Choke: 2 (Pillage Trilogy (Pillogy)) (18 page)

I looked into the gap and gaped.

There was a small piece of white paper. It had been sealed up between the back of the book and the leather that was wrapped over it. I carefully tugged the tiny paper out. It was about the size of a business card and had one corner missing. There were some big numbers scribbled on one side and on the other side was a list written in really tiny handwriting. It looked like a column of names with numbers after each one.

Thunder cracked, making the discovery feel almost sinister.

I held the card close to my eyes as I examined every centimeter of it. I carefully tore off more of the back cover to see if there was anything else hidden. There wasn’t. I peeled off the edging of the front cover and checked under it.

There was nothing but book.

I looked at the big scribbled numbers on the front of the card again and wished that Kate were with me. She was so much better with numbers and math. It was difficult to even read the list of words on the back because of their size, but I did make out the first word.

“Hunched.”

The word was followed by the number 1. I’d like to think that if I hadn’t been so tired from traveling to the cave, or so confused about what to do, that I would have figured it out instantly. But it wasn’t until almost a half hour later, while looking through the book for the fiftieth time, that I noticed the illustration on page one was of a dragon hunching.

My room lit up from a flash of nearby lightning. I counted to two and thunder shook the windows and vibrated through my chest.

I looked at the card again. I couldn’t make out the second word on the list, but I could decipher the number after it: 70.

I turned to page seventy. It was one of the last pages in the book and there was a drawing of a dragon with its wings spread. I checked the card and with the help of the picture could make out the small word.

“Wingspan.”

I quickly worked through the rest of the book. All of the numbers after the words corresponded to illustrations in the book. And all the words were descriptions of what the dragon in the illustration was doing—sleeping, attacking, flying, etc . . . I was pretty excited about figuring it out, but also disappointed that it didn’t seem to mean anything.

“What good is that?” I complained to Mr. Binkers.

I looked at the ten scribbled numbers on the other side of the card—27, 1, 20, 8, 70, 9, 54, 6, 40. I realized the random numbers were no longer completely random, they all were numbers of pages with illustrations on them. It made sense that the order that the numbers were written in was important, so I wrote down the title of the pictures in the order of the numbers, thinking it would make a sentence that would tell me some great secret.

“Flying, hunched, drinking, attack, wingspan, sleeping, clawing, screeching, dead—it all makes perfect sense now,” I said sarcastically to myself.

I checked out the illustrations four more times and was about to just throw the book across the room and call it quits when I finally saw what I needed to see.

“Yes!”

I knew all my days of looking at
I Spy
books and reading
Where’s Waldo
would pay off. I was pretty happy to have figured it out and felt slightly smug in the knowledge that I had always known pictures really were the best part of a book.

I stayed awake long into the night, listening to the rain and staring intently at pictures of dragons.

Illustration from page 42 of
The Grim Knot

CHAPTER 19

Thunder rudely woke me up at eight in the morning. I grumbled at Mother Nature and tried to go back to sleep. But the thunder was like an alarm that went off every few seconds, and unfortunately, the weather didn’t have a snooze button.

I sat up in bed and yawned.

The
Grim Knot
was resting on my dresser next to Mr. Binkers. What I learned from it last night didn’t make me feel any better. In fact it scared me even more. I was so happy to discover what was hidden, but I wished it had been a different finding.

I got up, dressed, and threw on my windbreaker. Last night while taking my windbreaker off, I had found a thin plastic zipper around the back of the collar. When I unzipped it, an attached hood came out. It was way easier to just use the hood instead of baseball caps.

I ran down to the kitchen to use the only phone in the manor. Of course Millie was there, and she was peeling carrots.

“I wish we had another phone,” I complained.

“We have one,” Millie pointed.

“I know that,” I told her. “I just wish we had one with a little more privacy—or maybe a cordless one.”

“I like a cord on my phone,” Millie insisted. “It’s more
stable.”

Millie stopped peeling carrots and started to mix something in a large orange bowl. It didn’t look like she was going to step out of the kitchen to give me any privacy. I glanced out one of the many kitchen windows that the wind was shoving raindrops against and shrugged. I picked up the phone and dialed star sixty-seven followed by Kate’s number. It rang four times before her father answered.

“Yes, sir, this is Timothy. I am a student in one of Kate’s classes,” I said while pinching my nose. I didn’t actually enjoy lying, but I needed to talk to Kate. “I live in town, and I know she can’t get to school. I thought I’d tell her what we’ve been learning.”

Kate’s dad commented on how thoughtful I was while Millie just stared at me. Seventeen seconds later Kate greeted me on the other line.”

“Hello, Timothy.”

“Hi,” I said, knowing she knew it was me. I needed to tell her what happened yesterday, but I didn’t want Millie to hear. “So you know that girl, Lizzy, in your zoology class?” I asked.

“Yes,” Kate played along.

“Well, she’s huge.”

Millie slapped me with a dish towel.

“That’s not a bad thing,” I said to Kate, trying not to sound so harsh. “It’s just an observation. Oh, and that really old white dress you like . . .”

“Yes . . .” Kate said slowly.

“Well, I saw it . . . in a magazine ad,” I told her.

“When did you go to the cave?” Kate asked, obviously not in the same room as her parents.

“A couple of times.”

“And that old guy was there?”

I nodded, realized she couldn’t see me do so, and said, “Yes. That white dress came out of the back room.”

Millie looked at me and raised her eyebrows as high as she could.

“Can you get over here so we can study?” I asked Kate.

“Have you seen the rain?”

“Is it raining?” I asked as thunder simultaneously ripped through the air.

“I’m not a big fan of being struck by lightning,” she said.

“Just duck as you walk.”

“I’ll try,” she said, laughing. “If I’m not there in two hours, I’ve given up.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“Bye, Beck.”

“Bye, Kate.”

I hung up the phone. Millie was staring at me with her good eye and both eyebrows arched.

“That was an unusual call,” she observed. “You’re not up to something, are you?”

I shook my head.

“Kate’s a smart girl,” she said, wagging her finger. “But I don’t want you hurting her. You should know that just because your father isn’t around doesn’t give you permission to run around all willy-nilly.”

“Willy who?” I asked.

“Beck, this weather can be very dangerous,” she lectured. “Combine that with your personality and . . .” Millie cut her sentence short and shivered as if there had been a disturbance in the force.

I looked out the window and halfway changed the subject. “When do you think it is going to stop raining anyhow?”

“It does make one worry,” she said. “Thomas is filling sandbags out by the stables.”

“That’s great,” I cheered, looking around for breakfast.

“He’s thinking he might need to sandbag some areas. The water’s getting dangerously close to the south end of the manor.”

“Wow.”

“He could use your help,” she added.

“Really? Cause normally I’d be in school,” I reminded her. “I mean I don’t want him to count on me being around when that’s not always possible.”

Millie scowled at me, and her wrinkly face bunched up like a rapidly drying prune.

“I was just trying to think of others,” I told her.

Millie opened the oven and pulled out a plate of food that had been warming. She handed me a huge biscuit with a thick slice of ham, a fried egg, and melted cheese in the middle of it. “Eat it fast and then go help Thomas before you have to study.”

I shoved the biscuit sandwich into my mouth and took a huge bite. It was even better than it looked and smelled. Millie filled up a large glass with milk and pushed it over to me.

“You should cook for a king or something,” I mumbled with a mouth full of ham and cheese. “Or Oprah.”

“Oh, I don’t think they’d want me underfoot,” Millie blushed.

I couldn’t imagine anyone who ate who wouldn’t want Millie underfoot. I had a second sandwich, changed things up with a glass of fresh apple juice and then walked slowly down the mansion hallway toward the north end of the manor and in the general direction of the stables. As I stepped out one of the back doors and into the nonstop rain, I decided to at least walk behind the garage house and see if any more of the tracks were exposed.

They were. In fact they had been so cleared off by the rain, that they now looked completely unburied and almost usable.

I sloshed through the mud and slipped up between the garage house and the stables. I couldn’t see Thomas, so I opened one of the large stable doors and entered. I followed the long dirt walkway between the stables—there were about fifteen on each side. At the far end was an open room with a hay-strewn floor and a round corral, and then two large barn doors opening to the outside. The doors were wide open and I could see a huge pile of sand. Thomas and Scott were shoveling at the base of it, filling sacks as fast as they could. Thomas was wearing nice trousers with large plastic boots. He had on a dress shirt with a vest over it, but he had gotten casual by rolling up his sleeves. Scott was in his usual grubby work attire.

I climbed over the corral fence and stepped up to Thomas.

“Millie said I should help,” I informed him, hoping that by phrasing it like that he would tell me I didn’t have to. He didn’t fall for it.

“Excellent.”

“I told her you probably don’t want to get used to me helping because I’m usually in school.”

“Grab a sack and start shoveling,” Scott interrupted.

I figured Scott was just mad because I still blamed him for what I had done. I picked up a shovel and started pitching sand into a bag. We were under the lip of the roof outside the barn doors so the rain wasn’t pelting us directly. But every time the wind blew east we got pretty wet. After about forty minutes, Scott left to check on some of the rain gutters. It struck me that since the tracks were exposed by nature, it couldn’t hurt to ask about them.

“So, Thomas,” I said.

“Yes,” he replied.

“I was walking behind the garage to get here and there are some train tracks.”

His shovel sliced into the mound of sand. “Really?”

“They run right into the back of the garage.” I held a bag open, and Thomas tossed sand into it. “The rain has washed away about a foot of soil. I guess they were buried.”

“It’s quite a wet spell,” he said nonchalantly.

I tied up the bag and picked up an empty one. “So you didn’t know about the train tracks?”

“I didn’t say that,” he answered, stopping to wipe his brow with a handkerchief. “There’s a line of track that goes through the forest and up into the mountain.”

“You don’t say?” I said.

“I remember as a child playing in that forest,” he replied. There was a faint smile on his lips. “The tracks were buried, but we found sections that were clean. All we ever found out was that your great-grandfather built the tracks as a beginning of what he hoped would be an elaborate mountain railroad.”

“Wow.” I mentally complimented myself on my great
acting.

Thomas’s shovel bit into the sandpile again. “There was an accident,” he continued. “A boy was killed, and, like so many of your relatives do, they buried their problems. Years later your grandfather planted the trees that now cover the track. I remember being very curious as a child, but my mother said never to even ask about it.”

It seemed weird to imagine Thomas having a mother.

“Well, the rain has washed the dirt away,” I said as I picked up another full bag of sand and heaved it next to the others.

“I knew this weather was once in a lifetime,” he said reflectively.

Scott came back and stopped our conversation. I was just about to fake an accident to get out of having to keep shoveling when Kate showed up. She came in through the stables and almost scared me to death when she crept up behind me and said, “Hello.”

“Hello, Katherine,” Thomas said nicely.

Scott just nodded. After my heart rate slowed, I informed Thomas and Scott that as much as I would have loved to stay and shovel, I needed to go and study with Kate. They took it pretty hard.