How the case begins
In the footsteps of Tessa Quirk
Every Halloween the town walks the lantern path. It starts on the square at dusk and ends at the fire hall, with candy and hot cider. On the way it passes the old granary lot and crosses the covered bridge. Tin lanterns hang on posts the whole way down. Twenty years ago, on walk night, the co-op granary burned. Henry Grote, the night watchman, died at the loading door. The town decided that a lamplighter's boy named Jody Rowe, nineteen, had been careless with a match. Nobody charged him. He left on the morning bus. This September, Jody came home to nurse his mother. People still cross the street when they see him coming. Tessa Quirk has run the walk for eleven years. This Halloween, the lanterns along the path start going out ahead of the walkers, one by one. The children whisper that the Hollow Man is back. He's the town's oldest ghost story, the boy who burned the granary. Tessa wants to know who is really putting out her lanterns.
- 1The Going Dark
- 2The Marked Doors
- 3The Figure at the Turn
- 4The Quiet Money
- 5What Burned
- 6The Apprentice
- 7The Coffee Tin
- 8Sealed as a Courtesy
- 9The Turn of the Walk
- 10Lamp Outbring your clues
Each chapter is a short scene and a puzzle, and every puzzle leaves you one clue. Keep all nine. The finale needs them.
Prefer pen and paper?
The whole case as one large-print booklet: every chapter and its puzzle, a clue ledger to fill in, and the ending sealed on the last page.
The people of the case
- Tessa Quirk. Teaches the fourth grade and has run the lantern walk for eleven years. Jody Rowe sat in the front row of her first class.
- Jody Rowe. Came home in September to look after his mother. He was nineteen when he left town.
- Mrs. Rowe. Jody's mother. Kept the books at the grain co-op for thirty years. Too ill this autumn to leave her bed.
- Abner Lusk. The town's last lamplighter, retired since the electric lights came in. Watches the walk from his porch on the square.
- Marta Grote. Pours the cider at the fire hall every Halloween. She was eight when her father died in the granary fire.
- Lyman Ware. Runs the hardware store on the square. Hands out the candy at the fire hall every Halloween.
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Kansas City Goodnight
Kansas City, 1961. A star's trumpet is ruined minutes before the second set, and the song everyone came to hear carries the wrong name.
Going Down to See Who
Lake Huron, 1929. After the equinox gale the lighthouse lamp is still burning at dawn, the keeper is gone, and his log stops mid-line.