Legacy of Secrets

by Ridley Pearson

  “You need glasses.”

  “No doubt. So, let’s say Dillard was trying to lead us here.”

  “Dillard was trying to lead us here.”

  “Ha-ha. Now what?” Amanda inquired.

  “First, we lose these two behind us. We’ll go inside through different doors. We get lost in there and meet in the children’s library in ten minutes.”

  “There’s a children’s library?”

  “There’s always a children’s library.”

  “Show-off.”

  The girls separated. They did so at the exact same moment without any signal. Such understanding had developed and grown between them, their souls braided.

  For Amanda, Dillard’s quest meant everything. It arose out of Finn’s carving their initials into the window jamb, a message intended for her.

  “To reach them you must follow them,” Dillard had said. She assumed he was speaking metaphorically—to reach, as in “reach for,” not “to touch or grasp.” She would have liked to touch Finn’s hand or kiss him. Just thinking about it made her blush.

  Of course, she was nearly certain Wayne had no such intentions in mind. He wanted her to be able to communicate with Finn in the past: he wanted to warn the Keepers about something Amanda had no knowledge of. Not yet, anyway.

  The cute girl in leggings followed Amanda at a comfortable distance. She was good at it; tailing someone was clearly not new to her. Amanda made no eye contact; in fact, she barely looked in her direction. Knowing she was being followed was enough. Losing her would require a combination of confusion, disguise, and misdirection, tools Amanda had been using since her escape from Barracks 14.

  Disguise was the most difficult part. It required her to comb the reading areas for abandoned items; people often left a scarf or hoodie over a chair to save it while they searched the stacks. Amanda borrowed a Dodgers baseball cap and an atrocious tie-dyed shawl on the fly. She did so before her tail entered, and kept the items bundled at her waist to avoid them being seen. Then it was only a matter of racing up a flight of stairs—catching her tail by surprise, no doubt—and hurrying through an exhibition on polar bears and out the other side before descending a different set of stairs. She moved down a long hall fluidly, like a dancer, and ducked into a closing elevator, stepping into the back to avoid being too obvious. The doors slid shut. Amanda put on the hat and slung the shawl around her shoulders.

  When they met up, Jess had on a headscarf wrapped like a hijab. She looked gorgeous, Amanda thought; no big surprise. Jess had a way of transforming her look with the slightest alteration. A change in lipstick could make her nearly unidentifiable, a rare and lucky quality.

  “I was just asking Ms….”

  “Fabicon. Joanna Fabicon.” The children’s librarian was a round-faced woman in her early twenties with perfect, full eyebrows and a huge smile. Jess immediately felt comfortable with her. Her thin dark hair was long, brushing against her necklace of gold leaves.

  “…if they have a book on Lucretius.”

  “And I was telling your friend: not per se. But the general collection includes many reference works that would include bibliographical data on the author.”

  “It’s the quote on the tower, in particular,” Amanda said.

  “Yes. Professor Alexander’s theme of light and knowledge was beautifully chosen.” Joanna would have made a good teacher, Jess thought. She had no airs about her. “The quote from Lucretius is such a great starting point for the theme.”

  “Starting point?” Jess asked.

  “Well, yes! Have you seen the Hope Street quotation?”

  “I don’t think so,” Amanda said.

  “‘A lamp to my feet…a light to my paths.’ At various points on the building, Professor Alexander placed symbols that emphasize the themes of light and knowledge.”

  “The truth,” Jess whispered.

  “Interesting way to put it, but yes, I suppose.” The librarian’s oversize smile took over her face.

  “Professor Alexander?” Amanda said.

  “One of the designers of the original building. Included on the tower are representations of eight forward thinkers and writers of the time, each of whom contributed to the theme of light and learning. Professor Alexander called them his Seers of Light. We have a tour, if you’d like?”

  As the words sunk in, Amanda knew what it had felt like to be Finn, facing the Stonecutter’s Quill. This woman’s explanation felt so much like something Walt or Wayne would invent; a puzzle too difficult and challenging for the boneheaded Overtakers to piece together, but just solvable enough for the Keepers.

  “Is there anything written by him, the professor?” Jess asked.

  “Let me think…” Joanna turned in her seat to face her computer. “There’s the original guidebook from 1927. It’s in our rare books collection on the third floor. Professor Alexander wrote an essay for it. Does that interest you?”

  “That’s perfect!” Amanda said. “Do we need an appointment or anything?”

  “You do, as a matter of fact. But you’ve come to the right place. I’m connected.” Joanna winked and placed a phone call. “You’re in. Ask for Mallory.”

  The girls thanked her.

  “We should split up again,” Amanda proposed.

  “Good idea.”

  “Five minutes?”

  “See you there.”

  LITTLE MISS SKINNY LEGS was getting annoying. She hadn’t identified Amanda’s disguise yet, but she kept showing up anyway, like a mosquito around the campfire. Amanda could not risk leading her to the rare books room.

  So she did what she had to do: she tailed her. It was like following a dog who could smell barbecue in the neighborhood, but was either too dumb or too easily distracted to hone in on it.

  Amanda moved fast, not wanting to keep Jess waiting. Without looking at the title, she snatched a book from a shelf. Pulling her hat down tightly, she moved with agility and speed toward the girl. Amanda smacked into her hard and sent her tumbling. In the ensuing effort to help her back to her feet, Amanda slipped the book into her backpack. She apologized, gave the girl her hand, and, with the brim of the hat still lowered, pulled her up.

  “Sorry ’bout that,” she muttered, and moved on, already having singled out a man in a security uniform up ahead.

  “You didn’t hear it from me,” Amanda said as she passed, “but I just saw that girl in the leggings put a book in her backpack.”

  She hurried ahead, reached the elevators and tapped the UP button. As the doors slid open, she heard a girl’s protesting voice: “That’s not mine! I swear! I swear!”

  Amanda smiled.

  The rare books room had the clubby appeal of a study in an old English manor house. The walls were rich with storytelling and meaning, iconography and symbolism. A few dark wood tables sat beneath green-domed law lamps. A hushed reverence muffled every turn of a page. From the moment Amanda and Jess applied their signatures to a journal scrawled with a hundred pages of names, most of which ended with initials like PhD, there was little question they’d entered a sacred space. This was where the ancients lived, the palace of the elderly.

  Two librarians oversaw the activities, including a man named Ricky Hart, who hunted down volumes in a professionally accommodating way for the new arrivals.

  Amanda, Jess, and the only known copy of Professor Alexander’s original guidebook in the library were left to themselves at a large table. Wearing white cotton gloves, Jess turned the pages of the small book while Amanda looked on. The professor’s essay was so densely written it was nearly indecipherable.

  “I don’t know,” Amanda whispered. “I don’t think we’re getting anywhere.”

  “Agreed. So what now?”

  “You think there’s a code in here? You think we messed something up?”

  “If there is a code,” Jess said, “then it has to have something to do with the original clue, right? ‘Like runners they bear the lamp of life.’ So…lamp…life…What are we
missing?”

  “His essay. It’s got to be in his essay.”

  “Okay!” Jess turned once again to the yellowed pages.

  Amanda saw it first. “Look at this!” Her chipped fingernail traced a line without touching the fragile paper. “‘Light and learning are associated together by an impulse so natural that it pervades the great literature of the world. Knowledge is imagined as a lamp, wisdom as a guiding star, and the conscious tradition of mankind as a torch passed from generation to generation.’”

  The girls stared at the page, rereading the quote. Finally, Jess whispered so softly that she might have been talking to herself, “I realize we have no way of knowing, but that’s got to be it. That’s got to mean something.”

  “‘Generation to generation,’” Amanda said. “Wayne and Dillard passed the torch to us, because the Keepers aren’t here. That much I get. But the generation stuff doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  “Maybe it’s the message we’re supposed to deliver. Something about…” Jess had continued turning pages past the book’s brief index. An old yellowed pocket was glued to the inside of the back cover. It had probably once held a library card. Something had been sketched in pencil onto the paper pocket.

  “What is that, a hand?”

  “Looks like a Q-tip,” Jess said.

  “It’s a torch!” Amanda said too loudly, earning the attention of the librarian. “It’s not a good-looking torch, but it’s a torch.”

  Jess rubbed her gloved thumb over the drawing ever so lightly. It smudged. She gasped and jerked her hand back. The smudged pencil left a small horizontal line in the middle of the torch.

  “Wait a second,” Amanda said. “There’s something in there.” She reached for the page.

  “Shh!” Jess slapped her hand back, reprimanding her. “You don’t have to tell the whole place, you know?” She delicately lifted the fragile paper pocket. She couldn’t get her finger inside without risking tearing it.

  “This is so Wayne,” Amanda wheezed.

  “We need a tool, something flat like a letter opener,” Jess said. “Tweezers.” She closed the book.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to ask for help.”

  “What? You can’t do that! Whatever’s in there…that’s for us! If you ask, that guy’s going to keep it.”

  “It’s a rare book, Mandy. I’m not going to damage it.”

  “This is Finn we’re talking about!”

  “And I’m the one wearing the gloves!”

  “Turn it upside down. Please, try gravity first!”

  Jess, embarrassed not to have thought of it, flipped over the book. Something slipped out of the pocket. Amanda grinned.

  It was a lined card inscribed with handwritten names and numbers.

  “It’s been cut with a pair of scissors or a razor blade,” Amanda said, lowering her eyes to examine it. “The cut edge isn’t yellowed like the rest of it.”

  “Why?” Jess said, picking it up gingerly with her gloved fingers. The back of the card was blank.

  “There has to be a reason. Wayne doesn’t do stuff for kicks.”

  “The name!” Jess said. “By cutting the card, he’s telling us to read the last name.”

  “Which is unreadable,” Amanda sighed. “If that’s someone’s signature, you’d never know it.”

  “The number!” Jess said, standing, the book in hand. Together, the girls marched to the reference desk where Ricky the librarian sat, his head down.

  “Excuse me,” Jess said. She showed him the card, explaining that they’d found it in the back of the book.

  “Interesting. This is from so long ago! We haven’t used this system in twenty years or more. You say it was in the back, in the pocket?”

  “Yes,” Jess said, and nodded eagerly.

  “Even more remarkable given that this card is not for this book. Some kind of mistake, I assume.”

  “What do you mean?” Amanda asked.

  “The title has been cut off the top. Names, cut off the bottom. But it’s a yellow card. In the old days the rare books collection used blue cards. Yellow was reference.”

  “Like dictionaries and things,” Amanda said.

  “All sorts of reference materials. Maps. Encyclo-pedias. Almanacs. Scientific journals. On and on.”

  “Yellow,” Jess said. “Should be blue if it’s in here.”

  “Right. But really, the cards were pulled from all the rare books a long time ago. There shouldn’t be any card in here at all.”

  “You can’t make out that signature, can you?” Jess asked.

  The librarian looked first with his naked eye, then with a magnifying glass. “No, I’m afraid not. It’s a bunch of scratches.”

  “The number?” Amanda inquired.

  “Good one!” Ricky Hart said. “Should have thought of that myself. Look at that number, would you?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Jess said.

  “How low it is! It’s three digits. Three!” The man could barely contain his glee.

  “Is that good?” Amanda asked.

  “Are you kidding? That early a number? The person is practically a founding member!”

  “Can you look up the name for us?” Jess asked.

  “I wish! Sadly, anyone with a membership number that low has surely passed away by now.”

  “Are there any records anywhere?” Jess asked.

  “Well…yes. Of course. I could look it up manually, I suppose.”

  “Could you, please?” said Amanda, flirting a little. It worked.

  “Well…why not?” Ricky asked the other librarian to cover for him and went through a door. He called back, “This could take a while.”

  WHILE RICKY WAS THUMBING through a dusty card file in a basement archive, Amanda and Jess were left in the rare books library. As Jess copied down the exact quote from Professor Alexander’s essay, Amanda wandered the room, reading titles off book spines and sneaking glances over the shoulders of the other patrons working at the tables.

  Whatever Wayne had left them qualified as difficult to solve. She assumed they were on the right track, but wouldn’t know for certain until some obvious piece of evidence jumped out at them.

  Generation to generation. She wanted so badly to believe that line meant something, but maybe not. The torch the runners passed…She’d seen a torch on the library roof; another on display in the library lobby.

  Still sorting through possibilities, Amanda ducked back and away from the room’s main door as the boy who’d had the electric bicycle walked past. She was sure it was him; he was too cute to mistake for anyone else.

  Heart in her throat, she waved, trying to win Jess’s attention. But Jess was bent over the reception desk, writing and reading from the guidebook. A shadow fell into the room from the hallway—a shadow in the shape of a man. The bicyclist had stepped back to get a look inside.

  “Hey,” Amanda heard. “I’ve just spotted a friend of mine. Could I…you know? Just for a minute.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “I’m not going to steal anything.”

  “Good! Then I won’t have to arrest you….Just kidding! Do I look like a cop?”

  “Oh, phew!”

  “You turned so pale!”

  “Ha-ha,” the boy said, snidely sarcastic.

  “I’m sorry, though, answer’s still the same. You’ll have to wait out here until she’s through.”

  “She’ll be through soon enough,” the boy said. The guard missed the menacing tone, but it sent chills through Amanda.

  It took Amanda three more tries, but eventually Jess looked her way. After a frantic effort, Amanda was able to move her forward, out of sight of the doorway.

  “You’re not going to believe who it is!” Jess said excitedly.

  “The guy on the bike is waiting at the door for us. He’s our new best friend, according to him.”

  “Wait? What?”

  “Your guy,” Amanda said truculently. �
�He told the guard you and he are good buds.”

  Jess’s excitement was such that she couldn’t focus. “The member’s name on the library card? Her number identified her as Marie Bounds.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something?”

  “That was my reaction, too. I asked what the last book she checked out was. No record of that. But while he was checking, Ricky-the-librarian turned out to be smarter than he looks. He’s Willa smart; Philby smart. We could have spent the rest of the day in here trying to figure out what Dillard was trying to tell us, but we’ve got Ricky Hart on our side, and Ricky Hart is a Disney freak. Spends his weekends in the parks, goes to D23 and movie premieres and anything Disney he can do in his spare time.”

  “Speaking of time, we’re a little short. Maybe we can talk about Ricky’s love of Disney later?”

  “Later? No! We’re not done here.”

  “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

  “Marie Bounds, as in Lillian Marie Bounds, her maiden name before she married Walter Elias Disney. This is from Ricky. Here’s the thing, though: He first recognized the name as being one of the library’s early big-time donors. Then this light went on in his head and he made the connection; he’s muttering stuff about how they probably used her middle name and maiden name to keep a low profile on the contributions. The Disneys were big supporters all along, he said—huge—and still are, but Lillian had this thing about reading. Maybe they gave the money early on under her maiden name for some reason that made sense to them.”

  “Why would Dillard/Wayne want to lead us back to Walt’s wife? That seems so odd, to make us work so hard.”

  “We’re not done,” Jess said.

  “Meaning?”

  “There’s a wall of card file drawers downstairs—”

  “Let me guess. Ricky?”

  Jess nodded. “Each drawer represents a big library donor. Ricky is positive there’s one for Marie Bounds. The drawers are fake, but who cares? Maybe there’s another clue. Alexander’s book gave us light, truth, and Marie Bounds. We’re not done.”

  “We are if the guy in the hall doesn’t move. We can’t lead him to our next clue. And what if he calls in reinforcements?” Amanda looked frantically around the room. “This is the only door.”