Peril in Paperback: A Bibliophile Mystery

Christmas she’d spent in Paris attending Le Cordon Bleu, she had sent each of us girls a wildly vibrant French silk scarf. We’d all thought she’d been terribly extravagant until I visited her for a week and discovered that they sold the scarves on every street corner in Paris.
    She handed me the motley bundle. “Can you fix this?It’s pretty old, but maybe you could clean it up and stick a new cover on it or something? I want to give it as a gift.”
    I slowly unwrapped the silky material and found an old book inside. Casting a quick frown at Savannah, I bent to study the book more carefully.
    It wasn’t just
old
; it was really, really, really old. Its faded red cover was made of a thin, flexible French morocco leather, the type that had been used for centuries to make family Bibles. The slim, supple leather allowed the book to be left open for easier reading. The signature pages were bound in the Coptic style, an ancient sewing technique that was still used today. I examined the spine and found it rippled in some spots and thinning in others. The gilding, while faded, was still readable.
Obedience Green
, it said.
    “Obedience Green?” I whispered, rubbing my fingertip over the pale golden letters. Was that the title of the book or its author? Maybe it was the name of the bindery. I opened the book, taking note of the dappled endpapers before I turned to the title page—and gasped. “It’s handwritten. In ink.”
    “Yeah,” she said, swirling her wineglass. “It’s kind of hard to read in places, but it’s cool, isn’t it?”
    I stared at the book’s title.
Three Hundred Curious and Uncommon Receipts by Obedience Green, a Gentlewoman, many years Housekeeper to the Eminent War General Robt. Blakesley.
    Curious and Uncommon Receipts
? I had no idea what that meant, but if Obedience had been a housekeeper, perhaps she’d recorded her household grocery receipts or something. I turned a few more pages to read an introduction written in the same fancy handwritten script as the title page. It was slow going, especially since every
s
looked like an
f.
    I had no idea what the author meant when she promised to “offer the most modern receipts presented in the most elegant manner.” It wasn’t until I reached the tableof contents page that I realized what the author meant by
receipts
. My clue was at the top of the page where the author had written, “Herein a bountiful listing of receipts and a practical bill of fare for every season, every month of the year.”
    “Recipes!” I looked at Savannah. “It’s a cookbook.”
    “Duh,” Savannah said, her eyes rolling dramatically as only a sister’s could. “Can you fix it or not?”
    “Of course I can fix it, but I’m not sure I should.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “It might be too important.”
    “Oh, for goodness sake.” Clearly annoyed, she stood and folded her arms across her chest. “It’s just an old cookbook, Brooklyn.”
    “It’s not just
old
, Savannah.” I returned to the title page and searched for a date. I finally found it scrawled at the end of a long run-on sentence that listed various contributors’ names.
MDCCLIX
. I did a quick translation of the roman numerals. One thousand. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen hundred. Fifty. Nine.
    Seventeen fifty-nine. I gasped again. Yikes.
    I took a few fortifying breaths until I could finally scowl sufficiently at her. “It’s
over two hundred and fifty years old
.” I showed her the date, then clutched the book to my breast. “That makes it extremely valuable just on its surface, never mind its historical or cultural value. And it’s written by hand! It’s beyond rare. Where did you find it? What are you going to do with it?”
    Her shoulders slumped and I felt mine sinking, too. My sister could be so clueless sometimes. And right then, it was obvious that she thought the same of me. “What does it matter to you? Why do you always have to ask so many questions? Can’t you just do as I ask? Just—” She fluttered her hand at me. “You know, do that thing you do. Dust it off and put a pretty cover on it.”
    I glared at her. “Do I tell you how to make a soufflé?”
    She laughed a little as she held up her hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. But if you could…I don’t know.Just fix it. I’ll pay you whatever it costs if that’s what you’re worried about.”
    “You know I’m not worried about the money,” I muttered, still too fascinated by the book to