Emerson Page and Where the Light Enters

by Christa Avampato

  “Can’t sleep, Emerson?” called a woman from a neighboring balcony. It was her elderly neighbor, Mrs. Morgan.

  “Not tonight,” Emerson answered.

  Small and portly with a kind, round face and soft features, Mrs. Morgan looked at the sky through a large, glittery telescope. She had a shawl tightly wrapped around her to keep away the cold night.

  “When I can’t sleep, I count stars,” said Mrs. Morgan. “Three hundred million stars in the Milky Way alone, or at least 300 million that we know about. And in New York City? One hundred. Ha! But that’s 100 more than we usually have.”

  “I noticed that, too, when I was walking home,” said Emerson. “Do you know why the stars are so visible tonight?”

  Mrs. Morgan laughed. “The stars do what they want to do, Emerson. Shine. Don’t shine. It’s their choice, not ours. But I think they shine a bit brighter just before something extraordinary is about to happen.”

  That idea made Emerson widen her eyes. “Something good?” she asked hopefully.

  “Ah, that is always the question,” said Mrs. Morgan. “Something good can be extraordinary, but so can something not-so-good.”

  “How will we know if it’s going to be something good or not?” asked Emerson.

  Mrs. Morgan continued gazing through her telescope.

  “Nothing is a matter of good or bad. It will be what is needed.”

  “Needed for what?”

  “Every moment holds the exact teaching we need, exactly when we need it,” said Mrs. Morgan. “In time, all the big questions find their answers.”

  Emerson yawned. Sleep was finally settling into her eyes. “Goodnight, Mrs. Morgan.”

  “Goodnight, dear,” said Mrs. Morgan, her eyes still fixed on the stars through her telescope. “A good night.”

  Mrs. Morgan never gave a straight answer to a question. That confused Emerson, but she also admired it. Their short conversations like this one happened all the time, mostly across their balconies and mostly late at night. She thought of Mrs. Morgan as a grandmother. She’d known her all her life, and she was a great friend to her parents, who met as college students in Mrs. Morgan’s astronomy class. She was another thread, delicate and tenuous, connecting Emerson to her mother. Slight, but there.

  Mrs. Morgan had survived World War II in Poland. Emerson had a hard time imagining how anyone could survive such a terrifying childhood and emerge as a kind and loving person. Whenever Emerson had a tough day or felt bad for herself, she’d think of Mrs. Morgan. If she could survive losing her entire family, her friends, and her home to that kind of evil, nearly dying herself, then Emerson could handle whatever troubles she had, too.

  She unpinned the vision board from the cabinet and put it on the floor. Friday sat on it.

  “That’s about all that thing’s good for,” she said to him.

  Behind the vision board was another board that gave Emerson a feeling of control and progress. A picture of her mother was pinned to the center. It was surrounded by dozens of pieces of paper. Emerson wrote ideas, questions, and clues on them. Arrows connected them in a giant web. When the police declared her mother’s death a cold case, Emerson launched an investigation of her own.

  Oliver used this web technique all the time. He told her that seeing all the pieces next to each other helped him figure out how they fit together. One sleepless night, Emerson went to her computer and printed out every online article she could find about her mother’s death and the police investigation that followed. She looked up her mother’s death certificate. “Cause of Death: Unknown.” Unknown. That was the word Emerson hated the most. Oliver always told her that everything is known by someone, somewhere, and that the purpose of life is to discover what’s unknown to us. Emerson’s purpose was to discover this unknown, the one on her mother’s death certificate.

  She opened her small notebook and ripped out two pieces of paper. She pinned them to the board. One read “The Starlighter.” The other read “Cassandra at Stargrass.” She knew that somehow these two things were related.

  “There’s no such thing as a coincidence. Only synchronicity,” she whispered.

  This was something her father said when he was working on a tough case. Now she was prepared to use it.

  CHAPTER 9

  LOST IN THOUGHT

  Oliver walked into his home office. He fluttered his lips and fired up his wall-sized tablet without turning on the lights. The soft glow from the wall usually got his blood pumping with anticipation. Now it made him feel depleted. He flicked through pieces of evidence: pictures, letters, email messages, and maps in Khitan, Akkadian, Aramaic, Ionic, and ancient Egyptian. Disjointed leads in different languages. He followed them all, to nowhere.

  All these years of painful research, wince-worthy risks, and mountains of money for scraps of information. Wasted. Lachlan was his last hope, again. He turned off the tablet and the light faded. The darkness was a cold comfort.

  When he closed his eyes, he thought of Nora and how she had begged him to go on looking for the book without her. He remembered the day when the box arrived at Stargrass. He and Jasper thought they finally had it—the book that contained the secret every artist, every scientist, every creative mind everywhere dreamed of, longed for, and would die for.

  When he held that box in his hands, he thought he’d fulfilled his promise to Nora to continue her work until it was done. He wanted to hold onto that feeling, the intense sense of pride mixed with gratitude and relief. It was sweet, and then it was gone, like a wind that kicks up strong and then falls away into nothingness. Oliver and Jasper opened the box to find only a scrap of paper with words scrawled on it in a twisted, crooked script. When the message was decoded, it was gibberish except for the last line: “He who wants waits.”

  Tonight, Cassandra and Lachlan competed for what was left of Oliver’s mental energy. Did Lachlan really know the whereabouts of the book this time, or was he sending Oliver on another expensive road to nowhere? Red herrings were his specialty; he enjoyed watching Oliver scramble only to come up empty-handed. But occasionally, just often enough, he did have valuable information, and he had helped Oliver solve a few difficult crimes that would have otherwise gone unsolved.

  But Jasper was right to be exasperated by Oliver’s plan to meet Lachlan at the IRT station alone. Lachlan couldn’t be trusted.

  “A sense of invincibility is a fatal flaw, not an asset,” Jasper had said to him. “If Lachlan’s laid a trap for you, and I’m certain he has, then only I can save you.”

  Even Oliver, a master of twisting words to his will, couldn’t argue this point with Jasper. Oliver could go there never to return, never to be found. Another cold case. He couldn’t let that kind of pain happen to Emerson again.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE MEANING OF PLACE

  Jasper, Truman, and Skylar emerged from Central Park at the corner of 79th Street and Fifth Avenue. Skylar threw her right arm out in front of them.

  “Wait.” Her left index finger halted a seemingly innocent passerby motionless in mid-stride. “Clear.”

  “Well done,” said Jasper.

  “I learned from the best,” she said with a smile.

  They hurried to a door to the left of the main stairs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Truman positioned his left eye in front of the peephole and then his right. A flash of red light burst into each eye. With a series of three beeps, the locks that secured the massive door opened.

  “That never gets old,” said Truman as Skylar started to cross the threshold into the museum’s lower entrance.

  “Sweetheart, aren’t you forgetting something?” asked Jasper.

  “Oh, right,” said Skylar. She waved her hand, and the passerby flickered back to life and continued his evening walk completely unaware of his momentary pause.

  “Remind me to never get on your bad side,” said Truman.
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  Once they were inside, he relocked the door by placing both his palms on a small piece of black glass to the left of the door. They exited the vestibule and found Raymond waiting for them.

  “You’re late,” he said. Without waiting for a reply, he spun on his heel and hustled down the dim hallway. For a small, rotund man, he was surprisingly agile.

  “Grandpa, this isn’t the way we usually go,” said Skylar.

  “We’re no longer operating in usual times,” Jasper replied.

  Pinhole-sized lights dotting the stone floor glowed just enough to guide their way to Raymond’s office. The surrounding darkness amplified the sound of their hurried footsteps. When they reached a metal door in the shape of a half-moon at the end of the corridor, Raymond yanked it open. He easily walked through the doorway, but the others had to duck to keep from hitting their heads on the frame.

  The view inside baffled Skylar and Truman. They had never been here before. They were in a circular room covered with living, blooming vines, save for three copper doors evenly dispersed in a semi-circle behind Raymond’s oddly small desk. Skylar ran her hand over the walls. The vines were warm to the touch. The twisted pattern they made was familiar, but she couldn’t place it. A sleek black cat with aqua eyes posed on what free space there was on the desk. A single free-floating orb of yellow light floated above a book that was easily a foot thick.

  Without an ounce of regard for the strange room, Jasper put his face close to the book as his gaze bore into its fragile pages.

  “What did you find?” Jasper asked.

  “Where did Lachlan tell Oliver to meet him?” Raymond asked.

  “At the abandoned IRT station,” said Jasper.

  Raymond pointed at a line in the open book. “I warned you,” he said. “‘A steam calliope may refer to a steam locomotive whose whistle is powered by compressed steam generated from a boiler. The IRT Ninth Avenue Line was the first elevated railway in New York City and was operated by steam locomotives.’”

  “He has Calliope’s book. That’s what he was trying to signal by choosing to meet Oliver at the IRT station,” said Jasper. “That’s what you’re saying?”

  “That is exactly what I’m saying,” said Raymond as he crossed his arms and peered over his round glasses at them with a deep sense of satisfaction. “Seems that Lachlan gave Oliver too much credit.”

  “Incredible,” said Jasper. “Almost unbelievable.”

  “Lachlan is a Cambridge-educated detective who traced some of the most notorious art thefts in the world,” said Raymond. “He knows he’s got something of supreme value, and he wants to sell it to Oliver, but first he wants to taunt him. Confuse him. He knows Oliver’s two weaknesses—Nora’s death and a puzzle without a solution.”

  “But if Lachlan knows what he has,” said Skylar, “then why not sell it to the highest bidder? Why even give Oliver the chance to buy it?”

  “Who else would believe what it is?” asked Raymond. “The book’s a myth now. Most people think it’s a fairytale. Even if someone held it in their hands, they couldn’t decipher it.”

  “We’re looking for a book no one can read?” Truman asked.

  “Well,” said Jasper, “almost no one.”

  “How did Oliver meet him?” asked Skylar.

  “A few years ago, Oliver was working on an especially thorny case in London,” said Jasper. “Lachlan was a small-time black-market art dealer then.”

  “And now?” asked Truman.

  “He’s the best broker in the world,” said Raymond. “Oliver has been working with him to recover Calliope’s book. He’s the one who helped us get close the last time.”

  “But the package was intercepted,” said Jasper. “Someone got to it before we did. When the box was delivered, it was empty.”

  Raymond raised his hand to correct Jasper. “Almost empty.”

  “Almost?” asked Skylar.

  “There was a note in place of the book,” said Jasper. “It said: ‘He who wants waits.’ Maybe tomorrow we’ll be done waiting.”

  “I hope you’re right, Jasper,” said Raymond. “For all our sakes. But I have a bad feeling about this.”

  “Thank you, Raymond. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Don’t thank me,” said Raymond. “Get whatever Lachlan has and don’t get yourself killed in the process. We’ve already lost too many on your side.”

  “Do you think Cassandra knows about Lachlan?” asked Skylar. “Is it possible that Lachlan could be playing Oliver and Cassandra against one another?”

  Jasper and Raymond stared at each other. Until today, that idea had seemed impossible. Now that Cassandra had re-emerged, the search was even more urgent—and dangerous.

  Jasper stood at his full height. Without a word, he left Raymond’s office with Truman and Skylar at his heels. They rushed back down the dim hallway, knowing they had only a few hours before daybreak.

  “Grandpa, this sounds too risky,” said Skylar. “To go underground. Alone. To meet this kind of man without knowing what you’re really up against. For all we know, Cassandra could be working with Lachlan. Don’t do this.”

  “Sweetheart, if there were another way, I’d do it,” he said. “We’re going to have to take our chances this time. We can’t risk Cassandra finding the book before we do. The results would be catastrophic.”

  “What do you need from me?” asked Truman.

  “We’re going to need your original sketchbooks,” said Jasper. “If we’re going to disarm Cassandra, we’ve all got to understand how she works as well as you do. Skylar, you’ll need to be with Emerson until Oliver can get back home from our meeting with Lachlan. She can’t be left alone. Not even for a second.”

  Skylar and Truman nodded in agreement.

  She and Jasper left the Met, and Truman headed for the American Wing of the museum. Every time he walked these halls, he reminded himself that he was passing by some of the most prized treasures in the world. But this was no time for sentimentality. Though he had walked this exact path thousands of times, tonight it felt like a foreign route littered with landmines. He knew he was no longer safe; every turn could bring chaos. Cassandra’s fearlessness, and her ability to rile others, was a reassurance of her power. Truman knew she was yet again a loose cannon with a lethal aim.

  CHAPTER 11

  WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT

  Emerson raced downstairs from her room, her arms loaded with books and her hair sopping wet. Friday trailed behind her. She was late. Very late.

  “Dad, why isn’t there any power?” asked Emerson as she raced around the apartment collecting the contents of her backpack for school. “I couldn’t get my hair dryer to work. And my alarm didn’t go off.”

  “No school today,” said Oliver.

  “What? Why?”

  “Looks like they don’t have power either,” said Oliver.

  “What happened?”

  “Says here that there was a fire at the power plant last night,” said Skylar as she flicked through her phone.

  “Sky, what are you doing here?” asked Emerson.

  “She’s going to stay with you while I’m at a meeting,” said Oliver. “Shouldn’t take too long, and I’ll be home right after.”

  “I don’t need anyone to babysit me, Dad,” said Emerson.

  “No one thinks you need a babysitter, Em,” said Skylar. “I’ve got a ton of reading to do. I’m already here so I’m just going to hang out for a while and get some work done. Columbia’s closed, too, because there’s no power.”

  Emerson fastened Friday’s leash to his collar. “All right. Well, I don’t have any school work to do so I’m going to go—”

  Oliver cut her off. “I think it’s better for you to stay in this morning, too.”

  “Why?” Emerson asked.

  Oliver gestured toward the window. “I
t’s pouring outside,” he said. “I took Friday out already. Early.”

  “Oh. I didn’t even hear it raining when I was getting ready,” said Emerson.

  “I guess we’ll have to chalk it up to your incredible sense of focus,” said Oliver. He gave Emerson a kiss on the cheek.

  “I’ll be home in a little while,” he said.

  Once he was gone, Emerson shuffled back upstairs to her room. Friday followed her. The floor was littered with papers, and the giant board with clues to her mother’s death lay at the center like a bullseye. Now was her chance to get Skylar’s help, or try to get her help. Emerson took school being cancelled as a sign that the timing was right to reveal to her closest friend what she’d been working on for months.

  Emerson rehearsed her speech in her head, trying to imagine how Skylar would respond. Would she be angry? Confused? Would she take this as seriously as Emerson took it? Maybe she’d be amused. Intrigued. If nothing else, at least surprised.

  When Emerson came out of her bedroom, Skylar was already set up at the dining room table with her books and notes stacked in evenly spaced piles.

  “Sky, I need to show you something,” said Emerson.

  “Okay.”

  Emerson took a deep breath and unfolded her investigation board. Skylar stood up and tugged at her bottom lip with her thumb and forefinger as she silently scanned the board.

  “I want to know what happened to my mother,” Emerson finally said. “And I want you to help me.”

  Skylar tilted her head. Her voice was soft and confused. “Help you do what, Em?”

  “I want you to help me find the person who killed my mother,” said Emerson as a burning sensation rose in her throat. “And I want them to pay for it. Either you help me or I’ll find a way to do it myself. But I’m not giving up on my mom because if the roles were switched she wouldn’t give up on me.”

  Skylar took another long look at the board.