The Empty Pulpit

About this book

The Millville Mysteries: The Empty PulpitBook ThreeThe envelope has been in the Calloway family for more than a century, sealed and set aside. On the evening of Heritage Day, Harold Calloway finally opens it. And when he reads the first line aloud to the four Meddlers gathered in the gazebo, everything changes.The pages inside belong to Elias Whitmore Croft, the founding pastor of Millville Baptist Church. They name a conductor who served alongside him on the Underground Railroad in the years before the Civil War. And they name the man who betrayed him.His name is Cornelius Pruitt.His great-grandson Douglas sits in the third pew on the right side of Millville Baptist every Sunday morning.Nora, Eddie, Cal, and James have learned to read the town's silences. This one runs deeper than any they have found before. In 1887, a faithful pastor named Silas Covey discovered what the Pruitt family had done, preached one honest sermon about it, and was gone within the week. He left something behind before he went: forty-one pages of documented history, hidden under the floorboards of the pastor's study, waiting for someone willing to look.The Meddlers are willing. But Douglas Pruitt has spent years on the right committees, in the right pew, and in the right rooms to make sure certain things stay unfound. And he already knows they are getting close.The Empty Pulpit is the third book in The Millville Mysteries, a middle-grade series set in a small Ohio town where the past keeps showing up in unexpected places, and where four kids keep deciding that the truth is worth the trouble of finding it.For readers ages 8 to 12. Series best read in order.