The Secret of the Incomplete Book

We moved when I was eight from the house that my father built to a "fixer-upper" that was in the boundaries of a better school district.  The shabby house in the upscale suburb came with the previous owners' smelly shag carpet, hideous wallpaper, and garage full of odds, ends, and half a shelf of books.

The books interested me for being books, but they were mostly kids books -- Seuss and other early reader books -- in as bad of shape as the house's roof. There were a couple of Hardy Boys Mysteries that I passed over. There were also two or three of Carolyn Keene's classics featuring spunky heroine Nancy Drew.

The first one that I read was mostly likely The Secret of the Old Clock, the first book of the series. I don't remember which book it was, but I do remember that it had a mystery of its own: it was completely missing the last chapters of the book! They had not been torn out. It was a defective copy, somehow bound without the remaining pages. I was left at the cliffhanger ending of the physical book's final page, certain and unsure at the same time that there was more to the story.

I pestered my mother to take me to the library. It was downtown, and we were in a distant neighborhood. In the days between, I picked up the book often, checking the binding, reading the last paragraphs and assuring myself that the ending just had to be missing. Once I was able to get the library's copy, the first thing I did was compare the two books.

I read the finale of the story with relief and excitement. Then I read through the rest of the series, in order as much as possible. The library didn't have all of them on the shelf any of the times that I visited. I never knew if one of the "missing" books would be there. Every rare visit to the library offered that mystery to me, too.

The series continued being published long after my interest waned. My reading level was already beyond Nancy Drew when I started reading the series. We didn't buy books often, and with the library geographically incompatible with my reading hunger, I often read my older sister's English class assigned reading novels. There was one other source of books in the house: my mother, the other reader.

Tucked away in her nightstand was a nice, thick book: a collection of three books by Daphe Du Marier. It included Rebecca.