Midnight Jewels

appeared in some of the margins were clearly very old. The ink was faded and the handwriting itself was in a two-hundred-year-old style that was extremely difficult to read. Mercy didn't see any margin notes that looked recent. New margin notes would have lowered the value of the book, but notes that dated from the time the volume was published were another matter altogether. They added an element of interest as far as many collectors were concerned, especially if the notes had been made by an important historical figure.
    Outside the motel room window the afternoon was fading rapidly. Mercy wondered where Croft was. He was undoubtedly making excellent time. Without her in the car he would probably be driving the mountain road at a much swifter pace than he had the first time. His excellent reflexes and eyesight would make it easy for him to take chances on the curves that would have sent chills down Mercy's spine. The only limitations would be those of the car itself. Croft would respect those mechanical limits, but he would probably push the Toyota to the edge of its abilities.
    Mercy stared thoughtfully out the window for a while, worrying about Croft and resenting her own helplessness. Then she glanced down at
Valley
again. The long rays of afternoon light caught the binding in a particularly revealing way. It was possible to see every crack in the leather, every nuance of detail left by the binder's tools. Whoever had purchased
Valley
had gone to great expense to have the book bound by an expert.
    Most books of
Valley's
era were issued by the publisher in paper covered boards. The purchaser was the one who sent it out to a skilled craftsman to have it bound in leather. Collectors loved to find volumes from the period that were still in their original boards, but the next best find was a book that was in a binding contemporary with the time period in which it was published.
Valley
was such a book. Since it had been privately printed in an extremely limited quantity, it was possible the printer had seen to it that it was bound before it was sold.
    Mercy fingered the spine of the book, examining it in the full glare of the afternoon light. It was slightly loose. Perhaps the book had been dropped at some point during its lively past. There was something slightly uneven about the inside edge of the spine, too, as if the learner had been torn or cut and then carefully repaired. The faint mark was a thin line that was only visible in strong light, but it was definitely there. That new extra sense of awareness she seemed to have developed lately told her the mark was not a simple scratch.
    Mercy sat very still for a long time, weighing her options. She could assume her imagination was functioning on overtime and forget her wild fancies. Or she could pry apart the learner at the point where it appeared to have once been cut and risk lowering the value of the book by deliberately damaging the already worn binding.
    She thought of Croft on his way to Gladstone's and she thought about how convinced he was that
Valley
was crucially important to his quarry. There was something about this book that made it worth a murder or two.
    Mercy didn't hesitate any longer. She went to her suitcase and dug out her cosmetic bag. There wasn't much in it, just toothpaste, toothbrush, a comb and brush, a few assorted cosmetics that she usually forgot to use and a small mending kit. She removed the tiny scissors from the mending kit.
    It took nerve to insert the point of the scissors into the almost invisible seam in the leather. The book she was assaulting was two hundred years old and worth a great deal of money. One didn't attack such a thing lightly—one did it with unsteady fingers and a lot of ambivalence. The line in the leather might not be a new seam. It might simply be an old mark or a binder's error.
    It was a shock when the leather began to separate under the probing of the scissors to reveal that the repair in the leather had been done with glue and was a very modern addition to the old binding. Whoever had attempted to reattach the leather to the spine of the book had done a neat but far from inaccessible job.
    Or just perhaps, Mercy thought, whoever had done this had intended to be able to undue his work at some point in the future.
    It took long minutes of painstaking work, but eventually the seam separated completely and Mercy found herself looking into a narrow opening between the spine of the book and the binding. She put