It was a surprisingly substantial train station for a town this tiny, this far from New York City. A flat-screen TV wedged into one corner of the lobby showed local news, including shaky iPhone footage of strange objects seen streaking across the sky last night. Plum wondered if people actually commuted to Manhattan from here. She wondered what it would be like just to be a regular civilian person who lived in Amenia, New York. She thought it might be pretty nice.

Quentin kept taking out his pocket watch and looking at it. Plum wanted to find it annoying—it was kind of a hipster affectation, that watch, like a novelty beard, especially since it didn’t appear to work in spite of Stoppard’s attentions—but it was such a strange and beautiful object. It drew her gaze, magnetically. It must have been a gift, she supposed, from someone who loved him. That Julia person maybe. More stories.

“Do you want to read the book?” he asked.

Oh, that. The leather-bound book that had been in the case. They’d taken it with them, of course, humped it through the woods, but now the thought of opening it filled her with dread.

“Maybe we should burn it,” she said. “Sooner or later the bird’s going to come after it. So maybe when it does we’re going to want to not have it.”

“The bird will have to hire some new muscle first. Round up more stooges like us. That’ll take time. In the meantime maybe it would help if we knew why the bird thought it was so important.”

“I guess. We could always burn it later.”

“Now you’re talking.”

“Lemme see it.”

It was an old leather notebook, or maybe ledger was a better word for it. The kind of thing an accountant with a green eyeshade might have written in, in an old-timey bank. The cover had the same monogram as the suitcase: RCJ. The spine was oddly mottled, blue and green.

“This was my great-grandfather’s.”

“I figured.”

“What do you think’s in it?”

“Diary?” Quentin said.

“What if it has dirty parts in it. Like intimate confessions, that sort of thing.”

“One way to find out.”

She nodded, resigned, but still she let the book lie in her lap. It felt heavy, too heavy to lift. She was at a crossroads, but the kind that had no signs at it. She wondered what could possibly be inside the book that people should have died for it; she was assuming that Lionel had done away with Pushkar too. She wondered if later on she would wish she hadn’t looked. That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn’t be unread.