Back home at the café, Bonnie let Debbie off on a break and a hung an OUT TO LUNCH sign over the front door to make sure she wasn’t disturbed. Then, she took the book upstairs, made a coffee, and sat down on the sofa to study it further.
No matter how hard she looked, though, the picture was still gone. She had wondered whether it might have been torn out by accident and slipped inside the dust jacket for safekeeping, but it was nowhere to be found. Definitely stolen, she concluded, to hide the group’s identity.
After finishing her coffee, she headed upstairs to Mervin’s grotto, and searched his bookcase for another copy of the book, but found nothing. There were a few other books on local history, however, but on flipping through them, she found the same thing: any mention of Christmas
