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had said when Sticky first mentioned his project. “The whole house is crammed with them.”
    “I know,” said Sticky with an eager, appreciative look, “and I still haven’t read half of them, but whenever—”
    “You’ve read
half
of them?” Kate cried, but Sticky was just gaining steam.
    “—but whenever a bibliography mentions a book that Mr. Benedict doesn’t have, there’s nothing to do but request it from the library, right? And if the Stonetown Library system doesn’t have it, then I have to ask for an inter-library loan, which means filling out a different form altogether. So think of how much faster the process will be when I can skip the catalog and go straight to the appropriate form! I’ll still have to wait until errand day to get the books, of course, but it’s much…”
    “Naturally,” said Kate, who hadn’t really been listening. “But let me just be clear—you’ve read half the books in this
house
? This
whole
house?”
    “Well, approximately half,” Sticky said. “To be more accurate, I suppose I’ve read more like”—his eyes went up as he calculated—”three-sevenths? Yes, three-sevenths.”
    “Only three-sevenths?” said Kate, pretending to look disappointed. “And here I was prepared to be impressed.”
    After Sticky had gone out, Kate and Reynie discussed the newspaper articles they had read, almost all of which were about Stonetown having fallen on hard times. The city’s government bureaucracy was terribly snarled, its budget a wreck. And what Kate and Reynie knew that most readers could
not
know—because the information was still classified—was that Ledroptha Curtain was much to blame.
    “I used to think the Emergency was boring to read about,” Kate observed. “But at least it was dramatic. This is just a tiresome mess. Sometimes I wonder if they’ll
ever
get it straightened out.”
    Reynie had wondered this himself. After all, more than a year had passed since the Whisperer had stopped sending messages into the minds of the public—no longer was Mr. Curtain secretly creating the fearful, confused, desperate atmosphere known as the Emergency—and according to Mr. Benedict the mental effects of those messages had almost entirely disappeared. And yet Stonetown, one of the world’s most important cities, was having difficulty paying its own bills and cleaning its own streets. Mental effects were one thing, Mr. Benedict had said, and practical effects quite another.
    Reynie shrugged. “Mr. Benedict says it could take a long time. He says it’s hard to fix a problem when so few people know the cause.”
    “That’s what’s irritating about it,” Kate said. “The fact that it’s classified. I mean, even most of the people in the
government
don’t know the truth. Milligan says some officials insist on keeping it secret.”
    “It’s because they’re embarrassed,” Constance put in, without glancing up from her work. (She was busy giving the mayor crossed eyes and insect antennae.) “They don’t want people to know they were duped by Mr. Curtain just like everyone else.”
    Reynie and Kate looked at her in surprise. Constance rarely paid attention to these newspaper conversations, and when she did it was usually to complain that they’d said the same things a thousand times. (Which was true enough, but they found it impolite of her to mention.)
    “I think you’re probably right,” Reynie said. “But I also think Mr. Curtain’s spies might have something to do with it. They could be working to keep the information secret… but that’s just a guess. I don’t know what their motives would be, or even who any of them are, and Mr. Benedict won’t ever talk to us about them.”
    “And why
is
that, Reynie?” Constance asked, propping her chin on her hand and affecting a look of serious interest.
    Now Reynie was really suspicious. But before he could ask Constance what she was up to, Miss Perumal entered the room carrying a file folder. She and