Kepler’s Dream (23 page)

And birds. On every shelf, bird after wooden bird. Small birds, big birds, seabirds, land birds, every kind of winged creature you could imagine. In a corner I even saw a peacock. I was pretty sure it was Carmen.

“Here she is,” he said, wrapping his hands gently around a piece he clearly had just been working on. “She's a hawk,” he explained. He offered it to me. “I made her for you.”

Sure enough, there was a sharp-eyed hawk, standing with its wings folded, ready to fly if it needed to, probably looking for prey.

“For me?” I touched the bird cautiously, as if it were alive and might scare easily. It seemed magical: so smooth and soft, yet the surface somehow transformed into feathers.

“Your grandmother told me that was the name of your soccer team at home, the Hawks.” He wiped a bit of sweat from his temple. “She doesn't much care for hawks, herself. But that's Mrs. Von Stern—strong likes and dislikes.”

I had to agree with that.

“I gave your grandmother a dove once that she keeps in her room. After the real hawk got the other one.” He put a hand on Rosie's shoulder. “And I made an eagle for this girl. Our name, Aguilar—you know, it's Spanish for ‘eagle.'”

I gave Miguel a big hug. “Thank you. I mean …” I couldn't
think of all the right words. He patted me on the back, like it was OK and I didn't need to say anything. I think we were both embarrassed.

Then he said I could take it now, he had just been finishing it. He wanted me to have it as a good-bye present, and for good luck. I was pretty sure I knew what he meant—about my mom.

I told Rosie to keep going on her quest for a last word with Texty, and she agreed. I had to find a safe place to keep my new pet bird, so I went back to my room.

By now, the path through the corridor and the Haitian Room and Tigger Hall was so familiar to me that I hardly saw the books and the bottles, the art and the armor. I had, finally, gotten used to my grandmother's many
things,
even if I could never in one lifetime know or understand what they all were or why she had them.

As Lou and I trotted down together into the John Hancock quarters, as my dad had called it, we saw an unfamiliar person in there, crouched down, reading the writing on the wall.

It was him.

“Belle!” He stood up to greet me. My dad was too big for the place, somehow. It wasn't the first time I had had that thought about him. Walter Mackenzie was one of those people who seemed naturally to fit better out-of-doors than in. “What have you got there?”

I showed him the hawk, and he whistled over it. “Miguel made this, right? Man, he does good work. Even as a kid, you know, he was always whittling stuff. That's beautiful.”

I agreed, and then put the bird on the table by my bed. For this last week at least it could watch out for Lou and me, in the night.

“So, Dad, uh—” I pointed toward him, and the wall. “What are you doing?”

“Oh, I was just looking through the names,” he said almost sheepishly.

“You and Mom are up there together,” I said, as if he wouldn't know that already. Then, since I couldn't come up with a snappy phrase to capture the weirdness of that, as Violet Von Stern would have, I just made a googly face at him, a combo of
What the heck? Who'd have believed it?
with a small shade of
Why'd you two divorce, anyway?
mixed in.

It made him laugh. “Yeah, Belle. Well, parallel universes, you know? Parallel universes.” His blue eyes—I saw them as Grandmother's eyes, too, now—wandered for a second. To a different universe, I guess. “In one of them, things go differently. My father lives.”

I thought of something I'd had under my pillow all these weeks, the photo I had taken from the Chamber of Tchotchkes, of little Walter and a silvered Edward.

“Here.” I took the small old square out from where I had hidden it, and handed it to him.

My dad took the picture from me, but didn't say anything as he looked at it. He was usually a pretty noisy guy, except when he was out fishing, but for a moment he was completely still. For the first time in my life I saw something that looked like moisture at the corner of his eyes.

Suddenly, there was a tapping at the back door and a strained whisper saying my name.

“Ella!”

My dad, startled, brushed his eye briefly with a thick thumb. “What the (expletive deleted)—?”

“That's Rosie,” I said, though I didn't know why she was back there again, trying to get my attention.

“Ella,” she whispered again.
“Come quick!”

“Sounds like it's important.” Dad went into the bathroom and to the back door. It was stuck, of course—as we knew.

“You can't open that one,” I told him.

“This old thing?” he said. “Sure you can. There's just a trick to it.”

He lifted his heavy booted foot and kicked the brass doorknob, hard. “You have to do that first.” Then, cool as a cucumber (are all cucumbers cool? I mean, even if you don't keep them in the refrigerator?), he turned the knob, the door opened and there, just like before, was my new friend, Rosie.

She seemed as astonished as I was that we'd gotten through there, like we'd magically entered into the fourth dimension or something, but my dad, cheerful again now, just grinned. “This used to be my room, too, you know, Belle.”

Well, no. It was one more thing I hadn't known.

We didn't pause now, though, as Rosie was urging me to follow her to the Library. She had been in there with Jason, she explained rapidly, to see him finishing up his work on the computer.

It turned out to be a good thing that I hadn't been with Rosie,
because she was able to get Jason into conversation by making a passing snide comment about “the Royal Violet.” (My friend was too polite to go into details about what she'd said.) She got the thumb dude chatting, turned away from his laptop, and then, she said, “I used my secret weapon.”

I looked blank.

“Lola.”

She could see I wasn't completely keeping up with her, but she let it pass. So apparently right on the spot she made up a whole tale about how her cousin Lola had been talking a lot about Jason lately. As Rosie said slyly, “It isn't a total lie … She did tell me about him.”

Even Tweedledums and Tweedledees are open to flattery, we learned. Like I say, Rosie might have a future in drama, or at least in creative writing, because her master stroke was remembering that Lola had gone to a pool party that day with some high school friends, and when she mentioned that, and how Lola had wondered if he would be there, Texty pulled out his phone and started going crazy with his thumbs, checking with someone else where this party was. By then Rosie was on a roll, so she emphasized that Lola was going to be there only for a little while, but if he headed over there fast, he might catch her.

Nice work, partner!

“But—now what?” I asked. I didn't feel too bad about tricking Texty, but I didn't see how it really helped us solve our case.

“Check the computer. That's the whole point. He left it on, and his file's still open. We've got to take a look.”

So Rosie and I sat in front of the Tweedle machine, trying to make sense of what was in front of us. I'm sure I hoped Jason would simply have left us a message that said in block letters
“You're right, I took Kepler's
Dream,
I'm guilty guilty guilty!”
Unfortunately it wasn't quite that simple. The open file was a long list of author names and book titles. I wasn't sure what any of them would have to do with the Morris Kepler, but there was nothing to do other than read through, looking for clues. At first it just seemed one long, confusing blur, but I did notice that some names were highlighted. Rosie agreed that seemed significant. We just didn't know how.

The outer door creaked open.

“What are you girls
doing
?” came the alarmed voice of my grandmother, but right behind her was an echo from Mr. Cheerful, my dad, trying to reassure her.

There was a frozen moment of the GM looking at Rosie, and Rosie looking at the GM, and I think both of them were wondering if she was going to have a fit about Rosie being right there, in her priceless
Librerery
.

Here was where my dad earned his stripes, though. If he had stripes.

“It's Holmes and Watson, Mother,” he said in his heartiest voice. “All Ella needs is a pipe. And one of those funny hats.”

The GM took in a sharp breath, and I had a distinct feeling that she was swallowing a whole sentence or two, of the kind that might have made reference to our old friend Phyllis Stine, or maybe someone even less favored.

“
Well, girls?” was all she said. “And what have you found?”

Now I had to hope we had something useful to show for our trespassing.

We showed the open file to my grandmother. You could see from the GM's grimace that the act of reading on the screen was distasteful to her, as if someone was getting her to swallow a nasty vitamin pill (like my mom used to make me do, in the mornings before I went to school). My grandmother agreed that what we were looking at was the inventory Tweedledum and Tweedledee had been working on all these weeks (I wasn't about to try to tell her their real names, not now). She did not know the significance of the highlighted sections either.

I noticed that one of them was Waugh. It was linked on the screen with something called
Decline and Fall
. I remembered the book I had seen in Our Pest's suitcase, that day he left when I had tried accidentally-on-purpose to rifle through his luggage. I told everyone about that, and about Abercrombie's eagerness to hide the copy from me.

“Really?” The GM looked interested. “And did you see what the book was?”

“Well,” I told her, “he covered it up pretty quickly. But I did see W-A-U-G-H …”

“Waugh.” She raised a brow. “You've always been a great fan of the Waughs, Ella, have you not?”

I gave it right back to her. “The greatest. You betcha.”

My dad could see some joke flitting between his mother and me, and I could tell he was surprised. Impressed, even. It wasn't
every near twelve-year-old who would risk sarcasm with Violet Von Stern.

My grandmother walked over to a particular patch of bookshelf where, it seemed, Waugh and his brothers hung out. She moved a finger along a series of spines, naming titles under her breath. When she got to the end of the line, she issued a single, distressed sound. (Not an expletive, as it would have been with my dad, but it was close.)

“Decline and Fall,”
she said wearily. “My first edition. A slightly foxed copy.” She paused for an educational moment. “In book collecting, Ella, that means lightly worn.” Then she faced all of us, her eyes a shocked water blue. Not icy. “My first edition is gone. It appears,” her voice was somber, “that Christopher
is
a thief, after all.”

From that point on, the four of us went back and forth between the highlights from the inventory Tweedledum and Tweedledee had created and the physical volumes on the shelves. Rosie or I would read out a name from the computer, like we were taking roll call, and Grandmother or my dad would compare the roll call with the volumes in her collection. Time after time we found that the boys were picking out the books of which she had doubles, and leaving those off their list.

The GM began to suspect that the “dire duo” didn't plan on their employer ever checking over their work. (Ms. Nelson would have had a word to say about that. She was very big on people checking things over.) “I'm sure they thought that I was old and doddering and not paying proper attention. The
policeman that night, Barker, believed the same thing. What is more surprising”—my grandmother's voice became sharper—“is that Christopher himself was playing me for a fool. The way this list was being created, it is clear he was actively involved. He knew perfectly well which were the valuable volumes.

“Of course I have doubles: I have an early edition of
Room of One's Own,
but I also have one that is signed. The signed copy—Virginia Woolf's name, in her own wiry hand—is tremendously valuable. Christopher and I have talked about it, and I know he has coveted that copy.
It is not on their list
.”

I understood what my grandmother was getting at: Abercrombie had been trying, with the help of his nephew and Jackson, to erase the record of some of my grandmother's most important books. And when he had done that, I was pretty sure, he'd come back and handily collect those books for himself. As he already had with the Waugh.

“Christopher tried to persuade me—indeed, he
had
persuaded me—that he would grant me a magnanimous favor in coming to ‘safeguard' the collection while I was next traveling.” My grandmother gazed around the
Librerery
: her room, her church. “He planned to come with a moving truck, no doubt, and remove select treasures.”

My dad reminded the GM that Edward had become wary of Christopher Abercrombie over the years, ever since the time Abercrombie sold him a precious volume that turned out to be a fake—something Grandmother said Mr. Books always denied he had known.

“
Yes, but Father made Abercrombie take the book back and return the money.” My dad looked at her. “He was not
terribly
pleased about that, as you may recall.”

“No, he wasn't,” my grandmother agreed. “But,” she protested, “in other ways Christopher has been a good friend to me …”

“Friend?” My dad did a Class A eye roll. Really, worthy of a sixteen-year-old. “Mother, the man tried to marry you!”

My grandmother blushed. “Well …,” she said. It was one of the first times I'd ever seen her at a loss for words.

“And I don't think he was happy about your turning him down.”