Abeo arrived with coffee, which was his version of an apology for being two hours late.
"You look terrible," he said, handing her a cup.
"You always know what to say."
They sat in Holloway's kitchen — a room that looked like it hadn't been updated since the 1970s, all brown tile and avocado appliances — while Iris laid out what she'd found. The manuscript. The notebook. The Scribes.
Abeo listened without interrupting, which was the quality that had made him a good detective and an impossible husband. When she finished, he pulled the notebook toward him and flipped through it with the careful attention of a man who had spent twenty years reading things people didn't want read.
"You said the police ruled Clara Voss's death natural causes."
"Heart attack in a locked room."
"Locked rooms don't kill people, Iris."
"That's what I said."
"How locked are we talking?"
"Three deadbolts, all engaged from the inside. Steel-reinforced door. No windows, no vents larger than my fist. The police checked — no mechanism, no trick."
Abeo sipped his coffee. "People do die of heart attacks. Even young people."
"She was thirty-one and ran marathons. And she died clutching an impossible manuscript in a room designed to keep secrets."
"Fair point." He turned to the back of the notebook, where Holloway had written a list of names — first names only, with dates beside them. Some dates were circled in red.
"These circled ones," Abeo said. "They're recent."
Iris looked. Four names with red circles, each with a date from the past eighteen months.
"Arthur — 12 September 2024. Penelope — 3 January 2025. James — 28 July 2025. Clara — 19 March 2026."
"The dates," Iris said slowly. "Are those..."
"Death dates, I'd wager." Abeo was already pulling out his phone. "If Edmund Holloway was tracking the deaths of his fellow Scribes, then either he was documenting a coincidence or he was watching them die."
"Or he was next. He died three days before Clara."
"His death was an accident. He fell down stairs."
"Edmund Holloway lived in this house for forty years. He knew every step. And he fell, alone, with no witnesses, three weeks after writing this list?"
Abeo set down his coffee. He had that look — the one she remembered from their marriage, when a case caught fire in his mind and everything else became irrelevant. Dinner plans, anniversaries, her.
"I'll run the names," he said. "If these are real people who really died, there'll be records." He paused. "Iris, if someone is killing members of a secret literary forgery circle, the motive is probably in that manuscript box. Either the du Maurier is worth killing for, or it contains something beyond the text."
"Like what?"
"That's what you're going to tell me. You're the book expert."
After Abeo left, Iris returned to the locked room. She sat at the desk where Clara Voss had died and opened "The Whispering Gallery" to the page where she'd stopped reading — page 206, the midpoint.
And there, folded between pages 206 and 207, she found a sheet of modern paper covered in Clara Voss's handwriting. Not du Maurier's. Clara's own.
It read: "The key is not in the text. It's in the errors. Count the deliberate mistakes — they spell out what Edmund was really hiding. If you're reading this, I'm probably already dead. Trust no one from the list. They are not what they seem."
Iris looked at the manuscript with new eyes. Four hundred and twelve pages. And somewhere in that perfect imitation of a dead woman's prose, deliberate mistakes had been planted like landmines.
She picked up her magnifying glass and began, page by page, to read for flaws.
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