One Piece Missing at Kessler's Drug

About this book

Hollister Falls, Vermont, February 1933. The mill is shut, and sixteen-year-old June Kessler runs a lending shelf of hand-cut jigsaw puzzles at the back of her father's drugstore, three cents a day, every piece counted on the soda-fountain marble. Then old Cyrus Webb, the retired bank cashier who rented her hardest puzzles, is found dead at the foot of his cellar stairs. When his last puzzle comes back, June counts five hundred and one pieces. The extra one was cut by a different saw, and on its back, in tiny ink, is the letter K. With a puzzle cutter, a switchboard girl, a delivery boy and a formidable retired schoolteacher, June starts tracing her own rental ledger through a town full of secrets. Each stray piece says a little more. And the closer it comes to saying everything, the more it could cost the people she loves.