Slain in Schiaparelli (Vintage Clothing Mysteries Book 3) by Angela M. Sanders Page B

so clever. Can’t even tell the damn time with all the clocks running backwards. You guys can puzzle over this all you want. I’m going to my room. Come on, Bubbles.” She grabbed the candlestick from Clarke’s hands. Her champagne bottle clunked against the doorframe on her way out.
    Tony backed out of the staircase and shut the back panel to the passage. The bookcase remained open. “It goes upstairs?”
    “Yes, lets out in the tower room’s closet. Hasn’t been used in years. It’s super dusty. This afternoon when I—” Joanna said.
    “What are those?” Penny pointed at the half dozen red-bound books hidden behind the faux shelf.  
    “The books I told you about. As I was saying, when I—”
    Penny interrupted her again. “He hid them, so they must be important. Let’s look at them.”
    Joanna turned to her and nodded. Penny clearly didn’t want Joanna to say she had found her upstairs. She hesitated only a moment. “Sure. We’ll take them to the great room where there’s more light.”
    Penny loaded a few volumes onto her arm and led the way to the table in front of the great room’s fireplace. “Maybe he talks about a plot to kill him. You know, about threats, things like that. Maybe he left clues.” She raised her head, and Joanna thought she glimpsed a hint of her old sparkle. “You know, I saw his ghost this afternoon.”
    “You were sleeping,” the Reverend said.
    “Between sleeps.”
    Between Bette’s pills and Tony’s herbs, Joanna thought. Before she went up to the tower room.
    Penny continued. “He was thin and white. Bald, too. He appeared for just a second at the end of the hall. I heard a rustle, and before I could even focus my eyes he vanished.”
    Clarke exchanged a knowing look with Daniel. The drugs, it seemed to say. Joanna remembered the portrait in the attic. A fair description.
    “We’ll all be seeing ghosts soon, no doubt,” Sylvia said.  
    “Let’s look at those books,” Penny repeated.
    Joanna already had a volume on her lap. The book smelled of mildew and old cedar, almost like incense. She opened the red leather cover to marbled endpapers. February 3, 1932, Joanna read. She turned the page. Black ink, faded to brown in spots, scrawled tightly across the page, leaving barely a margin. But the writing made no sense. Mouth agape, she raised her head from the page and looked at the others.  
    Tony had taken a volume from Penny and examined it near the great room’s fire where the light was best. Sylvia, Daniel, and Penny leaned around him, with Marianne’s head obscuring the page until Sylvia asked her to stand back. Stunned, they stared at the words.
    “Well? What does it say?” Clarke asked.
    “Gibberish.” Penny said. She picked up another journal, then another, opening and shutting their pages and pushing them to the side. “I don’t get it.”
    “Listen to this.” Joanna read from the journal in her lap. “‘Dog eats sun while ants dance rainbows on salty mountain.’ What does it mean?”  
    “Here’s another one,” Daniel said, the few fingers on his right hand clenching the book. “‘Beam a fairy to scour the world’s pans.’”
    “What?” Clarke said. “Let me see.”
    “Maybe it’s code.” Sylvia flipped through one of the journals Penny had discarded.
    “Automatic writing,” Portia offered from the sofa. “Learned about it in art school. The surrealists were big into it. They believed logic was a barrier to true art, and that you could directly connect to the collective unconscious by letting your hand go loose on the page. Redd obviously bought into it.”
    The Reverend nodded. “She’s right. Interesting, but hardly valuable. That is, unless we stumbled onto Chirico’s journals or something like that.” He ran his fingers tenderly over the spider-like words on the page.
    If the journals were nothing but arty gibberish, why did Redd hide them away? Could be he was embarrassed. Or—as Sylvia had suggested—maybe it