It lists spell ingredients from the mundane to the esoteric: dried herbs, manticore teeth, bottles of chupacabra venom. Magical devices and thaumaturgical instruments, most of which I couldn’t even tell you what they’re for. Spirit bottles, summoning coins that don’t list what they summon—always a bad idea—keys that open doors that only exist for seconds at a time. There are staves and wands. Wands. Nobody’s used wands since the 19th century. It goes on and on.

I’ve skimmed the book. That’s all I could do. It’s the size of a folded Sunday newspaper from when newspapers mattered, three inches thick and a good five pounds.

I pull over to the curb, pull the ledger from my messenger bag, and flip on the car’s overhead light. When I open it, it seems to have more pages than it should. It probably does. The handwriting on the pages is a spiderweb scrawl of tiny letters written by a dozen different hands. The fountain pen ink is faded to a grayish brown at the beginning. Then comes jet black ballpoint, typewritten notecards, and finally computer printouts pasted to the pages.

Pity the only organization it has is by date starting in the 1890s. There’s no W for wands, A for amulets, or S for Shit That Will Kill You if You So Much as Look at It Funny. All of the items are scattered throughout the pages.

On the plus side, it lists everything’s location. Storage unit addresses and numbers, safe deposit boxes and banks, GPS coordinates for things buried in the desert. Some have been updated two or three times as they were moved.

I remember seeing some items for locating lost things: amulets, a compass, a kewpie doll that spins its head in the direction of the thing you’re looking for and screams. I turn pages until I get to the late 1940s, looking for the kewpie doll. Not the best for stealth, what with all the screaming, but that’s the only one I can remember a date for. There are no entries between 1939 and 1946 during the war, and then a flood of items from late ’47 to ’52.