Free Digging Up the Dead by Jill Amadio Page B

to grind the gears. It strips them.”
    “Yes, yes. It’s not me that does the grinding, it’s the car. We really should get rid of that old bucket. It doesn’t like me, you know. Even when your father was alive and we’d go on outings, I always felt it wanted to chuck me out.”
    “Mother, stop being so melodramatic.”
    “Why do I always get the feeling our roles are reversed when you talk like that? Anyway, love, off you go, and enjoy your day.”
    While she waited for the Word program to appear, she filled and switched on the electric kettle, added a teabag to a Minton bone china tea cup and returned to the computer. A directory appeared, listing a single document with the simple heading, “Three.”
    Tosca clicked to open it and saw the words, Bright Purple Nights by Fuller Sanderson. A list of forty-six chapters followed. Did ‘Three’ refer to a subtitle? Familiar with all of the author’s books, she knew this could be the last one he had written before his death and perhaps had never delivered to Hirsch House. Who had saved this document to the flash drive? It must belong to Hirsch House, though, so it was Sally’s after all.
    What a coup for my newspaper, she thought, if I could write a book review of this unpublished manuscript. It would appear in the Daily Post Sunday Magazine , which was much more prestigious than the daily paper.
    Before hitting the Print button, she fast-forwarded to the final chapter, then pressed Enter to go to the next page in case he’d written notes and listed resource material. She had several author friends who kept jottings, questions, resources used for the plot, characters, settings and even musings at the end of their document, while others wrote them into the body of the work as it was written and played out. Tosca was a reader for two of her writer friends, dissecting their first drafts to see if all the elements hung together and each thread was tied up by the conclusion of the book. She disliked the job and found it time consuming, but friends were friends.
    Tosca checked the document’s word count. It was eighty-seven thousand words, about twenty thousand words longer than he usually wrote, she knew. All of his previous books were around sixty-five thousand, so it seemed there were indeed notes at the end, perhaps for even more books, including, she hoped, several synopses for future plots. That would make the document extremely valuable, because none of the drafts or notes for his earlier books existed.
    However, instead of seeing any of Sanderson’s notes at the end of the document or synopses for future books, she was faced with another title page: Seven Doors to Doom. A second book? Tosca checked the word count, which was eighty-five thousand, five hundred. Again, this was more than the author had ever previously written.
    Mystified, she clicked on the down arrow to the final chapter, pressed Enter again and came upon yet another title page: Silver Blue Shadow. This third document had no chapters listed and appeared half finished. It ended abruptly in the middle of chapter seventeen. There were no further writings.
    “What on earth is all this?” she asked aloud. “Two Sanderson books he never published and one in progress?”
    Barely containing her excitement, she printed everything out, thanking her stars she’d bought five reams of copy paper for her laser printer the week before. When the machine finally stopped she collected the pages from the tray. Why had he written these books with far more words than usual? Here were close to two hundred fifty thousand for all three. Ideally, there shouldn’t be more than one hundred eighty thousand words, but what a discovery!
    Engrossed in trying to figure out the puzzle, Tosca was alerted by a harsh whistle. Steam was shooting out of the electric kettle’s spout. She got up, poured some hot water into the teapot to warm it, swished it around, and poured the water out into the sink. This time, deciding she