Key of Knowledge

by Nora Roberts

  Liz have a nice place, a nice life. He’s taken up baking.”

  “Baking? Like cakes? Joe bakes cakes?”

  “And scones and fancy bread.” She couldn’t stop the smile. The thought of her father, big, macho Joe, in an apron whipping up cake batter got her every time. “I get a care package every couple of months. First few contributions made excellent doorstops, but in the last year or so he’s found his rhythm. He makes good stuff.”

  “Give him my best next time you talk to him.”

  She shrugged. She didn’t intend to mention Jordan Hawke’s name, unless it was in a curse. “End of the road,” she said when they reached the door of her apartment building.

  “I want to come in.”

  “Not in this or any other lifetime.” She reached for the books, he swung them out of reach. “Cut it out, Jordan. We’re not ten.”

  “We have things to talk about.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “Yes, we do. And stop making me feel like I’m ten.” He hissed out a breath, prayed for patience. “Look, Dana, we’ve got a history. Let’s deal with it like grown-ups.”

  Damn if he would so much as hint that she was being immature. The pinhead. “Okay, here’s how we’ll deal with it. Give me my books and go away.”

  “Did you listen to what Rowena said last night?” There was an edge in the tone now, one that warned her a good, sweaty argument was brewing. “Did you pay any attention? Your past, present, and future. I’m part of your past. I’m part of this.”

  “In my past is just where you’re going to stay. I wasted two years of my life on you. But that’s done. Can’t you stand it, Jordan? Can’t your enormous ego handle the fact that I got over you? Way over you.”

  “This isn’t about my ego, Dana.” He handed her back her books. “But it sure as hell seems to be about yours. You know where to find me when you’re ready.”

  “I don’t want to find you,” she murmured when he strode away.

  Damn it, it wasn’t like him to walk away from a fight. She’d seen the temper on his face, heard it in his voice. Since when had he yanked the snarling beast back and hauled it off?

  She had been primed for the argument, and now she had nowhere to vent her spleen. That was very, very nasty.

  Inside her apartment, she dumped her books on the table and headed straight for the Ben and Jerry’s. Soon she was soothing her ruffled feathers with a pint of cookie dough straight out of the carton.

  “Bastard. Sneaky bastard, getting me all riled up and skulking off. These calories are his fault.”

  She licked the spoon, dug for more. “But, damn, they’re really good.”

  Refreshed, she changed into sweats, brewed a pot of coffee, then settled into her favorite chair with the new book on Celtic lore.

  She couldn’t count the number of books on the subject she’d read in the last month. But then again, to Dana, reading was every bit as pleasurable as Ben and Jerry’s and as essential to life as the next breath of air.

  She surrounded herself with books at work and at home. Her living space was a testament to her first and abiding love, with shelves jammed with books, tables crowded with them. She saw them not only as knowledge, entertainment, comfort, even sanity, but as a kind of artful decoration.

  To the casual eye, the books that streamed and flowed over shelves in nooks, on tabletops, might look like a haphazard, even disordered, jumble. But the librarian in Dana insisted on a system.

  She could, on her whim or on request, put her hand on any title in any room in the apartment.

  She couldn’t live without books, without the stories, the information, the worlds that lived inside them. Even now, with the task ahead of her and the clock already ticking, she fell into the words on the pages in her hands, and into the lives, the loves, the wars, the petty grievances of the gods.

  Absorbed, she jumped at the knock on her door. Blinking, she came back to reality, noted that the sun had set while she’d been visiting with Dagda, Epona, and Lug.

  Book in hand, she went to answer, then lifted her eyebrows at Malory. “What’s up?”

  “I thought I’d swing by and see what you were up to before I headed home. I’ve spent the day talking to some local artists and craftspeople. I think I’ve got a good start on pieces for my gallery.”

  “Cool. Got any food on you? I’m starved.”

  “A tin of Altoids and half a roll of Life Savers.”

  “That’s not going to work,” Dana decided. “I’m going to forage. You hungry?”

  “No, go ahead. Any brilliant ideas? Anything you want Zoe and me to do?” Malory asked as she followed Dana into the kitchen.

  “I don’t know how brilliant. Spaghetti! Hot damn.” Dana came out of the refrigerator with a bowl of leftover pasta. “You want?”

  “Nope.”

  “Got some Cabernet to go with it.”

  “That I’ll have. One glass.” At home in Dana’s kitchen, Malory got out wineglasses. “What’s the idea, brilliant or not?”

  “Books. You know, the whole knowledge thing. And the past, present, future. If we’re talking about mine, it’s all about the books.” She dug out a fork and began to eat the pasta straight out of the bowl. “The trick is which book, or what kind of book.”

  “Don’t you want to heat that up?”

  “What?” Baffled, Dana looked down at the spaghetti in the bowl. “Why?”

  “No reason.” Malory handed Dana a glass of wine, then took her own and wandered out to sit at the table. “A book or books makes sense, at least in part. And it gives you a path to take. But . . .”

  She scanned Dana’s apartment. “What you yourself personally own would take weeks to get through. Then there’s what everyone else in the Valley owns, the library, the bookstore at the mall, and so on.”

  “And the fact that even if I’m right, it doesn’t mean the key’s literally in a book. Could be figuratively. Or it could mean something in a book points the way to the key.” Dana shrugged and shoveled in more cold spaghetti. “I said it fell short of brilliant.”

  “It’s a good starting point. Past, present, future.” Malory pursed her lips. “Covers a lot of ground.”

  “Historical, contemporary, futuristic. And that’s just novels.”

  “What if it’s more personal?” Malory leaned forward, kept her attention on Dana’s face. “It was with me. My path to the key included Flynn, my feelings for him—and my feelings about myself, where I would end up, where I wanted to go. The experiences I had—we can’t call them dreams—were very personal.”

  “And scary.” Briefly, Dana laid a hand over Malory’s. “I know. But you got through it. So will I. Maybe it is personal. A book that has some specific and personal meaning for me.”

  Thoughtfully she scanned the room as she picked up her fork again. “That’s something else that covers a lot of ground.”

  “I was thinking of something else. I was thinking of Jordan.”

  “I don’t see how he’s in the mix. Look,” she continued even as Malory opened her mouth, “he was part of the first round, sure. The paintings by Rowena that both he and Brad bought. He came back to town with that painting because Flynn asked him to. That played into it, although his part should have ended with your quest. And his connection to Flynn, which connected him to you.”

  “And you, Dana.”

  She twirled her fork in the pasta, but her enthusiasm for it was waning. “Not anymore.”

  Recognizing the stubborn look, Malory nodded. “Okay. How about the first book you ever read? The first that grabbed you and made you a reader.”

  “I don’t think the magic key to the Box of Souls is going to be found in Green Eggs and Ham.” Smirking, Dana lifted her glass. “But I’ll give it a look.”

  “What about your first grown-up book?”

  “Obviously the steely wit and keen satire of Sam I Am escaped you.” She grinned, but drummed her fingers, thinking. “Anyway, I don’t remember a first. It
was always books with me. I don’t remember not reading.”

  She studied her wine a moment, then took a quick gulp. “He dumped me. I moved on.”

  Back to Jordan, Malory thought and nodded. “All right.”

  “That doesn’t mean I don’t hate him with a rare and beautiful passion, but it doesn’t drive my life. I’ve only seen him a handful of times in the past seven years.” She shrugged, but it came across as a hesitant jerk. “I’ve got my life, he’s got his, and they no longer intersect. He just happens to be buds with Flynn.”

  “Did you love him?”

  “Yeah. Big time. Bastard.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Hey, it happens.” She had to remind herself of that. It wasn’t life or death, it didn’t send her falling headlong into a vale of tears. If a heart couldn’t be broken, it wasn’t a heart to begin with.

  “We were friends. When my dad married Flynn’s mom, Flynn and I hit it off. Good thing, I guess. Flynn had Jordan and Brad—they were like one body with three heads half the time. So I got them, too.”

  You’ve still got them, Malory nearly said, but managed to keep silent.

  “Jordan and I were friends, and we both really dug reading, so that was another click. Then we got older, and things changed. You want another hit of this?” she asked, holding up her empty glass.

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m having one.” Dana rose, got the bottle from the kitchen. “He went off to college. He got a partial scholarship to Penn State, and both he and his mom worked like dogs to put together the rest of the tuition and expense money. His mom, well, she was just terrific. Zoe sort of reminds me of her.”

  “Really?”

  “Not in the looks department, though Mrs. Hawke was really pretty, but she was taller, and willowy—made you think of a dancer.”

  “She was young when she died.”

  “Yeah, only in her forties.” It still brought a little pang to her heart. “It was horrible what she went through, what Jordan went through. At the end, we were all practically camped out at the hospital, and even then . . .”

  She gave herself a hard shake, blew out a breath. “That’s not where I was going. I meant Zoe reminds me of how Mrs. Hawke was. It’s that good-mother vibe Zoe has. The kind of woman who knows what to do and how to do it and doesn’t whine about getting it done, and still manages to love it and the kid. She and Jordan were tight, the way Zoe and Simon are. It was just the two of them. His father wasn’t in the picture, not as far back as I can remember, anyway.”

  “That must’ve been difficult for him.”

  “It would’ve been, I think, if his mother hadn’t been who she was. She’d grab a bat and join in a pickup softball game as quickly as she would whip up some cookie batter. She filled the gaps.”

  “You loved her too,” Malory realized.

  “I did. We all did.”

  Dana sat down, sipped at her second glass of wine. “So anyway, the Hawke goes off to college, gets two part-time jobs up there to help pay his expenses. We didn’t see much of him the first year. He came back for summers, worked at Tony’s Garage. He’s a pretty decent mechanic. Palled around with Flynn and Brad when he had the chance. Four years later, he’s got his degree. He did a year and a half postgrad and was already getting some short stories published. Then he came home.”

  She let out a long breath. “Holy Jesus, we took one look at each other, and it was like bombs exploding. I thought, What the hell is this? This is my buddy Jordan. I’m not supposed to want to sink my teeth into my good buddy Jordan.”

  She laughed, drank. “Later on, he told me he’d had the same sort of reaction. Whoa, hold on, this is Flynn’s little sister. Hands off. So we danced around those bombs and each other for a couple of months. We were either bitchy with each other or very, very polite.”

  “And then?” Malory prompted when Dana fell silent.

  “Then one night he dropped by to see Flynn, but Flynn was out on a date. And my parents weren’t home. I picked a fight with him. I had to do something with all that heat. The next thing you know the two of us are rolling around on the living room rug. We couldn’t get enough of each other. I’ve never had that before or since, that . . . desperation. It was incredible.

  “Imagine our chagrin when the smoke cleared and the two of us were naked on Liz and Joe’s pretty Oriental carpet.”

  “How did you handle it?”

  “Well, as I recall we lay there like the dead for a minute, then just stared at each other. A couple of survivors of a very intense war. Then we laughed our butts off and went at each other again.”

  She lifted her glass in a mock toast. “So. We started dating, belatedly. Jordan and Dana, Dana and Jordan. It got to be like one word, whichever way you said it.”

  Oh, God, she missed that, she realized. Missed that very intimate link. “Nobody ever made me laugh the way he could make me laugh. And he’s the only man in my life who’s ever made me cry. So, yeah, Christ, yes, I loved that son of a bitch.”

  “What happened?”

  “Little things, huge things. His mother died. God, nothing’s ever been as, well, monstrous as that. Even when my dad got sick, it wasn’t as bad. Ovarian cancer, and they found it too late. The operations, the treatments, the prayers, nothing worked. She just kept slipping away. Having someone die is hard,” she said softly. “Watching them die by inches is impossible.”

  “I can’t imagine it.” Malory’s eyes filled with tears. “I’ve never lost anyone.”

  “I don’t remember losing my mother; I was too young. But I remember every day of losing Mrs. Hawke. Maybe it broke something in Jordan. I don’t know—he wouldn’t let me know. After she died, he sold their little house, all the furniture, just about every damn thing. And he cut me loose and moved to New York to get rich and famous.”

  “It wasn’t as cut and dried as that,” Malory commented.

  “Maybe not. But it felt like it. He said he had to go. That he needed something, and it wasn’t here. If he was going to write—and he had to write—he had to do it his way. He had to get out of the Valley. So that’s what he did, like the two years we were together was just a little interlude in his life.”

  She downed the rest of the wine in her glass. “So fuck him, and the bestsellers he rode in on.”

  “You may not want to hear this, at least not now. But part of the solution might be to resolve this with him.”

  “Resolve what?”

  “Dana.” Malory laid both of her hands on Dana’s. “You’re still in love with him.”

  Her hands jerked. “I am not. I made a life for myself. I’ve had lovers. I have a career—which, okay, is in the toilet right now, but I’ve got a phoenix about to rise from the ashes in the bookstore.”

  She stopped, hearing the way her words tumbled out. “No more wine for me if I mix metaphors that pitifully. Jordan Hawke’s old news,” she said more calmly. “Just because he was the first man I loved doesn’t mean he has to be the last. I’d rather poke my eye with a burning stick than give him the satisfaction.”

  “I know.” Malory laughed a little, gave Dana’s hands a squeeze before she released them. “That’s how I know you’re still in love with him. That, and what I just saw on your face, heard in your voice when you took me through what you had together.”

  It was appalling. How had she looked? How had she sounded? “So the wine made me sentimental. It doesn’t mean—”

  “It means whatever it means,” Malory said briskly. “It’s something you’re going to have to think about, Dana, something you’re going to have to weigh carefully if you really mean to do this thing. Because one way or the other, he’s part of your life, and he’s part of this.”

  “I don’t want him to be,” Dana managed. “But if he is, I’ll deal with it. There’s too much at stake for me to wimp out before I even get started.”

  “That’s the spirit. I’ve got to get home.”

  She rose, then ran a comforting hand
over Dana’s hair. “Whatever you’re feeling or thinking, you can tell me. And Zoe. And if there’s something you need to say, if you just need someone to be here when you have nothing to say, all you have to do is call.”

  Dana nodded, waited until Malory was at the door. “Mal? It was like having a hole punched in my heart when he left. One hole ought to be enough for anybody’s lifetime.”

  “You’d think. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Chapter Three

  THE odds of finding a magic key tucked in one of the thousands of books at the Pleasant Valley Library were long and daunting. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t look.

  In any case, she liked being in the stacks, surrounded by books. She could, if she let her mind open to it, hear the words murmuring from them. All those voices from people who lived in worlds both fantastic and ordinary. She could, simply by slipping a book off the shelf, slide right into one of those worlds and become anyone who lived inside it.

  Magic keys and soul-sucking sorcerers, Dana thought. Incredible as they might be, they paled for her against the power of words on a page.

  But she wasn’t here to play, she reminded herself as she began dutifully tidying the stacks while keeping an eye on the resource desk a few feet away. This was an experiment. Maybe she would put her fingers on a book and feel something—a tingle, a hint of heat.

  Who knew?

  But she worked her way through the mythology stacks without experiencing any tingles.

  Undaunted, she wandered to the section of books on ancient civilizations. The past, she told herself. The Daughters of Glass had sprung from the ancients. Well, who hadn’t?

  She worked diligently for a time, reordering books that had been misplaced. She knew better, really she did, than to actually open the volume on ancient Britain, but it was suddenly in her hand, and there was this section on stone circles that swept her onto windy moors at moonrise.

  Druids and chanting, balefires and the hum that was the breath of gods.

  “Oh, gee, Dana. I didn’t know you were off today.”

  With her teeth going to auto-grind, Dana shifted her gaze from the book in her hand to Sandi’s overly cheerful face. “I’m not off. I’m working the stacks.”

  “Really?” The big blue eyes widened. Long golden lashes fluttered. “It looked like you were reading. I thought maybe you were on your own time, doing more research. You’ve been doing a lot of research lately, haven’t you? Finally starting on your doctorate?”

  With a bad-tempered little shove, Dana put the book back in place. Wouldn’t it be fun? she thought, to get the big silver scissors out of the drawer in her desk and whack off that detestable bouncing ponytail?

  She’d just bet that would wipe that bright, toothy grin off Sandi’s face.

  “You got the promotion, the pay raise, so what’s your problem, Sandi?”

  “Problem? I don’t have a problem. We all know the policy about reading on the clock. So I’m sure it just looked like you were reading instead of manning the desk.”

  “The desk is covered.” And when enough was enough, Dana thought, you finished it. “You spend a lot of your time worrying about what I’m doing, slinking around in the stacks behind me, eavesdropping when I’m speaking with a patron.”

  Sandi’s perky smile turned into a perky sneer. “I certainly do not eavesdrop.”

  “Bullshit,” Dana said in a quiet, pleasant tone that had Sandi’s dollbaby eyes going bright with shock. “You’ve been stepping on my heels for weeks. You got the promotion, I got the cut. But you’re not my supervisor, you’re not my boss. So you can kiss my ass.”

  Though it wasn’t quite as rewarding as hacking off the ponytail might have been, it felt fabulous to just walk away, leaving Sandi sputtering.

  She settled back at the desk and assisted two patrons with such good cheer and good fellowship that both left beaming. When she answered the phone, she all but sang out, “Pleasant Valley Library. Reference Desk. May I help you? Hey, Mr. Foy. You’re up, huh. Ah, uh-huh. Good one.” She chuckled as she scribbled down today’s trivia question. “It’ll take me a minute. I’ll call you back.”

  She danced off to find the right book, flipped through it briefly in the stacks, then carried it back to the desk to make the return call.

  “Got it.” She trailed down the page with her finger. “The Arctic tern migrates the farthest annually. Up to twenty thousand miles—wow—between the