Legacy of Secrets

by Ridley Pearson

  She shook her head, reprimanding herself. This was no time to complain; the Keepers worked well as a team, which meant that sometimes you got the funky jobs. She inspected each and every object on Roy’s desk, looking for ways a pen might be concealed. The three framed photos offered her nothing. Nor the star-filled hemisphere of polished, clear glass that served as a paperweight. The two pens in plain sight were in a little stand, which held them like rabbit ears at the top of a leather blotter.

  Next was a group of a half-dozen awards, several of them gold statuettes on a wooden stand. She picked up each one, studying them from all sides, including the bottom, looking for clever Walt Disney hiding places.

  “Guys!” she called out, holding a heavy Academy Award in her hand. The gold-plated statuette was of a rigid man, his arms crossed. Finn and Maybeck joined her. She pointed to a small cork in the award’s stand. “Look,” she said, hoisting a second, similar award. Only the first had the cork in the bottom.

  “That doesn’t look big enough for a pen,” said Finn, “but it does look like it was added.”

  “Do either of you feel like a criminal digging around in Roy Disney’s stuff? Roy Disney, as in the Roy Disney. Criminal, as in definitely breaking the law.”

  Maybeck picked at the cork and caught its edge. “We can argue about how we shouldn’t have done this later.” He pulled the cork free. No pen fell out.

  “Okay,” Willa said. “No pen. We plug it back up and mind our own business.”

  Maybeck shook his head. Using a long, tapered pen from the desk stand, he poked into the drilled hole. What looked like a tightly rolled dollar bill fell out onto the desk, along with a few flakes of sawdust.

  The three kids stared at the money. Maybeck put his eye to the hole. “Empty.”

  “What do you suppose…?” Finn unrolled what he now saw was half of a twenty-dollar bill. It had been torn neatly down the center. Its orange serial number was printed beneath an orange wreath. Gray engraved words identified it as a Gold Certificate. The back of the bill was printed in vivid green ink.

  “Bizarre,” Finn said. “Maybeck, can you memorize that serial number?” The best artist in the group, Maybeck also enjoyed something of a photographic memory.

  He took a long moment to do so, then nodded. “Got it.”

  “Some kind of code. A partnership. Someone else has the other half,” Willa theorized.

  “But why, and who, and is Roy hiding it or leaving it for someone?” Finn said.

  “Nothing written on it,” Willa observed.

  “And nothing left inside,” Maybeck said, checking again.

  “We’ve got to put it back,” Finn said.

  “Because? You don’t actually expect he checks it very often, do you?” Maybeck sounded as if he’d already decided to keep it.

  “We put it back,” Finn declared. “Maybeck, you’re sure you have the number?”

  “Got it.”

  “Back to work,” Willa said, sighing. The boys moved off, and she studied the other awards and oddities on the big desk.

  The other trophies and pieces of art were gifts from business groups; their engravings mentioned Roy, not the Disney company. One, smaller than the others, caught her eye. It was a brass or copper coin embedded in thick glass, a fortune-teller’s face on one side, “To Absent Friends” stamped into the metal on the reverse. There was no plaque. Another award or trophy showed a glass ballerina rising out of a glass pond, her back arched, her face aimed heavenward. On the shelves, Willa found a hole-in-one golfing award, a curled ballet shoe, a framed ticket to the Bolshoi Ballet, and another to the Opera House in Paris. No pen, and very few items that could hide one.

  The boys fared no better. Finn found a half-dozen pens in the desk drawers, including a new fountain pen still in the box. It had no engraving on its side and its mechanics were perfectly clean, suggesting it had yet to see ink.

  “Strange,” Willa said, “how you can form a picture of someone based only on his stuff. He golfs. He likes ballet. Opera. He’s been generous to the city and the businesspeople.”

  “He was a heck of a businessman,” Maybeck said.

  “Is, you mean,” Finn corrected.

  “Yeah…still hard to get used to that.”

  The door popped open. “Security coming.” It was Philby. “To the bathrooms. Now!”

  Finn, Willa, and Maybeck tidied up and hurried out of the office. In the hallway, they saw a shadow looming, projected at the top of the stairs.

  “Stalls. Standing on the seats,” Philby whispered. “Leave the doors partially open. Charlie’s already in.”

  The boys took three of the four toilet stalls. Finn climbed onto the fixture and leaned against the cool metal barrier, the stall door between him and the line of sinks and mirror.

  “Hello?” a man’s low voice called out. “Security check.” He switched off the light. The restroom went darkroom black. Finn released a pent-up breath. He heard knocking. The Minnies’ room. The guard announced himself. Then, nothing. He’d moved on.

  “What…now?” Maybeck whispered. “Or are we going to stand here all night?”

  The lights came on. “Hello?” A man’s voice. “I heard you talking just now, whoever you are. Unless you were talking to yourself, then there are two of you. Maybe more. Now, I don’t know why you’re not answering, and maybe it’s none of my business. But we’re closing up Animation in fifteen minutes and I’m making the rounds so as no one comes crying that they need more time, and no one calls telling us we locked them inside. Hello? Can you answer me, please?” He paused. “I’m not trying to interrupt nothing. I’ll just wait outside then. We can talk about this in a minute.”

  “You sure it wasn’t us you heard?” Charlene’s voice.

  Finn couldn’t see what happened next, but it sounded as if the guard said, “Girls?” The door thumped shut on its springs.

  “Go!” Philby said.

  The three boys each stole a look out of their stalls: no guard. They rushed to the door. Philby swung it open and stuck his head out. “He’s going the way we came. The girls bailed us out.”

  The three boys dashed into the hall and faced in the opposite direction. “This is the way the boys went,” Philby whispered.

  “What boys?” Finn asked, confused.

  “Don’t look now,” Philby said, pointing, “but I think we’re about to find out.”

  Three boys emerged from an office down the hallway. They were all dressed identically, in khakis and short-sleeved white shirts. They looked at the Keepers; the Keepers looked back. A brass badge was pinned to all three of their shirts: a Disneyland Cast Member number badge.

  The race began.

  FOR ONCE, FINN REALIZED, it was not the Keepers being chased, but the Keepers doing the chasing. More confusing still: Why were the Cast Members the ones fleeing? It had to have something to do with the papers one of the boys was holding, he thought. The papers, and the office they’d come out of.

  The boys were fast and hard to keep up with, much less catch. They bounded down the stairs, followed a second later by the three Keepers. But it was a long second and a great distance. By the time the Keepers threw open the glass door to the outside, the boys had turned and were waiting for them. The paperwork was nowhere to be seen—shoved up a shirt or discarded in the bushes.

  All six boys were winded and labored for air. They stood ten yards apart, saying nothing with their voices and everything with their eyes. Decision time. Clearly neither group knew exactly what to do.

  “Numbers,” Philby half-whispered to Maybeck. “Pins.”

  Maybeck nodded, face screwed up and focused. He’d already started memorizing.

  Philby called out to the boys. Finn realized it was in an effort to turn them so that their badges could be read more easily. “Who are you?”

  “We’re not the ones trespassing,” said a boy with no eyebrows. He might have been wearing a wig. His face indicated a moment of consideration; he was debating his op
tions. “S…E…C…U…R…I…T…Y!”

  The Keepers took off, entering the same narrow alley they’d followed to get in. The girls were visible in silhouette at the far end, waiting. They took off the moment they saw the boys.

  “Did you get them?” Philby said as he ran alongside Maybeck. He sounded surprisingly calm.

  “Two. I got two.”

  “Excellent,” said the professor.

  “Who were those guys?” Finn asked, at a full run to keep up.

  “Trouble,” Philby answered. “Those guys are trouble.”

  “NOW I KNOW HOW Cinderella felt,” said Charlene.

  It made sense. She was arguably the closest thing the Keepers had to a Cinderella.

  The group had fallen asleep with beating hearts and awakened as two-dimensional projections once more. Having returned from the harrowing night in the studios, they had elected to spend the night in the Opera House in Town Square, rather than risk wild pig and wolf attacks in the teepees. The Opera House wasn’t actually an opera house, but a warehouse full of lumber. The air held the sweet scent of pine and redwood, like camping at the edge of a lake.

  “Wayne and I will try to figure out how any of this is possible,” Philby said.

  “I wouldn’t try too hard,” said Willa, coming awake on a bed made of bags of peat moss. “When the baseline of a theory happens to be time travel, it isn’t likely to make much sense. I think it’s way smarter if we just accept and learn to work with the fact that we’re going to turn mortal about two hours after the park closes each night. As weird as it is, as nonsensical, that’s what seems to be the case. Better to take advantage of it.”

  “I want to find those three guys and debrief them,” said Maybeck, referring to the Cast Members—presumably fake—they’d seen the night before.

  “They were after today’s schedule that includes the big shindig tonight at the Golden Horseshoe,” Charlene said. “Opening Day for the public. It’s going to be huge. Their poking around can’t be good.”

  Finn sat up on the drop cloth he’d laid atop a pile of sawdust and called the Keepers into a tighter circle. They needed to keep their voices down. “Maybeck, Charlene, and I will search Roy’s office on Main Street for the pen. Philby and Willa, you figure out Wayne’s transmission and work out a way to return us.”

  Philby stared down Finn. “We have to remember, it’s always been me, manually taking control of the Imagineers’ DHI server in order to return us. It’s totally different now. One: I’ve never done it from a phone, always from a laptop with more power. Two: our phones don’t happen to work in 1955, and the personal computer won’t be invented for thirty years.”

  “Philby, you and Wayne and I will figure this out,” Willa insisted, somewhat weakly. “We need to see how Wayne managed to project us in the first place and work from there. Don’t worry, guys. We’re going to find Walt’s pen and get it back where it belongs.”

  Finn felt he belonged in the future—his future. He missed Amanda. They had the ability to solve huge problems together. With half of the equation absent, the chance of any such solutions lessened. He could picture her face, her smile, her laugh. He missed her laugh most of all.

  REACHING ROY’S OFFICE in the park required Finn, Charlene, and Maybeck to travel backstage from the Opera House woodshop to a set of stairs leading up above the Main Street Cinema. Maybeck and his choice of a business suit and hat stood out backstage, particularly as the only African Americans in the park seemed to be workers or Cast Members dressed as Indians.

  Finn, in coat and tie, and Charlene, who wore a pretty cream dress, looked like Opening Day guests, but hardly had the right appearance to be backstage Cast Members. For these reasons, and the fact that they were two-dimensional projections, the three stayed away from each other. Out ahead of the other two, Finn led the way. Using the construction chaos in an area that would one day be a parking lot, he kept to the walls at the back of the Main Street shops. Maybeck followed, and, a few seconds later, Charlene.

  They’d agreed on a common story to tell if questioned: they’d wandered backstage by accident, but, finding themselves there, were hoping for a bird’s-eye view of Main Street and the castle.

  Finn reached the fourth door—the one Wayne had told them to use—and ducked inside. Backstage lacked the paint and polish of the working park; it was all rough wood, with a few bare bulbs lighting the way. He waited for Maybeck and Charlene to catch up.

  “All good?” he whispered. But he could answer for himself. All was not good. There was some kind of interference in this building; their projections were sparking and fuzzy.

  Charlene held out her long arm and waved her thin fingers. “Kind of wonky, if you ask me.”

  “We should hurry,” Maybeck said. “If we get caught when we’re this unstable…” He didn’t need to finish his thought.

  Finn took off up the stairs, keeping an eye on his own hands and arms. The higher he climbed, the more his image deteriorated. Not good, he thought. The stairs led to a hallway, which ran a short distance in both directions. It was no more charming than the stairwell. The doors were unmarked. Finn stepped his projection through the first and looked around—it was clearly tool storage. He walked back through the door and rejoined the others.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Tools.”

  Charlene leaned only the head and shoulders of her projection through the next locked door. When she stepped fully inside, Finn and Maybeck followed, their projections crisp and sharp once again.

  The room was a spare office, carpeted with a simple desk and chair, a telephone, and a desk lamp. Attached to the side of the desk was a crank-driven pencil sharpener. Several Disneyland posters were thumbtacked to the wall. The room’s two small windows looked out beneath an awning onto Main Street’s Crystal Arcade.

  “This has to be it,” Maybeck said. He gestured at the view. “It looks across at a window marked ‘Elias Disney: Contractor.’ Walt and Roy’s father. How cool is that?”

  Together, the three searched the desk. They found a rubber-banded bundle of #2 yellow pencils, opera glasses, a paper punch, a stapler, some paper clips, a leather-bound checkbook, and several cardboard-covered ledger books with pages and pages of carefully written numbers. They found letters, blank stationery, an address book, and postage stamps. In the lower desk drawer, Roy Disney had a stash of yellow-and-red bags of Fritos and two bags of potato chips.

  “Junk food,” Maybeck said. “I’m liking Roy.”

  “No pen,” Charlene said disappointedly. “I mean there are three pens, but they’re all Reynolds Rockets, all ballpoints. No fountain pens.”

  “This is getting frustrating,” Maybeck said.

  “‘Getting’?” Charlene raised an eyebrow. “What planet are you on?”

  “Not sure,” Maybeck said. The three laughed together.

  A sharp knock on the office door startled them.

  “Mr. Disney? You in there?”

  A man’s gruff, low voice. The Keepers hurried to stand behind the door should it swing open, their backs against the plaster wall.

  Another knock.

  “Sir?”

  The doorknob rattled, but the door was locked. All three expected to hear a key being inserted and the doorknob turning. If they timed it right, they could simply step their projections through the wall.

  But thankfully, it didn’t happen. There was a protracted silence; it seemed the man had moved on. Charlene tried to elbow Finn, but her elbow went through his image’s side. Still, she won his attention and pointed straight ahead.

  At first, Finn saw only the office window. Why would Charlene point it out? he wondered. Then his vision shifted, and he looked through instead of at the glass. Across the street, inside a set of bay windows that carried the name ELIAS DISNEY at the center, there was movement.

  Charlene, the first to venture forward, led the way past Roy’s desk, keeping to one side of the windows. “Oh my gosh!” she said. “I think it’s them.”
r />   The boys rushed to her side, also avoiding being seen through the window.

  “Sure looks like it!” Maybeck said. “Or, if it isn’t…Nah, I’m not so sure it is.”

  “Do you recognize the second from the left?” Charlene asked.

  “Maybe,” Maybeck said. “It’s hard from this distance.”

  “Who’s that they’re talking to?” Finn asked, squinting.

  “Can’t see. It’s a guy in a business suit? He’s got a hat like yours,” Charlene said to Maybeck, who moved quickly back to the desk.

  “Look,” Charlene said. She reached down for a small, gummed notepad on the windowsill. Someone had been standing at this window, taking notes. Her projected fingers passed through it, unable to grab hold.

  The note was a series of numbers—4, 157, 323, 54, 204—and the initials SR.

  “Check it out,” Maybeck said. He’d gotten the opera glasses from the desk drawer. Lifting the small binoculars to his eyes, he muttered a string of curses.

  “What?” Charlene asked.

  “The numbers on the pad are badge numbers. Badges 162 and 51 are over there now. Roy was keeping track of who was meeting in that office.”

  “So the other numbers are other Cast Members?” Charlene inquired, bending low as she crossed back to Roy’s desk. “That makes sense!” She concentrated and was able to pick up a sharpened pencil.

  “There’s another…” Maybeck said. “Eighty.”

  “Eight-zero,” Charlene said as she wrote it down.

  “Correct. If the guy would turn his head…but he’s in the dark and his back is to us.”

  “SR,” Finn said. “Roy wrote down the initials…of what?”

  “Hang on!” Maybeck muttered. “I think they’ve spotted us.”

  One of the Cast Members in the center window was pointing directly at them. Maybeck was already setting down the binoculars when Finn saw the adult in the room also turn, his face cast in half shadow. The man pulled the curtains. Finn tried to imprint the image of his face, an attempt clouded by two of the boys taking off at a run.