When Adam didn’t even bother to answer, Logan’s knot got a little bigger. He looked at his watch. “I don’t really have time to go to Alex’s house. I’ve got to be home in an hour.”
“That’s okay. Like you said, I don’t really need to be there. We can head to your place instead.”
Logan just shrugged.
• • • • •
The heat made waves off the street pavement in front of Logan’s trailer. It always seemed to him like it was hotter here than anywhere else in town. Except in the winter, of course. Then it was colder.
No one was talking much as they trailed up the gravel parking space, and Logan kicked one of Sam’s WWE action figures off the door step with a little more force than was strictly necessary.
“Ah! Ow!”
Logan didn’t see how the little plastic guy could have hit Adam or why it would hurt badly enough to make him yell, so he turned with a little snarl of irritation. Adam was twisting strangely, trying to pull his backpack off his shoulders.
“What’s wrong, Adam?” Alex was the closest, and she grabbed the backpack just as he dropped it. “Oh! Whoa. What is that?”
Everyone could see it now. Adam’s backpack was jerking around on the ground where Alex had dropped it. It looked like something was alive in there and was trying to get out. Eve took several steps back.
“No way!” Adam suddenly leaped forward and unzipped the pack. “It’s the statue!” The little stone bunny hopped out and took a big leap away from Logan’s trailer. Dominic stepped in front of it, and its next leap took it right into him. He picked it up. It was clearly vibrating in his hands.
They all gathered close.
“It’s still trying to jump away,” said Dominic.
“That is too weird,” said Eve. “I thought they were only supposed to move when no one was looking.”
“I guess it changed its mind,” said Adam.
“I told you we didn’t know anything about it,” Logan hissed.
“Hey there, neighbor. Another meeting of the book club?” Candace was standing in the door to her trailer, just a couple of feet from where they were huddled.
Logan wondered if she had noticed the bunny. He stepped away from the others. “Just hanging out. My mom’s got to be at work soon, so we’re stuck back here again.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Adam slowly raising the backpack over the bunny in Dominic’s hands.
“You know you’re the only one stuck here,” said Eve, intentionally walking in front of where the others were trying to hide the twitching bag. “The rest of us are here because we want to be.” She turned her brightest smile on Candace. “Seriously, if you met my mom, you’d know that this place is like the most peaceful place on earth to me. Are you headed to work now, too? Logan said you were working at the same place as his mom.”
“Yeah, I am. Working there, I mean. Donna is great, and she helped me get a place. I’m on the graveyard now though, so I don’t go in until 11.”
“That sucks,” said Eve. “I’ve always wondered how people can stand working all night like that. Shouldn’t you be sleeping right now? Did we wake you up?”
Logan silently saluted Eve’s ability to make small talk as Adam put his backpack on again and leaned not-so-casually against the trailer in an attempt to hold it still. From the look on Adam’s face, Logan suspected that the statue was steadily punching him in the back. The thought was more than a little satisfying, and the satisfaction made him feel more than a little guilty.
“No, I always get up about now,” Candace was saying. “I sleep for a few hours, but if I don’t get up and have some time to myself I go crazy. When I saw ya’ll coming in, I was just having my breakfast.” She waved the can of Pepsi in her hand.
Eve laughed and just barely managed to make it sound natural. Fortunately, at that moment, Logan’s mom opened the door behind him.
“Oh good. That is your voice I heard out here. I’m so glad you’re here early,” she said. “I just got a call that Mr. Selves wants to see me before the shift. I’ll need to head out soon if I’m going to make it.”
“That sounds like good news, Donna,” bubbled Candace. “You think he’s going to talk to you about that promotion?”
“He didn’t say,” said Mrs. Talbott neutrally, but then she tossed off a little grin. “But I think tonight might actually call for a little makeup before work.”
She went back inside, closing the door behind her. Logan kept his eyes down. If anyone was laughing to themselves about that embarrassing little scene, he didn’t want to see it.
“Sounds like that’s a hint to us to take over with the kids,” said Eve brightly. “Good to see you again, Candace.”
Logan seized the excuse to wrench open the door and would have led the way inside if he hadn’t seen Adam’s pained face out of the corner of his eye. He stepped aside and let Adam stumble up the step as quickly as possible, Alex right on his heels to cover the lurching of the backpack. Logan was just following them when he heard Candace call out.
“Wait! I think you dropped something.”
To his horror, Logan saw that she was holding up a copy of the Book of Beginnings. Adam’s book must have gotten knocked out in the chaos with the statue.
Thinking quickly as usual, Eve stepped over. “Oh thanks! Must have fallen out of my bag.” She reached out for the book, but Candace was already opening it curiously.
“So…this must be the book of old stories I keep hearing about…”
“Yeah,” said Eve. “It’s just…” Her second attempt to grab the book was foiled when Candace sat down on her step. The book had fallen open to a random page, and Candace was looking at it in her lap.
They all watched, frozen.
“You guys know this makes no sense, don’t you?” Candace looked up at them, then cocked her head to the side suspiciously. “You do know. I should have known. This is one of those practical joke things. Or…oh…this is the ‘book’ for your ‘book club.’”
They all tried to summon smiles.
“I guess I’ll have to take this book away and tell your parents that all this ‘book club’ isn’t doing much reading. That would be the grown-up thing to do.” Candace stood up and carried the book inside her trailer without another word.
For a second everyone just stared at the spot where she had disappeared. Then she popped her head back out the door, grinning mischievously. “I always hate grown-up things to do.” She tossed the book out to Eve, who just managed to catch it, bending half the pages in the process. “My lips are sealed, so you can get rid of those terrified faces and go have some fun.” With a little wave, Candace closed her door.
Eve rounded on the rest of them, the Book of Beginnings clenched tightly in her hand.
Before she could say anything, Dominic shook his head. “Inside. Let’s all just go inside.”
Inside the trailer, Adam put his backpack on the lumpy couch and sat on it. “It’s calming down, I think,” he said with a wince as it poked him in the butt.
“What’s calming down?” asked Darcy, stalking into the room with her usual attitude.
“The itching,” said Eve smoothly. “Adam has poison ivy. I wouldn’t get too close to him. I hear it’s catching.”
Darcy raised both eyebrows and stepped back to sit at the table. “Why did he come here, then?”
“Darcy!” Logan warned.
“I’m just saying.”
“It’s okay,” said Adam. “It’s only contagious if someone touches the spots. Mine are mostly on my stomach, so it’s no big deal.”
Logan wondered if he knew anything about poison ivy or if he was just making it all up. Either way, Darcy was convinced enough to lose interest. Besides, she’d noticed something else to be nosy about.
“Hey, what happened to your old book, Logan?”
Eve had set the book on the table, and the bent pages made the cover stand up a bit. Logan snatched it up just before Darcy did. “Nothing. I just dropped it.”
“Geesh. Touchy much?”
Logan didn’t bother to reply. He just turned and shoved Adam’s book into his own backpack out of sight, pointedly zipping it shut.
Characteristically, Darcy rolled her eyes, but instead of arguing, she turned to Eve and began asking her opinion on some vital issue called “bangs or no bangs.” In no time, she had dragged Eve and Alex down the hall to look at some magazines she kept in her room. Logan pitied them, but he was too relieved to interfere. A few minutes later, his mom left.
Adam wasted no time. He jumped up off the backpack, which really had settled down to minor twitching but still couldn’t have made for a comfortable seat. “What are we going to do with this thing?”
“Well, we took it to follow it,” said Dominic. “Maybe we just need to do that sooner than we thought.”
“If we even can,” Adam said. “That thing has gone crazy. If we let it go, it may just take off down the street faster than we can follow it.”
“So we get our bikes first,” Dominic answered. “We take it out away from people and we don’t let it go until we’re ready for anything.”
“For anything?” Logan asked. “We don’t know anything about this old lady who gave it to us, but we do know that we have some kind of enemy out there. What if this whole thing is a setup and that statue leads you right into some kind of trap?”
“It could happen,” said Adam. “But we can’t know that unless we follow it. We have to at least try.”
“Why?”
“Because…” For once it was Adam who was at a loss for words. “I guess we don’t HAVE to follow it, but aren’t you curious about it? Do you really think we should just let it go or give it back or whatever and forget about it? It could be another clue to who sent us the books or to who this enemy is or something else just as useful.”
“I just don’t think it’s smart to blindly go after something that we don’t understand.”
“We don’t understand any of this!”
At that moment, Sam came into the room, his box of Legos under his arm. It soon became clear that he had planned for all the big boys to help him make a space station and he wasn’t going to be talked out of his plan. A half hour or so of sorting blocks and designing landing strips and the ships to go with them eased the tension in the room.
When the girls finally emerged from the back, they all agreed on a movie. Even with that distraction it was impossible to talk about any of the days events. Adam’s backpack had been wedged behind the couch, and the younger kids didn’t seem to notice it, but Darcy had super-hearing and would jump right in with nosy questions anytime two of them tried to have a private conversation.
In the end, the best they could do was to casually agree to meet at the usual spot first thing in the morning to figure out what to do for the day. Adam slipped his now-quiet backpack from its hiding spot and gave it a significant look as he wished them all a good night. It was a while after Adam left that Logan remembered the book. Adam’s bent-up copy was still in Logan’s backpack.
• • • • •
When the kids were in bed, Logan sat at the table straightening the pages of Adam’s book. He did his best to unbend and smooth over, but the crease was still obvious on every page. It made Logan sad to think that a book that had somehow survived in perfect condition for so many years (in spite of being stolen by an eight-legged monster and tossed onto a pile of mostly destroyed reading material and then recovered by a group of clueless teenagers and hauled back across an underground river) would now be damaged by something so harmless as a careless neighbor.
As he carefully unbent the last page, something caught Logan’s eye. Lines. Opening it fully, he stared in amazement. Instead of words, the last page of the book in his hands had a picture. More accurately, it seemed to be a map.
Logan knew he had never seen a map in the back of the Book of Sight. Had something new been unlocked somehow?
As quickly as he could, he fumbled through his backpack for his own copy of the book. Yanking it open to the last page, he saw nothing. Well, more nonsense words as always, but definitely no map. He looked back at Adam’s book. The map was as plain as day.
Logan sat very still for several minutes. Then he picked up the map and began to examine it. There were a few of what looked like roads drawn in along the left edge. At least, they were fairly straight lines and labeled with numbers like state roads often are. Most of the map seemed to show mountains. There were a few trails marked, but most of the labeled parts were landmarks: Forked Tree, Finger Rock, Percy’s Falls, and a bunch more symbols with no labels. There was a little key in the corner, with a compass giving the confusing information that down was north. Under that, in very small letters was a poem.
To find the answers that you seek
Your lonely journey here begins
Mark your path among the peaks
One alone may enter in
The poem ended with a very small mark that looked something like a fork.
Logan’s mind raced. Could this map be saying what it sounded like it was saying? Was it actually showing him where to go for answers? It seemed a little too easy. If that road marked 14 was actually State Route 14, then this map showed the mountains right outside of Dunmore. He could hardly wait to tell the others.
Then a very small but very deadly thought occurred to him. Was this news to all of them?
Why was the map in Adam’s book but not in Logan’s? More importantly, had it just now become clear or had it been there all along? There was no real reason to believe that it wouldn’t have always been there just as plain as plain. Logan tried to remember if he had ever looked in Adam’s book before. He didn’t think he had. How long had Adam known about this map?
Suddenly the last line in the poem stood out to him. One alone may enter in. That obviously meant that the answers could only be uncovered by one person. They couldn’t all go together.
There was no more doubt in Logan’s mind. Adam knew about the map. He knew where to go for answers. He hadn’t told anyone else because he wanted to be the one alone who found the spot. He was probably just waiting for a good excuse to disappear up into the mountains for a few days.
Logan was angry. No, he was furious. He couldn’t believe after all they’d been through together that Adam would keep something this big from them all. He should know better. He had tried things on his own before, and once it had almost gotten them all killed. Logan wasn’t going to let him get away with something like that again. He would show everyone the map in the morning and then Adam could try explaining himself to the whole group.
10
Following Medusa
No matter how much Adam’s mind told his stomach there was nothing to worry about, the sick feeling would not go away. He had imagined the whole conversation with the group from beginning to end at least eight times, and every time it was calm and reasonable and everyone understood. Still, all it took was the feeling of his backpack hanging empty on his shoulders to make his stomach tie itself up again. It was a relief to finally arrive at the Redoubt.
Only Eve and Alex were waiting, and they were deep in conversation and didn’t even look up as he approached.
“I’m just saying that she already seems to know a lot and she’s really interested. What could it hurt to just try showing it to her?”
“Chances are it would just be James all over again. If she tries and can’t understand it, it will only give her more reason to make Logan’s life miserable. He has to live with her.”
“I know, but I really don’t think she would be like that. I’ve spent a lot of time with her. She’s not like that when we’re doing stuff together. I think she mostly acts that way because she feels left out of stuff.”
“I get that, but Logan doesn’t. He’s not going to be okay with us showing her, and I’m just saying that we can’t do it if he doesn’t want to. It’s his family, his life.”
“Are you guys talking about Logan’s sister?”<
br />
They didn’t exactly look guilty, but it was pretty clear that they hadn’t noticed him standing there. “Oh! Hey Adam! Didn’t hear you come up.” Eve’s smile was a bit too bright.
“Were you talking about showing Logan’s sister the book?”
“It was just an idea I had,” said Eve. “We were just talking about it.”
“You really think she’s ready for that?”
“I don’t know,” said Eve. “I mean, yeah, I really do. But I wasn’t trying to say that I know better than everyone else.”
“You know you have to talk to Logan before you do anything like that.”
“I know, I know. We would all talk about it. I was just seeing what Alex thought first. You know, if I should even bring it up to…everyone.”
Just then Adam spotted Logan walking through the high grass towards them. The look on Logan’s face made Adam remember his empty pack. The sick feeling was back. “Today might not be the best time. There’s…um…other stuff we have to deal with today.”
Eve looked at him curiously. He looked away. Everyone wasn’t there yet. He only wanted to tell this story one time.
Logan strode into the circle of trees like a man on a mission. He didn’t look like himself at all. Normally he barely made eye contact with anyone. Today, his stare was direct and challenging. Adam was still trying to decide if he should ignore it or ask what was up when he heard Dominic come up behind him.
“Everyone’s here. Good. We’ve got a lot to decide.”
“Before we do that, there’s something else we need to talk about,” said Logan.
Adam wanted so badly to grasp at Logan’s distraction and delay the moment of truth, but he knew his stomach couldn’t take much more. “Actually, there’s something I need to tell you guys. It kind of changes things, so I’d better not wait.”
Logan clearly did not like being interrupted. “I think this needs to go first.”
The Broken Circle (The Book of Sight 2) Page 12
