Free The Rosemary Spell by Virginia Zimmerman

lot of stage directions in Shakespeare’s plays?”
    â€œNo, but okay.” She always imagines I have the same random information taking up space in my head that she has in hers.
    â€œWell, I think it’s in Act Three. One of Shakespeare’s rare stage directions is
exeunt, pursued by a bear.
” She smiles. “So perhaps Constance Brooke was making more sense than you realized.”
    â€œWhat’s
exeunt
?” Adam asks.
    â€œExit in the plural,” Mom says.
    â€œSo people were being chased by a bear?” I ask.
    â€œYup!” Our actually wanting to talk about Shakespeare has delighted her into forgetting about the depressing report of our visit to River House.
    â€œDo you think she was trying to tell us about a bear?” Adam puzzles.
    â€œNo.” I watch the ruin of Constance’s old house whiz by as we drive down River Road. “It was more like a metaphor.”
    â€œFor what?”
    â€œNo clue,” I sigh.
    â€œDoes
false codex
mean anything to you, Claudia?” Adam asks.
    Mom’s eyes snap to meet mine in the rearview mirror. “She didn’t really mention the false codex, did she?”
    â€œYeah, what is it?”
    She does that sniff laugh she uses when something’s not really funny. “It’s the reason we came to Cookfield.”
    â€œSorry?” This is the last thing I expected her to say. “I thought we came because you got a job at the university.”
    â€œWe did, but I wanted the job because Arthur Brooke, who taught English here and who was Constance’s father, did a lot of research on a book—a codex—that he believed belonged to Shakespeare. Most scholars think he was wrong—that’s why they call it false—but I was enchanted by the idea that there might be something to discover about Shakespeare in Cookfield, so here we are.”
    â€œDid you get to study the codex?” I clutch at my bag.
    â€œNo,” she answers. “Brooke left all sorts of interesting notes in the university archive, but the book was lost long before I showed up. It was a disappointment, but of course, it can’t really have belonged to Shakespeare, so it’s no great loss.”

    Adam and I sit on my bed, a pizza box between us.
    â€œI kind of feel like we stole the book from your mom,” Adam says through a mouthful of cheese he’s pulled off the pizza. He always does this. He eats one piece. For the second piece, he pulls off the cheese and toppings and eats them as a gooey handful. Then last he’ll just pick at the toppings. It would drive me crazy if he hadn’t been doing this since we were two.
    â€œShe never knew it was in the house.” Guilt swells up, and I set down my half-eaten slice. “I felt like we could take it, you know, because it was in my room, and no one wanted it. It had been left behind, forgotten. But . . . my own mother was looking for it!” I drop my head onto my knees. I can’t tell her we found the diary—the codex—and wrote in it. But not telling her has suddenly become an enormous lie. I want to go back and find the book again and make a different choice.
    â€œBut, Rosie.” Adam reaches for some way to make this better. “It can’t really be Shakespeare’s book. I mean, what are the chances? How could it be?” He picks pepperoni off the pizza.
    â€œBut what if it is?” I moan.
    â€œOkay,” he says in a firm voice. “Even if it is Shakespeare, all it has is a list of herbs and a short poem, so it’s not like it’s . . . important.” He trails off as we both hear how lame this sounds.
    â€œMaybe the disappearing writing was Shakespeare too, and we made it disappear!” Panic swirls around me. “Adam, we didn’t just write in Shakespeare’s diary. We somehow erased it!”
    He wipes his hands. “Let’s figure out the poem. Then we can