On our way out, I also spotted Riley and invited her along. Bess and George both gave me a strange look, probably wondering why I would want to talk about any of this in front of someone we had just met. I needed information, though, and I was willing to bet Riley could tell me a lot about Christopher DeSantos.

We found a diner just a little ways downtown. The rain had let up, but the diner’s windows were still all fogged. Inside the building, the foggy windows and the wood paneling and the smell of pancakes made everything feel cozy and warm. We all happily shed our rain gear. Riley and I were sitting on one side of a vinyl booth, while Bess and George sat on the other. By the time we had all ordered and had our hands wrapped around mugs of hot chocolate, Bess and George were ready to ask some questions.

“All right, Nancy,” said Bess. “What’s going on?”

“I’m not really a Christopher DeSantos fan,” I said, hunching my shoulders. I felt guilty about having lied to my friends, even if I had a good reason.

“That much is obvious,” said George, blowing away the steam rising from her mug.

“But we hadn’t found a good mystery in forever!” I explained. “And then someone sent me this.”

I pulled a folded piece of paper from my back pocket. It was a newspaper clipping, now heavily creased and slightly wrinkled. The headline read, IMAGE OF MISSING GIRL APPEARS AT DESANTOS EXHIBIT. And printed in black and white was a grainy photograph of the Carlisle Museum.

“One of the museum employees, a girl named Grace Rogers, disappeared a week ago,” I said. “But the image of her did appear in one of the DeSantos photographs. Which is impossible, since all the photographs in the exhibit are from the 1940s. The article says that the photographs are supposedly cursed, and that every person who has tried to display a DeSantos photograph has had something terrible happen to them.”

“And no one has tried to shut down the exhibit?” asked Bess. “What about the police?”

I shook my head. “According to the article, the police here have already debunked the curse once. The curator at the Carlisle Museum, who I’m guessing is the white-haired woman we just saw, tried to fake the curse when the exhibit was first announced. She claimed one of the photographs had disappeared, when really she’d just hidden it away. Even after Grace vanished, the police still maintained that Susan was behind it. The article says that they’re giving her until Friday to admit that she and her employee, the missing girl, planned this entire thing. That’s three days from now. If they don’t come forward, the police are going to close the museum.” I paused, then added thoughtfully, “And now that there’s a second victim, who knows what the police will do?”

Bess and George each took a turn scanning the newspaper clipping.