Thirty-Three

Insurance investigators conclude the library heist was done by local townies who exploited February break and disabled campus security cameras, including one previously knocked out during a snowball fad. The thieves entered via a smashed basement window and cut into the Special Collection safe with bolt cutters, looting valuables and spray-painting an insult.

Clues include a Ripple bottle traced only to a Gogan takeout and bolt cutters bought at Ace Hardware, neither leading to suspects. Some thirty rare books resurface days later in the trunk of a burned-out Monte Carlo at a Gogan junkyard, but key volumes—including Enoch Crane’s journal—remain missing.

Although the junkyard reuses tapes, a recording from the night before the tip shows a gaunt, pale-haired man lingering on the Monte Carlo, staring and waving at the camera as the image glitches and distorts, his proportions warping unnaturally. The figure abruptly vanishes between frames and is never identified.

At The Briars, Arthur, Gwen, Colin, Van, and Donna watch the local news airing the footage. Colin, half-mocking and half-serious, suggests the apparition might be Elwood Hondo slipping from film to reality, tying the break-in to their ongoing supernatural entanglements. Arthur is unnerved by the sense of being watched as the unsettling figure dissolves from the tape.