July 28, 1722. Kingston, Jamaica, after a short trip from Port Royal. Making a late-night visit to the bookstore…

“The man desperately needs a better lock,” Elara muttered under her breath, fingers dancing with her lockpicks.

A tense few seconds passed before the lock surrendered with a sharp click. We waited, watching up and down the moonlit alley beside the Word to the Wise bookshop in case anyone heard. No one appeared. Elara yanked open the wooden door.

“Go!” she hissed.

I darted into the shop’s shadowy back hallway with Lysander right behind me. Precarious towers of boxed books greeted us with a dusty silence. I kept my fingers to myself, despite some idle curiosity. The stacked boxes also looked a little unstable. I lifted my lantern to raise its hood just a little, just enough to give us some meager light.

Elara remained outside, holding open the side door, while she kept an uneasy watch on the alley. Silvery, pale moonlight played over her face, casting the worry lines around her eyes in stark relief. Her dragonfly-like wings fluttered nervously.

“Don’t take too long, you two,” she said in a low voice. “I think I’ve a sense of how often the city watch wanders by here. We won’t have more than an hour and a half at best.”

I nodded. “Understood. We’ll be quick. Let us know if you see anyone.”

With a nod back, Elara shut the door, leaving Lysander and myself alone in the dusty gloom.

“Sail the high seas, ransack an office for old papers,” Lysander quipped, then peered inside the nearest box. “Ah, the life of a privateer!”

“Not helping,” I half-whispered back. Still, I grinned anyway. It was Lysander’s way of easing the tension.

“Remind me when we started doing all this skulking about?” I asked quietly. My eyes discovered an intricate cobweb nearby from an ambitious spider. It stretched from the ceiling to an abandoned, empty wooden shelf. The mild clutter in the hallway didn’t give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about a quick escape if we needed one.

“Oh, when we started getting attacked by ink-blooded golem things, and you went to talk to a sea hag,” Lysander replied dryly with a grin.

I shook my head, lifting the lantern to part the gloom a little.

“Argall’s office should be this way.”

The bookshop was as silent as an old tomb, and slightly less cozy. A faint, bitter odor of singed paper collided with the stale scent of dust. I wrinkled my nose at it. Both smells hung in the air like a fog while we hurried through the hallway to Argall’s converted office. The decor, and the state inside, wasn’t much different from last time.

Everything was still a scattered mess, but at least it looked a little less like a battlefield. Someone, probably his assistant, Miss Stewart, had attempted to organize the chaos. Argall’s desk was back upright, but there were still plenty of papers and books that had been tossed around with wild abandon.

“At least we don’t have to worry about leaving anything out of place,” I suggested.

Lysander shook his head at the haphazard stacks which seemed to trail off onto the floor like an escape attempt.

“If he’s really as tidy as he seemed, while the Death Whisper didn’t kill him, the sight of all this might,” he quipped with a sigh. “We best get started. I’ll take the desk.”

I nodded, then idly rubbed at the bruise around my left eye. This wasn’t quite like looking for a needle in a haystack. Most haystacks are often bigger. I looked around for where to start as the bruise nagged at me with a dull ache.

Moonlight played through the lone grime-stained window, pulling out long shadows across the room. The curtains almost seemed spectral, while shadows from bottles, trinkets, and shelves stretched out like long, grasping claws of a forgotten nightmare.

Lysander pulled up a chair on the other side of the wide wooden desk, carefully opening drawers to rummage through their contents. I picked a thick collection of papers and a few books on the floor to the right.

As I set down the lantern on the corner of the desk, I realized this was close to where I found Argall during the Death Whisper attack. My right hand felt warm, but I shoved the memory aside and got to work.

I sifted through the stacks of paper, while Lysander was busy with three well-worn ledgers. For a few minutes, the sounds of rustling paper filled the room. Ghosts of a bookseller’s past slowly appeared in writing. We hoped it would whisper something useful.

After what felt like almost half an hour, Lysander shifted in the chair as he stretched.

“Anything?” he asked in a low whisper.

I sighed, rubbing lightly at the bruise around my left eye again.

“Nothing yet,” I replied, while I set aside another meticulously marked invoice. “Señor Argall has an alarming collection of invoices. Not all of them are for books.” I studied a handwritten list in the feeble lantern’s glow. “This is a list of books to purchase.”

A slip of paper caught my eye after setting aside the book list on an unbalanced stack of paper to my right. I reached over, tugging out the mysterious paper from underneath the unread stack. It was one of Kingston’s news broadsheets dated last week. 

“‘Dockside Horror! Another Petrified Body Found!’” I read in a low tone. There was an artist’s sketch of the victim. A lifelike portrait that would live in my nightmares for a good week at least.

“Lysander, have you seen this?” I asked, waving him over. “It was last week.”

He dropped the ledger he had found onto the desk, then walked over to look at the broadsheet with me.

“Oh, I remember this,” Lysander commented quietly while he skimmed the article. After a second, he tapped it with the back of his hand. “Like it says here, the murders have been mostly happening near where Harbor and Hanover street cross. Out past the east end of the docks, where they talk about expanding Kingston.”

He handed the broadsheet back to me and shrugged with a sigh.

“Each victim felt as dry as a mummy but was petrified wood. Died screaming, they say, or at least looked like it.”

“Petrified victims?” I shot him an alarmed grimace. “How did I miss this?”

Lysander shrugged while he patted me on the shoulder.

“You were buried in your potion brewing that week. Something about cleaning elixirs and tonics for a Comtessa?”

I nodded, raising my eyebrows at the memory of the stench those elixirs made. It took days to clear the air, and some of it still haunted a few pots.

“Those. Yes, I all that now with the Comtessa.” A series of handwritten notes littered the margins of the broadsheet. “Look at this. It looks like Señor Argall’s handwriting.”

Lysander turned the edge of the page toward the lantern for better light. Then he squinted at the mangled scrawl.

“‘Who profits from this?’” he read aloud. “‘Check warehouse again.’” There was a sudden, confused look on his face. “Warehouse? He has a warehouse?”

“It would stand to good reason,” I admitted. “Especially if he happens to have more than one copy of a book to sell. A lot of booksellers are doing that lately.”

“But what else would he have there?” Lysander asked, raising his eyebrows.

There wasn’t a good answer to that, other than to go find out.

I tapped at another handwritten note. “There’s another one. ‘Coincidence?‘“ There was a line drawn from that to the murders. “Why would a bookseller be so interested in waterfront murders?”

“A new pastime?” Lysander replied with a faint smirk.

I ignored the joke.

“It’s like he’s been looking into the deaths.” I folded the broadsheet page carefully, tucking it away into my shoulder bag. Something about all this seemed off, but still felt like we might be on the right path. A darker path, but still the right one.

“This doesn’t feel like a coincidence,” I said while I glanced around the room. “But it also doesn’t seem like what we’re looking for. There has to be something else.”

We returned to our search with a fervor. I’d started to lose a little hope until Lysander let out a small laugh. He produced a well-used leather-bound journal from the depths of Joshua Argall’s desk. The spine was cracked with wear, but the leather had been lovingly oiled and repaired in places.

“His appointment book,” Lysander said, then spread the book open on the desk. I peered over his shoulder while he flipped quickly through the pages.

“There, what’s that?” I put my hand down on a page, running a finger over an entry underlined twice. The lantern had to be nudged closer to make out the words.

“‘Visitor from San Germán? Brotherly advice? Discuss illness again.’” I read aloud. “It seems the Señor has a brother.”

“That was early last week,” Lysander commented curiously. “Argall was sick? He didn’t look like anyone recovering from being sick.”

“No, he didn’t,” I replied as I flipped a few pages back forward in the journal. A torn, loose piece of paper caught my eye.

“It’s an order for an elixir,” I said, holding it up for better light. “Argall has written on the side, ‘regrettably treatments ineffective’.”

“When was that?” Lysander asked, glancing at the scrap of paper.

I turned the page over twice before I shook my head. “There’s no date. It’s been torn off.”

Lysander scowled, then flipped through a few more pages in the appointment book. Then he tapped the tapped the page with a surprised smile.

“Oh, here’s something,” he tapped a series of handwritten entries on a new page. “Argall wrote ‘Lunch at home. Brother insists. Perhaps more unconventional methods needed.’ Pedro, this was the day before he hired us.”

“How many doubloons would you bet we were the ‘unconventional method?’” I asked in a grim tone.

“That’s a sucker’s bet,” Lysander replied, giving me a wry look. “Now this warehouse he mentioned? That’s a bet I’d like to take.”

I hurried around to the other side of the desk for the stack of invoices.

“You know, if he’s storing books, there could be shipping manifests among those book lists and invoices,” I said, snatching up a handful off the floor pile. “They might have an address.”

I read through the top five papers, then tapped the sixth with the back of my hand.

“Which is right here.” I arched an eyebrow at Lysander, while a grim smile tugged at me. “It’s on Water Lane, a block away from Harbor Street at the east end. Sound familiar?”

Lysander shot me a surprised look.

“The murders,” he said with a humorless laugh. “Pedro, now I really want to see this warehouse.”

A rapid series of sharp, insistent taps against the grimy window from outside shattered the conversation.

“Elara,” Lysander exclaimed softly, words tinted with concern.

My hand suddenly felt very warm to the point it ached at the knuckles.

She burst into the office two seconds later, wings folded tight against her back like drawn knives.

“Time to go!” she said with an alarmed expression.

“City watch?” I asked, stuffing the invoices into my bag next to the folded broadsheet.

“No,” she said with a quick shake of her head. “A Death Whisper.”