The Secret Keepers

by Trenton Lee Stewart

  He should tell his mom everything. He knew that he should. He even wanted to tell her. But then what?

  Reuben staggered into the kitchen, took a TV dinner from the freezer, and fumbled it into the microwave. With bleary eyes he watched it go round and round on the revolving glass tray. If he told his mom the truth, she would make him give up the watch. Her child in danger? No question. But he would still be in danger, he was sure of it, and so would she. The Smoke would want his secret protected. The Smoke would take no chances.

  Reuben peeled off the TV dinner’s plastic covering and watched the steam escape. Escape, he thought. That was what he needed. New Umbra had suddenly become a nightmare. The Directions were looking for him. The man on the phone was looking for him. The Smoke himself was probably out looking for him. Yes, he and his mom needed to get out of the city, but where would they go? With what? They had no money, no family. And how could Reuben convince his mom of anything without telling her the whole truth?

  He didn’t have the answers. He didn’t think he even knew all the questions. It amazed him that earlier on this very day, he had been trying to figure out a way to get money so that they could stay. Now he needed to accomplish the exact opposite, and it seemed infinitely harder.

  The dinner, a bland potpie, was still half-frozen in the middle. Reuben ate it anyway, too hungry and tired to care. He sat hunched at the kitchen table, thinking. The watch had gotten him into this mess, and now he needed it to get him out again. But what was he missing? If his mom was right, if there was always another way, then there had to be something he hadn’t considered yet. So what was it?

  He tried to think of the things he didn’t know. How did others know about the watch, for instance? How did they find out about it? He was tormented by the awareness that The Smoke knew things he didn’t. The same with the man on the phone. If Reuben knew what they did, maybe his path would seem clearer. Maybe he could set them against each other somehow. Cause a commotion and slip away for good. He was the one with the watch, after all. He had power; he just needed more information.

  But that was the problem. How could he find it? Where to even start? Reuben groaned and put his head down on his arms. What was he missing? What had he overlooked?

  He was still asking himself these questions when he fell asleep. And half an hour later, he woke up with the answer.

  It had happened to Reuben before; maybe it happened to everybody. Important things would emerge while he slept, remain floating on the surface of his thoughts when he woke. P. William Light.

  The name was a clue to a mystery he’d never tried to solve. Sure, he’d spent hours wondering about this man to whom the watch had once belonged, but he’d never tried to actually find anything out. All of a sudden P. William Light was an ally, a friend from the past. Maybe he had something to tell Reuben, some advice to give.

  And maybe, Reuben thought as he jumped up from the table, he was grasping at straws because he was desperate. But what else was he supposed to do?

  He went to his closet and unbundled the wooden box. One of the antiques dealers had told him that it was perhaps a century old, and very well made. Its custom design and magnificent contents suggested that its owner had been wealthy, possibly a figure of some importance. At the time, Reuben hadn’t found the box itself of much interest. But now questions began to form.

  Why hadn’t P. William Light included an address in the inscription? If the watch were mislaid and then found again, how would the finder locate the owner? Reuben scoured the box in case he’d missed something. Nothing. Had Light been important enough to assume that everyone knew him? If so, maybe Reuben could find out something about him. That would be a start, anyway.

  He glanced at the alarm clock. The library closed in an hour.

  Outside, storm clouds had gathered. Thunder rumbled in the distance. A few fat drops of rain began to fall. Reuben didn’t mind. An impending storm was a good excuse to pull up his sweatshirt hood, the better to hide his face, and to hurry along the sidewalk without drawing attention.

  In the library foyer Reuben walked past the phone with a shudder. He couldn’t bear to look at it. Had it really been only a few hours since he’d fed coins into it with such confident expectation? That had been in his old life. The life before that voice in his ear.

  The library had always seemed rather dim to Reuben, but now, in contrast to the threatening darkness outside, it seemed brilliantly bright. It also appeared to be completely empty. He went straight to the reference section and began flipping through encyclopedias. He found entries on a few different men named “William Light”—an Australian military man, a rodeo star (who went by “Billy”), a crooked politician—but none whose first initial was P. He checked a biographical dictionary. Nothing. He closed the heavy book with a frustrated thump of the cover. He was going to have to face the librarian.

  Reuben approached the desk warily. The librarian hated conversation. He always made Reuben nervous with his brusque talk and the way he avoided eye contact. And now Reuben had embarrassed him by startling him among the bookshelves last week. He felt sure the man would resent having to help him. Still, Reuben summoned his nerve and made his request as politely as he could.

  “‘P. William Light’?” the librarian repeated gruffly, looking above Reuben’s head. His eyes shifted back and forth behind his glasses as if he were watching an insect flying around. “Who was he?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Reuben explained. “I think he might have been someone important, probably around a hundred years ago.”

  Now the librarian was looking down at his desk. His eyebrows were so bushy they overhung the rims of his glasses; it made his glasses appear to have eyelashes. “Indexes,” he said, and rose from his chair.

  Half an hour later the desk was covered with binders, directories, and other assorted volumes. The librarian had gone through them one by one as Reuben stood anxiously watching, shifting his weight from foot to foot. The man had spoken not a single word, which, over the course of a half hour, created a remarkably awkward tension. From time to time Reuben glanced around. They remained the only two people in the library.

  The librarian drew his finger down rows and rows of words, page after page. After the first few minutes, Reuben had stopped trying to figure out what sorts of indexes he was checking. None had produced results. But now the man paused, marking a place with his finger, and looked up in the direction of Reuben’s arm. “You’re looking for a person? Not a place?”

  Reuben flinched. The sudden gruff questions were as unnerving as the silence. “That’s right,” he said quickly. “P. William Light.” The librarian grunted, licked his finger, and flipped the page. Reuben looked away in despair.

  At last the librarian closed a binder, shook his head, and muttered something indecipherable. Perhaps he thought this sufficiently communicative. Not until he rose from his desk and began putting his materials away did Reuben realize that the librarian had found nothing, that the search was over. The disappointment caught in his throat like a stone. After a moment he managed to mumble his thanks to the man, who did not reply, and drifted away scowling. Never had he met anyone so reluctant to speak unless absolutely necessary.

  At the library door Reuben hesitated, looking out at the still-dark afternoon. There was a haze of drizzle in the air, fuzzing the outlines of everything on the street. Something had occurred to him. He turned and walked back to the librarian’s desk.

  “Excuse me,” he said. The man turned from a shelf, his arms full of binders, and looked expectantly at Reuben’s shoulder. “Why did you ask if I might be looking for a place instead of a person?”

  The librarian cleared his throat. “Because there’s a place called Point William—a town about fifty miles up the coast—and the lighthouse there is called the Point William Light. There’s a newspaper story about it. We have it on microfiche.” He turned and went back to shelving his materials.

  Reuben blinked. P. William Lig
ht. Point William Light.

  Property of Point William Light.

  Minutes later, at Reuben’s request, the librarian had set him up at a dusty microfiche machine and scrolled to the pertinent story. Reuben stared at the screen. There it was. Point William, a small town with nothing to distinguish it except for its historic lighthouse—known as the Point William Light—and the fact that the lighthouse had always been kept by members of the same family, generation after generation, all the way back to its earliest days. It was the town’s local paper that had done the story, focusing on a squabble about property ownership.

  Reuben had been reading for approximately one minute when the librarian announced that the library was closing.

  “Okay,” Reuben said, trying hurriedly to finish the article.

  The librarian flipped a switch. The screen went dark. “We’re closing,” he repeated, and returned to his desk.

  Reuben pushed his chair back, his eyes still fixed pointlessly on the screen. He had read enough, though, and his mind was churning. Property of Point William Light. The same family for generations. If he was right—if that P stood for Point—then the descendants of a person who had once possessed the watch were still living in Point William. They were the lighthouse keepers.

  Reuben felt himself shudder, whether from excitement or anxiety he couldn’t have said. He had solved one mystery only to fall into another. What did the watch have to do with those people? Did they have any claim to it? What might they tell him? Was there any way they might help him?

  And the most pressing question of all: What was he going to tell his mom?

  For Reuben knew, without even considering it, that he had to go to Point William. He would find answers there. He’d known it the instant he learned the truth about the inscription. A voice in his head—his own voice, but somehow smarter and more confident than him—had said it plainly.

  Follow the light.

  In the end, it was surprisingly easy.

  “I’m glad you want to go,” his mom said. She’d been home perhaps twenty seconds when Reuben hit her with his story. “You know that, right? I’m just a little taken aback. You’ve never been on a sleepover before. Miles Chang? The nice one?”

  Reuben shrugged. “Yeah, he just came up to me at the community center. He said his dad can pick me up Friday morning and bring me back Sunday afternoon.”

  He was making it so easy for her: the nice kid, with the nice teacher for a dad; the offer of a ride so she wouldn’t have to worry about getting him there; the chance for her son to finally make a friend. And yet his mom chewed her lip a long time, as if in deep inner debate about the matter, and Reuben had to pretend not to be seriously worried about her decision. He didn’t have a backup plan.

  “What if they want to take you to a movie?” she wondered aloud. “Or go out for dinner? You’d need money.”

  So that was her hesitation, the fact that they were desperately broke. “Oh, don’t worry about that!” Reuben groped for what to say. “They probably won’t. I mean, I’m sure they won’t, and anyway I have a few dollars—”

  His mom shushed him. “No, you keep your money. I have a little I can give you. Oh, don’t look so surprised! Maybe I can’t pay the rent, but I can certainly fund my son’s first sleepover.…”

  Yes, it was all surprisingly easy. Reuben felt enormously relieved. And enormously guilty.

  After they’d said good night, Reuben went to his room and counted the money she’d given him, along with the small amount he’d saved himself. It ought to be enough to pay for a train ticket, he thought. If not, well, he could turn invisible, after all.

  As he put the money away, he noticed that his hands were trembling. He thought he knew why. That conversation with his mom had been the last big obstacle. Now that he’d gotten through it, the matter was settled. He was going. By this time on Friday, he’d be in another town, a place he’d never been, and he’d be entirely on his own. He would have to keep his mom convinced that he was at a sleepover. He would have to observe and deal with strangers. He had to try to learn something incredibly important—and potentially dangerous—without getting discovered himself.

  He was becoming, in other words, an actual spy.

  Friday morning Reuben lay in bed, listening to his mom bustle about the apartment. It was almost time. He’d been awake for over an hour, but he was waiting until the last possible minute. The less discussion the better.

  When his mom had come home from work the night before, Reuben had pretended to be asleep. He’d heard the soft thunks of her shoes as she kicked them off, heard her sigh with relief as she dropped her bag beside them. Then she had slipped quietly into his room and sat on the edge of his bed. And there she had remained, just sitting, for what seemed like ages. Was she hoping he’d wake up and talk to her? Or was she just looking at him, thinking troubled or tender things? Just being a mom?

  At last she had risen, pulled the covers up around his shoulders, and kissed him very gently on the forehead. Reuben had felt a knot in his throat, and it took everything in him not to open his eyes and speak to her. Afterward he had lain awake for a long time, staring into darkness.

  It was time. His mom had to leave now or she’d be late for work. Reuben rolled out of bed and walked into the living room, making a show of yawning and rubbing his eyes. His mom was putting her bags over her shoulders. She set them down again and gave him a big squeeze.

  “You have fun,” she ordered, and reminded him of his promise to call her each night.

  “I will,” Reuben said. “You have fun, too.”

  His mom rolled her eyes. “Oh, I’ll have a grand time, I’m sure.” She kissed him and went out.

  Reuben locked the door behind her and went to his bedroom closet. In case his mom checked his backpack, he hadn’t put the wooden box in yet. Now he took it from its hiding place, still in its bundle, and wrapped it up in his windbreaker, which he stuffed deep inside the backpack. The watch and key he would keep in his sweatshirt pocket, ready to use.

  Queasy with nerves, he forced himself to eat breakfast. He might need every ounce of energy. He took the fastest shower of his life, for it made him very ill at ease not to have the watch on him at all times, and as soon as he’d dried off, he made sure the watch was fully wound and set precisely to twelve o’clock. He had developed an abiding dread of the hour hand getting nudged out of position unbeknownst to him. He had nightmares of finding himself in a dangerous situation, discovering too late that the time wasn’t properly set.

  But the watch was fully wound; the hour hand was in precise position. He was ready.

  Reuben got dressed, shouldered the backpack, and went out.

  Yesterday he had spent the better part of an hour studying subway maps and train schedules, making sure of his route. To his dismay, however, he arrived at the Lower Downs subway station to discover that the line he needed was closed due to track repair.

  The morning was unseasonably cool, but standing before the faded map on the station wall, jostled by early commuters who seemed to resent his backpack, Reuben started to sweat. He had to get to the Grand Avenue station, the city’s central terminal, where he could purchase a train ticket to Point William. The route he’d planned would have been very straightforward. But now, because of the closed line, he had to take a more complicated one that involved changing trains twice—and the first change would be at the Brighton Street station.

  Reuben studied the map intently, hoping he was wrong. But no, any other route would take him halfway around the city, a longer trip by far, and he might miss the train to Point William. There wouldn’t be another until evening, and arriving in a strange town after dark was too daunting, too scary even to contemplate. And so Reuben memorized the new route, bought his ticket, and headed warily down to the platform.

  It was rush hour. The Lower Downs subway commuters stood shoulder to shoulder in their work clothes, carrying their secondhand briefcases and purses and satchels, smelling of harsh soap,
cheap aftershave, cheap lotions and perfumes. Some stared sleepily ahead; one or two were reading. Reuben squeezed in among the masses, and when the train came, he squeezed through its doors along with all the others.

  Only after he was on the train did he notice the Directions in his car. Frontman and the others, on their way to the Counselor’s mansion, where they would deliver their reports and their envelopes, receive their wages, and no doubt discuss the boy they’d been seeking without success in Middleton. They stood near the doors, hanging on to straps. They were the only passengers not pressed against anyone—people were giving them room. The four men chatted idly with one another, but even on the subway train they kept up their habit of surveying the area around them. Reuben, peeking out through a tangle of adult arms and shoulders, would be hard to spot. And yet.

  Only after he was on the train did he notice the Directions in his car.

  He was supposed to get off at the Brighton Street station. What if they saw him, a boy fitting the description of the one they sought, disembarking in precisely the neighborhood they had been searching? Inside his sweatshirt pocket, Reuben’s fingers squeezed the watch key.

  Don’t fiddle with it! he scolded himself. Did he want to accidentally vanish in the middle of all these people? A young boy disappearing into thin air would cause a panic. It would certainly get the Directions’ attention. And where would he escape to? The car was so jam-packed he could scarcely move.

  Reuben quickly tried to calculate a different plan. Nothing worked. He could skip the Brighton Street station, but to no good purpose—the next few stations were also in Middleton. The one after that was in Westmont, but that was the neighborhood in which the Counselor’s mansion was located, and he dared not risk getting off at the same stop as the Directions. Besides, most of the commuters worked in Middleton and would be getting off soon. What if he found himself alone in the car with the Directions?