But Atlas had a right to know just how dangerous it was for him to be harboring me, even talking with me. The last man I’d discussed the journal page with was currently missing the back of his skull and a heartbeat.
So as soon as we’d settled into the sofa, I told Atlas everything. He listened pensively, without interruption, as the firelight danced in his unblinking eyes. And when it was over, I felt something unexpected: relief.
I had committed myself to following the path of these riddles. Even if there was only an infinitesimal chance that what lay at the end could save Echo. Even if the Serengeti Sapphire turned out to be a hoax. Even if there was a high probability that Nox would catch and kill me before I was through.
My relief was because now, if I died, at least one person in the world would know what really happened to me.
Atlas didn’t respond at first. He leaned back and stared into the fire, his arms draped over the back of the sofa. Then he said, “Well, I’ve got good news and bad news, Sabra.”
“Is this the beginning of a bad joke?” I asked him. Two young men were dead, I was on the mob’s hit list, my sister’s life hung in the balance—yet I couldn’t tell whether Atlas was taking me seriously.
“The bad news,” he went on, unfazed, “is that you’re going to have to cut and color your hair.”
I glared at him. “Are you getting high off the odor of burning hoodie?”
“Don’t get me wrong—the ruby-red vixen look goes well with your dimples, but that’s exactly what that son of a bitch will be looking for.” He pulled a box from a pharmacy bag he’d hidden beneath the coffee table and tossed it to me. It was black hair dye. “They’ll never see a brunette with a pixie cut coming, though.”
I couldn’t decide whether Atlas was an idiot or a genius. “Strangely practical, which I can’t argue with. Although it does make me wonder whether you’ve done this whole harboring-a-fugitive thing before. So what’s the good news?”
“The good news is that I’m going to help you find the Serengeti Sapphire, whether you like it or not.”
“What makes you think I need your help?” I asked. “What makes you think I’ll still be here in the morning when you come to check on me?” However grateful I am for all you’ve done, I conceded silently.
“Because I can tell that you’d do anything to save Echo, and you know that you have a better shot at seeing this thing through if you have someone to watch your back—especially someone as well-versed in American history as your brother.”
“Wait.” I held up a hand.
Atlas failed to suppress a smile. “Did you think it was by a random dormitory lottery that I got paired with Jack?”
This changed everything. For every historical fact I’d absorbed from my brother’s nerdy ramblings over the years, there were a thousand more I didn’t know. And this quest, this path of journal pages, reeked of history. It was Jack’s bottomless knowledge on the subject that had probably let him get the drop on Nox, before Nox ultimately got the drop on him.
“So you’re telling me”—I tapped the journal page on the table—“That you might be able to solve that riddle?”
“No,” Atlas replied. “I’m telling you that I already did.”
“You already figured it out?” I echoed incredulously. “You’re telling me that in the thirty minutes I was in that bathroom, you obtained spare clothes for me, ordered a pizza, bought hair dye, lit a fire—and you still found time to solve a century-old riddle, which as far as I can tell is total gibberish?”
“I’m sure hieroglyphics looked like a game of Pictionary the first time an explorer wandered into the pyramids, but only because he didn’t speak the language. Here, watch this.”
From his backpack, Atlas produced a pen and a notepad. While I looked on, he copied the text of the poem onto the paper. He only glanced at the journal page once, which led me to wonder whether my new friend had some sort of photographic memory.
On castle grounds
’Top drumlin’s perch
Where griffins gaze
O’er shore and shoals
Where statues flank
Long halls of pine
The hill rolls down
To taste the sea
As roses watch
The fount’ runs dry
The truth entombed
Exhumed at last.
Atlas then combed through the riddle, underlining keywords like castle, griffin, and entombed, just as I had done with Jack’s postcard. “It’s easy to see why your brother followed the riddle to the Museum of Fine Arts. It does resemble a castle—stone masonry, a central courtyard—and the objects mentioned throughout the three stanzas sound like the kind of things that would only coexist in a museum. The MFA is full of statues, and entombed could refer to the Egyptology room, which houses a collection of mummies and sarcophagi.”
I read between the lines. “But you think he was wrong.” It was hard to imagine Jack being incorrect at anything, especially history. He was the kind of kid who even aced tests he never studied for.
Atlas squinted into the fire. “I don’t know what was going through Jack’s head. Maybe he had a few places in mind and that’s the one where he got caught. Or maybe he knew the bloodhounds were on his trail, and he was trying to steer them down the wrong path. It’s impossible to say.”
I pictured Nox sending his men to futilely sweep through the MFA, looking for a page they’d never find. It was almost enough to make me smile. “So where is this poetic compass actually pointing us?”
“North.” He grinned. “But that’s all you’re getting for now.”
I stood up angrily. “This isn’t a game, Atlas. If you know where the next page is, then this conversation only ends with you drawing me a map with a big red X on it. The last person who helped me just had his brain matter sprayed over a backyard in Cohasset, so from now on, I’m on my own.”
That last sentence sparked something fierce and dark in Atlas. He rolled up his flannel shirt sleeve and turned his left palm upward, exposing his wrist. He was showing me a tattoo below his elbow, the one I’d noticed when I first met him.
It was the name Selene written across a crescent moon. The tattoo artist had done something interesting to the final e in the name: The edges of the letter erupted into a flock of sparrows, taking flight until they disappeared around Atlas’s arm.
This was one riddle that I could solve.
I thought back to meeting Atlas, when he mentioned his sister. The distant look in his eyes as he talked about her going to high school, something I now realized was only a tragic hypothetical. “What happened to her?” I asked softly.
Atlas bit the inside of his lip. “Two summers ago, for her thirteenth birthday, Selene decided to have a little camping trip in the woods behind our house. Couple of friends, couple of cute boys. My parents were away on business, and she lied to me that she was sleeping over at a friend’s house.” Atlas paused. “I guess one of the guys at the campfire had a brother who was a dealer, so he’d stolen a bottle of Blyss from his private stash. Thought it would liven up the party.”
Now I remembered how Atlas had remained remarkably still throughout my entire story—except for an almost imperceptible flinch when I mentioned Nox’s connection to the Blyss trade.
“My sister was the birthday girl, so she took the first shot. Selene’s heart stopped within seconds. Her friends freaked out when she collapsed beside the fire. They were so afraid they’d get in trouble that they just …” The words left her there evaporated off Atlas’s tongue. “One of the girls was so hysterical by the time she got home that her mother grilled her until she came clean. The police found Selene soon after. The coroner confirmed later, after the autopsy, that the Blyss had been dosed with poison. Apparently it’s not uncommon for dealers to sabotage their competition by slipping what they call ‘bad apples’ into their product.”
Everything that I wanted to say sounded like a cliché—“I’m so sorry,” or “It wasn’t your fault”—all
the things I’d loathed hearing after Jack died. I said nothing.
“So while I’m sure it was desperation that made your brother tell me to look after you, and while I know that if a psychologist were here right now, he’d tell me I’m displacing my guilt for Selene’s death onto someone else’s little sister, believe me when I say that I don’t give a shit. Because when you find out that your little sister died cold and alone in the woods not far from the recliner where you fell asleep watching Jeopardy, you earn the right to be irrationally protective of people you hardly know.” He rolled his sleeve back down, covering the tattoo.
I put a hand on his elbow. It was in my nature to resist help from others. When your father was a crook and your mother was a workaholic, fending for yourself became second nature. But I sensed now that we both needed each other: I needed Atlas to help me find the next journal page, and Atlas needed this quest as catharsis for the death of his sister.
“Okay,” I said.
Atlas bristled. He probably hadn’t expected me to cave so easily. “Okay?”
“But if you join me,” I continued, “it isn’t me that you’re signing onto protect. It’s my little sister. Survival doesn’t mean anything to me if Echo doesn’t come through this, too. So help me, stand by my side—but you can never ask me to give up.”
He regarded me for an intense moment, perhaps trying to compute the possibility that in order for Echo to live, he might have to watch me die trying to save her. Eventually, he squeezed my hand. “Rest up,” he said. “History field trip starts tomorrow.”
______
I slept restlessly, my dreams haunted by the flap of buzzards’ wings. Their red eyes peered through the cloud of death and their talons tore into a lifeless, faceless body that could have been Smitty’s.
Or it could have been my own.
I felt something flutter onto my bed sheets and lashed out, aiming to break the bird’s neck before it pecked out my eyes.
Instead, I discovered that the creature responsible for the “fluttering” was a lacy peach-colored dress. Even stranger, Atlas was leaning in my bedroom doorway wearing a tuxedo. He twirled a bowtie rakishly around his fingers.
I pulled the sheets up around my neck. “Should I ask whether you want your martini shaken or stirred?” I asked, my voice still groggy with sleep.
“It’s too early to start drinking, Moneypenny,” Atlas said in a British accent. “I have no clue whether that dress is your size. I had to ‘borrow’ what was available in the basement. Some of the wealthier residents here have us dry-clean things, then never remember to collect them.”
I rubbed my eyes. “Let me guess. The clues in the riddle are sending us to a high school prom.”
Atlas chuckled mischievously. “That guess was less ridiculous than you think. Get dressed. Party starts in one hour.” He vanished out the door.
I had slept well into the morning, so by the time I pulled myself together, it was nearly noon. The dress fit loose in the chest and tight in the hips, a catalog of all my self-consciousness, but it sure beat a soggy, bloodstained hoodie.
Atlas offered no clues about our destination as we drove north, but when we arrived in the town of Ipswich, I caught faint whiffs of the ocean air through the truck’s open windows. Eventually, Atlas turned onto a long drive past a sign that welcomed us to “The Crane Estate at Castle Hill.”
Reading the word “castle” gave me a tingle of excitement. I pulled out the riddle and traced my fingers over the first sentence. “On castle grounds …” I read aloud.
Atlas grinned without taking his eyes off the road.
A security guard emerged from a small hut to meet us. His eyes took in Atlas’s tuxedo and my dress without a touch of surprise. “Here for the Ramapo wedding?” he asked.
“About time those crazy kids got hitched!” Atlas replied. The guard laughed and gestured toward the parking lot ahead.
I waited until we’d exited the truck and were strolling up a hillside path to berate Atlas. “Please don’t tell me that we’re crashing some stranger’s wedding.”
He mouthed the word “oops” at me.
The winding path eventually spat us out in front of the most breathtaking house I’d ever seen. I whistled through my teeth. “Not exactly a castle,” I said, “but it will do.”
The Crane Estate was an enormous masterpiece of red bricks and picturesque windows, elegant chimneys, and a high cupola in the middle that glowed softly against the overcast sky. It looked like the kind of palace that belonged in the English countryside, where the royal family would spend summer playing polo and drinking tea out on the lawn. A place where the BBC would film a television drama about how the elite and their servants lived at the turn of the century.
It did not resemble something that belonged on a random hill in the Boston suburbs.
Hordes of wedding guests were milling about in the house’s circular drive. Atlas tightened his bowtie. “I figured we could use the wedding to our advantage. We look like we belong here. But if Nox’s horned sidekick shows up, she’s going to stick out like a wolf in a sheep’s pen.”
I nodded, admiring my companion. I held up the riddle. “So we have a sort-of castle, which takes care of the first line, and it’s at the top of a big hill, which explains drumlin’s perch in the second. That leaves ten more lines you need to sell me on.”
“Challenge accepted.” Atlas looped his arm through mine.
The backyard, as it turned out, was even more impressive than the front. In fact, to even call it a yard felt like a disservice. From the back steps of the mansion, a vibrantly green lawn extended for a quarter mile toward the ocean. It cut a perfectly straight line fifty yards wide through a forest of pine, spruce, and cedar trees. The grass undulated in magnificent hills, up and down, up and down, all the way to a cliff overlooking the sea.
“What do you think?” Atlas asked.
I put my hands on my hips and absorbed the magnificent view. “I would have killed to have all this open space when I was a kid. Our ‘yard’ in Dorchester was a patch of cracked asphalt barely big enough for us to play catch.” I gazed back at the mansion behind me. “What the hell is this place?”
“I won’t bore you with historical context.” Atlas paused. “Scratch that, I can’t help myself. The quick version: A hundred years ago, a super-rich guy named Crane bought all this land and built a mansion for himself and his wife. It was a beautiful Italian-style villa like you might find in Tuscany. His wife absolutely hated it. Crane promised her that if she didn’t warm up to it after ten years, he’d build her a completely new home. Exactly ten years later, she said ‘Yep, this place still blows,’ so he constructed the sixty-room estate you see now.”
“Right,” I said, “because only a savage would live in a fifty-nine-room house.”
“You know what they say: ‘Happy wife, happy life.’” Atlas tapped the riddle in my hands. “Let’s see if we can make sense of the rest of this. First, I need you to close your eyes.”
I reluctantly indulged him and Atlas took my arm and led me across the lawn. We stopped after twenty paces. “Okay, you can open them,” he said.
When I did, I found myself face-to-face with the piercing eyes of a golden-brown creature.
“No way,” I whispered.
The statue had the beak and talons of an eagle but a lion’s ears to match its feline body. It had been sculpted with a tongue darting out of its open beak and squatted half-risen on its haunches as though about to take flight. A second identical statue perched on the opposite side of the mansion’s terrace.
“Where griffins gaze,” Atlas read from the riddle, pointing to the two mythical creatures. Then he turned me around. “O’er shore and shoals. At the base of the cliff is Crane Beach, and on a good day they say you can see all the way to the Isle of Shoals, off the coast of Maine.”
I followed Atlas out onto the lawn next. To either side of the green, white classical statues of people dressed in ancient garb stood on pedestals
. Behind them, the evergreen trees towered a hundred feet. “Where statues flank / long halls of pine,” I quoted from the text. My gaze returned to the wavy green lawn that descended toward the beach. “The hills roll down / to taste the sea.” While this was all promising, that still only accounted for the poem’s first eight lines. “What about the final stanza, though? I don’t see any roses or fountains.”
Atlas frowned pensively at the riddle. “Damn. Well, I guess I was completely wrong. We can head back to the truck now.” A smile broke across his face. “Unless …”
With a gleeful shriek that caused a cluster of wedding attendees to glance our way, Atlas took off toward the edge of the house in a horse-like gallop. I sighed and raced after him, although it was a struggle to keep pace in the oversized flats that Atlas had scrounged up to go with my dress.
The pursuit took me down a tree-lined path toward a garden that resembled the ruins of an ancient city, lost in the jungle. Massive stone columns topped with elegant mermaid statues guarded its entrance, and I nearly lost my footing rushing down the steps. I expected Atlas to stop there, but he simply yelled, “the Italian garden!” before rushing excitedly across the grass. The rectangular lawn was enclosed by stone walls on all sides. Atlas paused in the exit on the opposite end and waited for me to catch up.
As in shape as I was, I was breathless by the time I reached Atlas’s side. He grabbed my hand and tugged me down another short path. A second garden awaited us, a circular terrace surrounded by more stone columns.
In the middle of the small green was a stone fountain that had long run dry. Its centerpiece was a bowl-shaped urn, where the water might have once pooled for bathing birds.
Atlas lowered his voice reverently. “The Cranes commissioned several famous landscapers to craft these beautiful gardens. This”—Atlas spread his arms wide—“is called the Rose Garden. It used to contain six hundred varieties of the flower.”
I kicked the sandals off my blistered feet. The moment my toes hit the grass, it felt like someone passed an electric wand over my body. I strode slowly but purposefully over to the old fountain. Stepped over the lip and down into the stone basin.
Nightingale, Sing Page 10
