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letter and the spy map. It might’ve been a little selfish of me, but I wanted to read the other letters by myself before letting Lettie and Ruthanne see them. Maybe there would be some mention of Gideon in those.
    “The Rattler. That sounds as mysterious as the Shadow.” Lettie took on the deep, dramatic voice everyone knew from the Sunday-night radio broadcast. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.”
    Ruthanne rolled her eyes.
    “In fact,” Lettie continued, “it’s just like that episode a few months ago. A lady, she gets mysterious letters from herdead husband—well, they’re not letters really, they’re more like notes, because they don’t come in the mail, they’re just left under her pillow, and right before she goes insane—”
    “Not now, Lettie,” Ruthanne said. “The Rattler, whoever it was, could still be here, spying on us at this very minute.”
    “After all this time? The letter was written”—Lettie did the calculating in her head—“eighteen years ago. And I don’t see how this map is going to help us.” She looked over the paper. “It’s just a map of Manifest, or at least Manifest as it was back in 1918. See here, that Matenopoulos Meat closed down forever ago.”
    The cousins’ debate continued. Ruthanne said, “So, maybe it’s a map of likely suspects and places the spy might frequent.”
    “Maybe he’s dead by now. The Matenopoulos place is on there and Mr. Matenopoulos is dead.”
    “Maybe you shouldn’t be such a stick-in-the-mud. Come on, let’s scout around.”
    As we all got up, I figured Ruthanne had won. And from Lettie’s skipping along beside us, I gathered she didn’t mind.
    We looked up and down Main Street, taking in store owners and passersby.
    There was the butcher, hanging up a big hunk of meat to cure outside his store. He pulled the fleshy meat hook and wiped it on his already bloody apron. The iceman whacked his spiky tongs into a block of ice and hoisted it out of his truck. The barber shook out his apron and wiped his razor blade clean. Thinking of spies and people going insane made everyone seem a little frightening.
    They were like nameless men in a scary nursery rhyme—thebutcher, the iceman, and the barber—until Lettie identified them as Mr. Simon, Mr. Pickerton, and Mr. Cooper.
    We made our way into and out of a few stores, asking if anyone had heard of the Rattler. No one seemed inclined to shed any light on the matter.
    “The Rattler could be any one of them,” Lettie breathed. “But I still say the Rattler could be dead and buried by now.”
    “Or maybe not,” Ruthanne said with authority. “Look.”
    It was the undertaker, all dressed in black, hauling a slab of granite into the Better Days Funeral Parlor.
    “Maybe it’s Mr. Underhill,” Ruthanne whispered. “He’s always itching to carve somebody a grave marker. Maybe he even killed a few bodies himself.”
    “The letter didn’t say anything about murder. We’re just looking for a spy, right, Abilene?” Lettie asked.
    “Yes, but …”
    “But what?” Ruthanne asked.
    “Well, say there
was
a spy. What do you think he was spying on?”
    Lettie and I looked at Ruthanne. She rolled her eyes and gave a sigh, like she was disgusted to have to explain something so simple. I figured she was just stalling till she could think up an answer.
    “There
was
a war going on, you know,” Ruthanne said.
    We kept staring.
    “And in wartimes there’s always secrets that need keeping from the enemy.”
    Still staring.
    “So what makes you think Manifest didn’t have a few secrets of its own that some spy might want to find out about?” Ruthanne asked.
    Since Lettie and I couldn’t come up with a better explanation, we shrugged and turned our eyes back to Mr. Underhill, who’d come outside. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and looked up at the cloudless sky.
    “Look at him,” Ruthanne said. “He’s sniffing for death in the air.”
    A breeze