Sleepy Hollow: Children of the Revolution (9 page)

“You’ll take Whitcombe-Sears. You already know the place.”

Jenny rolled her eyes. “I’ve been there maybe three times, and the last time was years ago. Why can’t I go to Ticonderoga?”

Abbie closed her eyes, then opened them again. “Because it’s against the law.”

“Say
what
?”

“Part of the terms of your release from Tarrytown Psychiatric into my custody was that you would stay in Westchester County. You can’t go down to the city, you can’t go across to Jersey, you can’t go east to Connecticut, and you can’t go upstate. That’s the deal, and if you break that deal, it’s back to Room 49 you go.”

Crane frowned. “I can’t imagine that they would assign Miss Jenny the same room when …” He trailed off, probably seeing the look on Jenny’s face. She was certainly going for majorly pissed-off.

“This
sucks
.”

“I agree, but it was the only way to get the judge to sign off on your release.”

Jenny stared angrily at her sister, but this time Abbie wasn’t giving her a nasty look back. It was a look of apology and of guilt.

Abbie walked up to Jenny and put a hand on her
shoulder. “Look, Jenny, cops may suck—but judges suck more.”

Unable to help herself, Jenny burst out with a laugh. “Guess so. All right, fine, I’ll head to the library.”

“Thanks for understanding.”

“Oh, no.” Jenny took a step back and shook her head. “This isn’t understanding. At best, this is resignation.”

“Fair enough.” Abbie turned to Crane. “It’s four hours to Ticonderoga from here. We hit the road now, we can get a motel room for the night and check the fort out in the morning.”

“Very well.” Crane nodded.

Abbie then turned to Irving. “I don’t suppose I can get the department to pay for the motel?”

Jenny again couldn’t help bursting out with a laugh.

For Irving, though, it was just a chuckle. “You want the honest answer or the polite answer?”

Crane frowned. “The polite one, I should think.”

“
Hell
no, not in your wildest dreams.”

That just deepened Crane’s frown. “If you knew the full tenor of my dreams, Captain, you would not make such a statement. And I shudder to think what the honest answer was.”

Abbie quickly said, “My credit card can handle it, as long as we stick with a cheap-ass motel. I’m still paying off the movers who had to ship everything
back
when I changed my mind about moving to D.C., plus I lost the security deposit on the apartment down there.”

Jenny chuckled. “Always the little things, ain’t it, sis?”

Irving nodded. “Yeah, all right. I got some other business in the city to take care of anyhow.” He pulled out his cell phone and called someone. After a few rings: “Hey, Beth. Listen, I need you to do me a favor.…”

Whatever favor Irving wanted this Beth woman to do for him was lost as the captain left the room.

“Who’s Beth?” she asked Abbie.

“His former partner. She’s an insurance investigator for the company that insures the Met these days. She’s the one that verified that the medals were stolen.”

Jenny nodded. “Cool. All right, I’ll head over to the library soon, then. I want to check a few more things here.”

“We’ll hit the road.” Abbie looked at Crane. “Let’s go.”

Crane gave one of his bows. “Happy hunting, Miss Jenny.”

“You too, Crane.”

Jenny spent the next hour trying and failing to organize Corbin’s files. Each time she took a shot at it, she either got distracted by something interesting to read—there was one musty old book that had all kinds of interesting stuff about healing potions and
herbs—or got fed up and stopped after only sorting a few things because it was boring.

To her horror, she was going to have to admit that her older sister was right.

Considering she’d been spending the better part of a decade thinking of Abbie as nothing but wrong, this was a bit of a revelation for her.

Putting it out of her mind, she left the armory and headed up to North Broadway and then down to Chestnut Street.

The first time Jenny had set foot in the Whitcombe-Sears Library, it was in the company of Sheriff Corbin.

“This old church is a library?” she had asked the sheriff when he brought her down Chestnut the first time.

Corbin had smiled under his beard. “Hasn’t been a church of any kind in fifty years. It was Episcopal, and done in the Federal style—which is why it’s made out of brick instead of stonework, and why the inside was boring as hell. Give me a good old-fashioned Gothic church or Catholic cathedral any day.”

Jenny had stopped walking and given him a look. “Is this gonna be another lecture? ’Cause if it is, I can go back home
right
now.”

Putting a reassuring hand on her back, he guided her forward. “No lecture, I promise. At least not from me.”

They had gone inside the large wooden double
doors, which opened with a creak. Inside was a small hallway with a staircase on the left and a wall on the right that had a bulletin board covered with flyers about various happenings and services in the town. In front of them sat a doorway to the larger church area—or, rather, library area—which had a small security gate designed to read the bar codes on books that hadn’t been checked out.

Past the gate had been rows of bookcases where pews probably used to be. Looking up, she saw more bookcases up on the balcony where the organ probably was. Up front, in the area where the altar would have been, sat a huge wooden desk.

Corbin had made a beeline for that desk. On top of it had been a pile of books, a computer that was top-of-the-line the year Jenny was born—the fan was making a labored noise—and a wooden box containing call slips and small pencils. On either side there had been two small tables with computers of the same vintage as the antique on the desk, which Jenny had figured to be for the use of the general public.

Said public had been nowhere to be found, as the two of them had been the only patrons present in the library.

Behind the desk had sat a middle-aged man with a beard that was even grayer than Corbin’s, and with thinning wispy salt-and-pepper hair, which was tied back in a ponytail.

Without preamble, Corbin had smiled and said
to the man behind the desk, “You know that desk violates the fire code, don’t you?”

The librarian—at least, Jenny had assumed he was a librarian, though she never did find out for sure—had just grinned. “So cite me, you old reprobate.”

Corbin had put out his hand over the desk, and the librarian shook it enthusiastically. “Good to see you.” He had turned to Jenny then. “Jenny Mills, this is Albert Whitcombe-Sears, the proprietor of this august place of learning.”

“Thank you, August,” Al had said, mispronouncing Corbin’s first name with the accent on the second syllable like the adjective Corbin had used to describe the library. Then he had offered her his own hand. “Pleased to meet you, Jenny—but you can call me Al. Just don’t call me Betty.”

Jenny had returned the handshake, and had also given him a confused look. “Why would I call you Betty?”

Corbin had waved the joke off. “Paul Simon song.”

“Who?”

“I’ll burn you some CDs. Trust me, you’ll be grateful. Anyhow, Al, we need to look up some genealogical stuff going back to the early nineteenth century. Involves a haunting up in Douglas Park.”

“You know, this church hadn’t been built yet,” Whitcombe-Sears had said. “It was all Dutch Reform around here in those days. Wasn’t until the
railroad that all the rich Protestants started moving up here. Then, suddenly, we had Episcopalians and Presbyterians and the like. Then the auto industry showed up, and it was all poor immigrants, who were almost entirely Catholic, so this place becomes a library.”

Jenny had glared at Corbin. “You promised me no lectures.”

“No, I promised you no lectures
from me
.”

The research they had done that day had been less useful than Corbin had hoped, though they had taken care of the ghost in the park. Whitcombe-Sears had even helped. The banter between Corbin and Whitcombe-Sears had been so practiced that Jenny had been surprised when Corbin had sent her back to the library rather than go himself to see his old buddy.

Today was the first time she had visited since Corbin’s death.

The vestibule hadn’t changed much. The bulletin board still advertised various services and events happening around town, including one of the local schools putting on a production of
1776
. Jenny thought it would be hilarious to bring Crane to see that, just to watch his head explode.

She walked through the same security gate, walked past the same bookcases in place of pews, all stuffed to the gills with various and sundry musty tomes.

Approaching the main desk, she saw the biggest
difference since the last time she was there: Whitcombe-Sears had finally upgraded. The computers were all brand-new and with flat-screen monitors instead of the monster cubes he’d had before.

The man himself had cut the ponytail off, which just emphasized how far his hairline had receded.

He looked up from reading his fancy new monitor and his eyes widened. “Goodness gracious, great balls of fire, if it isn’t Jenny Mills! Didn’t expect to see you again. I’d heard they, ah—”

“Put me away? Yeah, I was institutionalized for a while, but I’m
all
better now.”

“You ask me, you were always crazy.” He grinned, then dropped it quickly. “I guess that’s why you weren’t at the funeral?”

Jenny lowered her eyes. “Yeah. They don’t give furloughs, not unless it’s a family member.”

Whitcombe-Sears shook his head. “Stupid rules. You and Corbin
were
family, in all the ways that mattered. Anyhow, that’s neither here nor there. What can I do you for?”

“I actually want to take a look at your exhibits.”

Frowning, Whitcombe-Sears said, “Since when do you care about art?”

“Oh, I really don’t. But I read online that you have an Independence Cross on display.”

“I have one on display, yes. Wanna see?”

“Please.”

That got Whitcombe-Sears to blink in surprise.
“ ‘Please’? Damn, being in the funny farm made you all polite and stuff.”

Jenny actually credited Crane with any semblance of decorum she had. It was hard
not
to be polite around him. It was like he exuded a force field made out of manners.

But the last thing she wanted to do was try to explain Crane to—well, to anybody, really, so she just prompted Whitcombe-Sears. “Exhibit?”

“Right.” He tapped something on his computer and then got up and led her to the area to the south wall on the left.

“I thought the restrooms were this way.”

“They also are, yeah.” Whitcombe-Sears grinned. “I’ve got a ton of family heirlooms, and I rotate ’em through the display cases.”

He led Jenny through the doorway. She’d been through it before, but always to turn right and go down the stairs to the bathroom. This time she continued ahead a bit and turned left to find a small room filled with glass cases.

Ignoring everything else in the room—though a nice portrait caught her eye—she made a beeline for a piece of metal in the shape of a cross. The cross itself was even on all sides, and rather short, so it was more like the Red Cross logo than, say, a Catholic crucifix. It had a small loop on top of it, which was probably what a string or chain was run through so it could be worn around one’s neck.

“The crosses were all forged by a French silversmith
named Gaston Mercier,” Whitcombe-Sears started in what Jenny had come to recognize as his lecture tone. “This one belonged to one of my ancestors, Caleb Whitcombe. He worked with Henry Knox to move cannons from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston, and set them up at Dorchester Heights. That helped win the Siege of Boston, which was one of the—”

“The first battles of the Revolutionary War, yeah, I know.”

Whitcombe-Sears stared at Jenny dubiously. “Since when do you know about history, Jenny?”

“Let’s just say I’ve developed a more than passing interest in the American Revolution.” She squinted more closely at the cross, noticing what appeared to be scratches on the side, but after gazing more intently upon them, she realized there was a pattern to them. “What’re those scratches?”

“Good catch. Anybody else came in here and asked that, they’d get the spiel about shipping and time passing and other nonsense. But lucky you, Jenny Mills, you get the
real
story. See, Gaston Mercier wasn’t just a silversmith—he was an alchemist. He couldn’t actually turn straw into gold, like other alchemists tried, but he learned how to infuse magic into solid objects. Especially silver, which conducts spellcraft quite efficiently. And there was a reason why Washington specifically chose Mercier for this commission.”

Jenny steeled herself for another lecture.

AUGUST 1785

GEORGE WASHINGTON PACED
back and forth in the sitting room, waiting for the physician to finish his examination of his wife.