Chapter 11
THE LOCKED TOME
Twig and I have had a long-standing date every Saturday at noon in Maggie’s basement, where we brainstorm, research, outline, record, and edit episodes for the podcast. Today, I’m late.
And I don’t mean fifteen minutes late like last Saturday, either.
I mean egregiously late. Like, we should be wrapping up by now because my shift starts soon late.
I jog across the street to Evermore Books, a two-story brick building on the square.
The second floor is home to Maggie’s impressive compilation of historical records, accessible by appointment only.
The first floor is the book shop, a haphazard maze of mismatching shelves stuffed with mostly used books, many of which have handwritten notes tucked inside.
My all time favorite? A hastily scribbled note in all caps that warned, “Do not read after midnight.” I found it inside The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, and Maggie was right.
I really shouldn’t have read it after midnight.
Breathless and windswept, I rush past the storefront window, which boasts, among other things, a taxidermy raven with beady eyes. The bell on the door jingles as I let myself in.
Twig is bent over the counter, chatting with Walt while the resident black cat, Poe, tries to nuzzle his way between Twig’s folded arms.
“I am so sorry,” I say, rushing toward them, “but I promise when I tell you what I’ve been up to, you will forgive me.”
Twig responds with such an emphatic sneeze, his glasses slide to the end of his nose. He’s allergic to cats, and Poe never leaves him alone. “It’s not a problem,” he says on the cusp of another.
Walt shoos Poe off the counter. “Yes, because being an hour late isn’t a problem at all.”
“Fifty-four minutes late,” Twig corrects, followed by a third sneeze. He grabs a tissue and blows his nose. “Which, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t the end of the world.”
Walt harrumphs. He’s a retired journalist who loathes tardiness. Back in the day, he worked for the Foggy Hollow Gazette as a hard-nosed beat reporter, investigating scandal and corruption in local politics.
The FHPS hates him.
I plop a paper bag from Tudor’s next to the cash register. “I bring a peace offering.”
Walt digs inside and removes the wrapped biscuits. He tosses one to Twig and takes the other for himself.
“I’ve been chatting with your friend here about Dante’s comet, set to make its appearance over our town in thirty-nine days, ten hours, and .
..” He checks his wristwatch. “Forty-four minutes.” Walt shoots me a wink.
When it comes to time—or any measurement at all, really—Twig is nothing if not exact.
“And brightest on Halloween night,” I say, a smile stretching across my face. “What are the chances?”
“Point zero eight percent,” Twig replies around a mouthful. He’s already unwrapped his food and taken a giant bite. He swallows it down. “That’s the probability of a random individual being alive when the comet returns, and its peak visibility occurring on Halloween Night.”
My smile widens. “Point zero eight percent.”
“What a time to be alive,” Walt says.
Indeed.
I turn to my friend. “You have your appetite back, I see.”
With a nod, he scarfs the rest of the sandwich, then brushes biscuit crumbs from his hands. “So, what had you running late?”
I shoot a glance at Walt, then look back at Twig with wide, excited eyes. “Let’s go downstairs and I’ll catch you up.”
Walt gives another harrumph. “Top secret stuff, huh?”
I grab Twig by the elbow and pull him toward the stairs. “Enjoy your biscuit, Walt,” I call over my shoulder. “Share a bite with Poe!”
Descending the steps of Maggie’s bookstore always makes me feel like I’m Mike from The Goonies, sneaking into the basement of the Fratelli’s restaurant with a map I found in my attic.
The staircase is narrow with a single overhead bulb flickering uncertainly against the stone walls.
At the bottom, the air is damp and cool.
We sit in chairs salvaged from upstairs and do our work at a large, scarred wooden table, where wires snake across the surface and connect to microphones and sound equipment.
In the shadows, old wooden crates sit like silent sentinels, their contents a mystery.
Twig plugs in his laptop. “I have to be at robotics in forty minutes.”
I slap my forehead with my palm, feeling a fresh wash of shame.
In several short weeks, Twig and Naomi will be leaving me for one of the most important competitions of their lives.
Last spring, their robotics team was extended an exclusive invite to attend the Future Innovators STEM Symposium at Carnegie Melon University.
The three-day conference will be culminating in The Catalyst Cup, and if their team wins, every member will get a ten thousand dollar scholarship toward their college education.
They’ve been up to their ears in prep work, and yet, never once has Twig showed up this late on a Saturday.
“I am such a jerk,” I mutter.
“You aren’t a jerk,” he says. “You just tend to lose track of time, especially when you’re wrapped up in something fascinating. So … what had you fascinated?”
I tell him everything. The tense encounter between Rafe and Jude at Willowmere Park last night. Going inside the manor so Jude could show me something in his bedroom. And then the portrait itself—Ezra’s Obsession.
“She looked like you?” Twig says.
“She was identical to me.”
“Did you take a picture?”
“I didn’t have my phone. But even if I did, I don’t think snapping a pic would have gone over too well.”
I tell him the rest—the story behind the painting, the symbol on the locket my doppelg?nger was wearing, and how we found it again, on the sketch of Molly. I tell him, too, how both were familiar. Somehow, I’ve seen them before—Molly and the symbol.
“What did it look like?” he asks.
I grab a pad of sticky notes along with a nearby pencil and draw a simple sketch. “Do you recognize it?”
He shakes his head.
I lean back in my chair. “I don’t know, Twig. I feel like something big is going on.”
“What do you mean?”
“The timing of everything. The Vandenbergs have been MIA from Foggy Hollow for the past thirty years, and now they’re back. This portrait shows up. Dante’s comet is on its way. The last time it made an appearance, Ezra was alive. It all feels connected somehow.
We sit and stare at one another, our podcast long forgotten, when the bell jingles upstairs and footsteps echo overhead, followed by a greeting that’s muffled but unmistakably Maggie’s. If anyone in town is going to recognize a symbol on a locket from the early 19th century, it’ll be her.
Twig and I race each other up the stairs.
Maggie Henshaw is a painfully thin, hawkish woman in her late seventies who has mousy gray hair and dresses in layers, even in the summer.
Maxi skirts on bottom. Cardigans and scarves on top with bizarre accessories, like preserved insects encased in brooches or a necklace made from a tiny bird skull.
She’s never without her journal, which is stuffed with handwritten notes, to-do lists, and loose scraps of paper.
She has the kind of voice you have to lean in to hear, yet she’s always telling me and Twig to speak up.
We find her and Walt bickering in one of the narrow aisles.
“Maggie, you have Frankenstein shelved next to The Federalist Papers.”
“They were published in the same era,” she replies, “and they both start with F.”
“Maggie,” Walt says.
“What?” she barks.
“That’s insane.”
“It’s not insane. It’s chronologically intuitive.”
“No customer looking for The Federalist Papers is going to search for it next to a horror novel.”
No customer is going to look for The Federalist Papers, period.
But I keep the sentiment to myself. It will only exacerbate the bickering.
The two of them act like an old married couple.
One of their favorite topics to argue about is the way in which Maggie organizes her shop, which is, admittedly, terribly confusing to customers.
“I have a question,” I say, giving the sticky note a wave as I join them in the post Revolutionary War, pre-fire section. “Have either of you seen this symbol before?”
“Never,” Walt declares while Maggie pats inside her pockets and mutters something about her reading glasses.
“They’re on your head,” Walt says.
She brings them to the end of her nose and inspects my rendering. When she’s finished, she turns to me with her unblinking stare. “Why do you want to know?”
“I saw it on a sketch and I’m curious.” It’s best to keep it vague.
Maggie gets very irritated with strange and mysterious things.
Not because they frighten her or even because she doesn’t believe in them.
Sometimes, I think she might. She just doesn’t like how easily they overshadow history.
History, to Maggie, is the most important thing in the universe.
“Well,” she finally announces. “I recognize it.”
“You do?”
She waves at us to follow, then heads toward the reading nook, where a faded velvet armchair and a rickety side table sit beneath a floor lamp that almost always flickers.
The area is boxed in by shorter shelves, the kind you might find in the children’s section of a library.
The books in this section aren’t for sale; they’re for looking.
She bends over, removes a large book from a bottom shelf, and places it in my hands.
The thing is hefty, and looks like it belongs with the Vandenberg family archives.
A proper tome made of leather. And there, on its dusty cover, is the symbol embossed in gold.
“It’s locked,” Twig says.
He’s right.
Its pages are sealed shut with a sturdy metal lock.
“Where’s the key?” I ask.
“If I had to guess, somewhere inside that estate you’re so obsessed with. This book was donated to me in 1995, along with several other volumes.”
“By who?”
“Denis Tulane.”
My mouth drops open.
Maggie waves her hand in my direction like one shooing away a fly. “We are acquainted.”
I stare incredulously. She knows more than anyone how hard Twig and I have tried to get an interview with Denis Tulane, and all this time, she’s known him? “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Because the last thing Denis needs is a couple kids bugging him about that disappearance. He’s been pestered enough. The man deserves some peace.”
Walt lifts his eyebrows imperiously. “Why would this gentleman donate a locked book without also giving you the key?”
“Who knows and who cares,” Maggie replies. “My favorite thing about this book is that lock.”
I blow on the cover, sending up a small cloud of dust. “What does the symbol mean?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Do you want to know what I think?” Walt asks.
“No,” Maggie replies.
“I think it’s probably something religious. Lots of old groups used to carve their beliefs into things. Cults. The Knights Templar.”
Maggie blinks at him. “Did you just lump the Knights Templar and cults into the same category?”
“The entire lot of them were executed on Friday the Thirteenth. That sounds pretty cultish to me.”
Maggie’s thin frame puffs with indignation. She’s so wound up, she doesn’t notice the mischievous wink Walt shoots at me and Twig. “Walter Jensen,” she scolds. “You know very well the Knights Templar were not killed on Friday the Thirteenth! They were arrested.”
Poe meows and weaves figure eights around Twig’s ankles.
He sneezes.
I take out my phone and snap a picture of the dusty tome while Maggie and Walt argue. The next time I see Jude, I’m going to show this to him. And maybe together, we can find the key.