♦ SNOWFLAKES AND RUMORS ♦

      The city of Rosewood was humming with rumors. They swirled every which way, across snowy rooftops and down narrow streets.

      “How is it possible? It’s been two years!”

      They were exchanged in shops along Howling Bloom Street and slurped in Belmont Café.

      “Are you saying you think we’ve been duped?”

      “What would they have eaten?”

      They were laughed about in student rooms at the Willow Academy and gulped in handfuls at DuttonLick’s sweetshop.

      “Weren’t there penguins on the iceberg?”

      “You think they survived by eating penguins?”

      It was a blizzard of rumors. They piled as high as the snow. There were hundreds of answers to one single question:

      ROSEWOOD CHRONICLE

      HOW DID RALPH AND RACHEL HELMSLEY

      SURVIVE STRANDED ATOP AN ICEBERG?

      Ralph and Rachel Helmsley were two of the city’s most famed residents—explorers, once presumed dead, soon to return to their tall, skinny house on crooked, narrow Willow Street. And there wasn’t a single person anticipating the explorers’ return home more than their grandson, Archer B. Helmsley.

      “Archer’s dangerous. He set tigers loose in a museum just to see if he could outrun them!”

      “I heard he can make acorns explode simply by looking at them.”

      “No, that’s impossible. But he can turn a flamingo into a glass of pink lemonade when he’s thirsty.”

      In truth, Archer couldn’t make acorns explode or turn a flamingo into a glass of pink lemonade. But with the help of two friends and a life raft, Archer had outrun a pack of tigers. It had happened two months ago, during a botched rescue attempt to find his grandparents—who’d been missing from Archer’s life since he was a mere two days old. As a result, for the past two months Archer had been living at Raven Wood Boarding School. His parents had insisted it was for his own good. And to make matters worse, just before he’d boarded the train north, Archer had discovered his grandparents were not only very much still alive—they were also finally coming home.

      So Archer had missed the first rumor spread through Rosewood and the first snowflake fall on Willow Street. And he’d missed the countless others that followed. It had been a particularly cold start to winter—the kind of cold where if you wrinkled your nose, it could remain wrinkled forever. The whole of Rosewood had become a white sea, and the snow only got deeper with each passing day.

      ♦ CLANKING RADIATORS♦

      On North Willow Street, in the cellar of house number 376, a boiler was hard at work, forcing steam into pipes that traveled up four stories to a top-floor bedroom, where a radiator was hissing and clanking and Adélaïde Belmont sat at her desk, writing a letter.

      … I haven’t seen your grandparents yet.

       But everyone in Rosewood is talking about them…

      Adélaïde paused and glanced over her shoulder. Her friend and neighbor Oliver Glub stood a few feet from her desk.

      “I might be able to sled over to your bedroom soon,” he said, his face pressed to her balcony window.

      Adélaïde joined him, both watching as snowflakes piled the secret Willow Street gardens high.

      “I’ve never seen so much snow,” Adélaïde said. “Those garden walls are seven feet tall, but I almost can’t tell where one garden ends and the other begins.”

      Oliver lived diagonally across those snowy gardens.