but it’s so narrow. If her foot caught on the edge of one of those book piles, she could easily trip. Honestly, it’s surprising she didn’t lose her balance before now.”

“But she begged for help,” Nora protested. “She answered the phone and begged for help. Then she told me it was too late. I didn’t get to her soon enough.”

“I need to know everything that happened, but not here. Come outside with me.” He put a hand on Nora’s back and steered her toward the dining room.

This room, like the center hallway and staircase, was also a repository of books, clothes, and miscellaneous household items. It looked like a tornado had ripped through the house, picked up everything Lucille owned, and deposited the whole mess right back where it came from.

Outside Vanderbilt’s library at Biltmore, Nora had never seen so many books in someone’s home. Most of the piles were waist-high. Other stacks were over six feet tall. Nora didn’t know if there was a dining table under the mound of old paperbacks that rose toward the ceiling like a cresting wave, but it had to be stronger than Atlas to bear the weight of a thousand romance novels.

The path leading to the kitchen was lined by encyclopedia sets. There were blue ones, black ones, brown ones, and red ones, stacked without any sense of order. Volume 14 from one set was sandwiched between Volumes 2 and 9 from two other sets.

“My gran had the same ones,” Andrews said, pointing at a pile of red books. “She was so proud of them, even though they were all missing pages. Turns out, Gran ripped out entries from every volume. She said certain people didn’t deserve to be in the Encyclopedia Britannica, so she took them out.”

Something cracked under Nora’s foot. The noise startled her, and she jerked sideways, knocking into a tower of encyclopedias. They wobbled precariously, but she pressed the length of her body against them, holding them in a lover’s embrace to keep them from falling.

When she raised her foot, she saw that she’d stepped on a plastic water bottle.

“This place is a minefield,” said Andrews. “Let’s get you outside.”

They picked their way through the dining room and into the kitchen. They’d just entered the cramped and dirty space when two men in EMT uniforms appeared in the boot room.

“Hey, Andrews. Where’s our patient?” asked the older of the two men.

“Let Ms. Pennington get outside. Then I’ll show you,” said Andrews.

The EMT gave Nora a once-over. “You okay, ma’am?”

“I just need some water. I have some in my truck.” Eager to take a breath of fresh air, she brushed past the EMT. “If Andrews needs to talk to me, that’s where I’ll be.”

“Is your truck parked out front? The one with all the books painted on it?” asked the younger man.

Nora nodded.

He gestured toward the dining room. “She buy all these books from you?”

The hint of accusation in his tone nettled Nora. “No. I brought her a bag a few times a month, but she sold books back to me too. I have no idea where all of these came from.”

“You never asked her?” the man pressed.

“I didn’t see them because I’ve never been inside. If I knew she was living like this . . .”

She let the thought dangle because the truth was, she had no clue what she would’ve done other than share her concerns with Grant. He would’ve contacted social services. He would’ve followed up with Lucille Wynter’s caseworker. He would’ve used all of his connections to ensure she got the help she needed.

Why didn’t you do something? taunted her guilty conscience.

The answer wasn’t a pretty one. Nora had convinced herself that she hadn’t questioned Lucille about the holes in her sweater or the spider web crack in her reading glasses because she didn’t want to upset the old woman, but the truth was, she didn’t ask because it was easier not to know.

I brought her cookies I didn’t bake. Socks I didn’t knit. And books. I thought they’d ease her loneliness. I thought they were enough.

The older paramedic gazed into the dining room and whistled. “Looks like Ms. Wynter tried to wall herself in. I used to make forts out of junk when I was a kid. I thought it would keep the monsters out.” He turned back to Nora and said, “We’ll take good care of her. You go get that water.”

Monsters, Nora thought as she waded through the soupy air.

Inside her truck, she put the windows down and drank her tepid water. The ambulance had blocked her in, and when she realized she wouldn’t be going anywhere soon, she folded herself over the steering wheel, rested her head against her arms, and closed her eyes.

In the silence, she considered the EMT’s words: “Looks like Ms. Wynter tried to wall herself in.”

Lucille was afraid to go outside. Nora already knew that, but she had no idea why Lucille had turned her home into a death trap in an effort to feel safe.

Nora had watched dozens of documentaries about hoarding, and in every episode, the hoarder could always go back in time and pinpoint the moment when their need to accumulate stuff began to outweigh all other needs.

Their behavior was often a result of trauma, and many of the hoarders felt compelled to surround themselves with mountains of things as a coping mechanism. The chaos in their homes became a reflection of the chaos in their minds, and Nora felt sorry for every one of these people. At the same time, she felt a voyeuristic fascination watching these shows. She was riveted by the extent of their hoards and by how they continued to add to their collection despite protests from family, friends, landlords, and neighbors.

She knew these shows were scripted and carefully edited, but the pain in the hoarders’ eyes was always genuine. Like Lucill. . .