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‘This isn’t about George.’
The exchange revealed nothing to the twins, except that Custer and Rodeo Dave knew each other.
‘Hop aboard!’ Rodeo Dave called over the grumbling engine. Jack looked at Jaide, who shrugged. The chassis hardly shifted as they climbed in, Jack in the front, marvelling at the chrome-finished dashboard and the depth of the seats, and Jaide in the seemingly infinite rear.
Susan hurried out of the house carrying packed lunches, as though they were going to school. She gave them to the twins with a kiss each goodbye, and waved as the giant automobile slid smoothly into motion. They watched her recede into the distance behind them. Custer disappeared as though he had never been there.
‘This is Zebediah,’ said Rodeo Dave over the engine noise, patting the dashboard. ‘I only bring him out for special occasions.’
‘What’s the occasion?’ asked Jaide, wondering if this had something to do with Grandma’s accident. Could he be hiding the van to get rid of evidence?
‘Zebediah creates the occasion,’ he said. ‘Without Zebediah, this’d just be another ordinary Wednesday. And that’s absolutely what it should not be.’
Jack couldn’t believe the car was going to fit down the lane, but it did, just.
‘Where do you keep him?’
‘Gabe Jolson lets me use the dealership’s shed on Station Street. Zebediah doesn’t take up much space when you park him carefully.’
Gabe Jolson ran Portland’s sole car yard, Gabriel’s Auto Sales. Rather like the Book Herd, the twins had hardly ever seen anyone looking at the cars, let alone buying one.
Zebediah glided through the town like cruise liner, barely bumping when they went over the bridge, and turning into corners as smoothly as cream. People stopped to look as the car swept by, and some of them even waved. It was as Rodeo Dave had said – Zebediah did create an occasion. Jack would have liked to drive around a little longer, but it seemed to take them no time at all to reach the castle gates.
Thomas Solomon waved Rodeo Dave into a parking space large enough for Zebediah. Dave put on the handbrake and turned the key. With a smooth clearing of its mechanical throat, the car’s engine shut down.
‘I reckon you can leave the top open,’ Thomas Solomon said to Rodeo Dave. ‘No rain forecast today.’
Jaide looked up. The sky was cloudy, with patches of blue. It seemed the weird weather of the previous days had passed.
As she slid across the back seat to come out the far door, she saw a ginger tail poking out from under the front seat. She reached down and tugged on it gently.
The tail retracted and Ari’s face appeared.
‘Hey, watch it!’ he hissed.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Shhh. I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on you.’
‘Why?’
‘Who knows? I think Custer wants me out of the way so Kleo can get up to . . . whatever it is she’s getting up to.’
That was a possibility, Jaide thought. If Ari suspected that there was a giant, vulnerable bird cooped up, who knew what he might get up to? But couldn’t it also be that Custer didn’t trust them? Or maybe it was Rodeo Dave he didn’t trust . . .
She wished they’d had time to talk to Custer properly that morning. It occurred to her only then to wonder if Rodeo Dave’s arrival had been timed to cut them off.
‘All right,’ she whispered. ‘You stay there and I won’t say anything. Just try not to get in our way, okay? We’ve got something important to do.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said before she could explain. ‘I don’t care a bit for old books. I’m mainly here for the mice.’
‘Coming, Jaide?’ asked Rodeo Dave.
‘Uh, yeah, just getting my bag.’
Ari stayed under the seat as Jaide left the car, slammed the door behind her with an echoing boom, and ran to catch up with Jack and Rodeo Dave as they crossed the moat bridge to the castle. Rodeo Dave had a backpack of his own, filled with things that rattled and clanked. He didn’t explain what they were, but it certainly didn’t sound like lunch. He had left his cowboy hat behind, on the car’s dashboard.
Nothing had changed inside the castle. Everything was frozen just as it had been for all the years after Young Master Rourke had moved out. Jack assumed that other assessors would be moving in at some point, to look over the furniture, paintings, and other valuable items. Hopefully that wouldn’t happen before they had found the Card of Translocation.
Rodeo Dave put his backpack on the floor of the library and took stock of the job ahead of them.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Here’s how we start. I’ve made a rough list of the titles across these three shelves. I need you to take the books out, check them off against the list, dust the covers, and put them carefully in the boxes over there. If I’ve missed a book, write in the title, author, publisher and year of publication on the right side of the list. If anything looks really fragile, leave it where it is. Don’t even try to dust it. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ said Jack.
‘I’m going to check the collection in the lodge. It’s mostly paperbacks, but even so, some of those old pulps can be very valuable. You’ll be okay here while I’m gone?’
‘We’ll be fine,’ said Jaide.
He nodded, picked up his backpack, and left.
‘That’s great,’ whispered Jack. ‘Now we can start looking!’
‘Not yet,’ Jaide said. ‘First we have to wait, in case he doubles back to get something and catches us gone. We also need to make it look like we did some work. We don’t want to make him suspicious.’
‘What if the card is in the lodge?’
‘He’s already searched it – or someone has – and it wasn’t there. I don’t know why he’s searching again. Let’s get started, Jack. Otherwise he’ll come back before we’ve even gone.’
Together they went through about half the shelves Dave had indicated, marking off and cleaning the books, flicking through them as they went, before boxing them up as instructed. They were soon filthy, with blackened fingers, and dust and cobwebs in their hair. Jack had found an old notebook (blank) slipped between two volumes of a massive history of the steam engine, and Jaide had found the skeleton of a mouse or a small rat squashed under a giant book about ship maintenance, but apart from that they found nothing out of the ordinary. No gold card, and no map showing them where it might be hidden, either. Just books, the bust of Mister Rourke, and the painting of the woman in yellow, smiling to herself as though she knew something they didn’t.
Jack put his latest armful of books onto the ground, puffing up a cloud of dust that triggered a coughing fit.
‘I think it’s been long enough now, Jaide, don’t you?’ he said when he had recovered.
‘All right.’ She climbed down from the low ladder she was using to check the top shelves. ‘Let’s go.’
They took the ring of keys and the witching rod from Jaide’s pack and eased slowly through the library door, after first checking for anyone in the hallway outside. It was empty, apart from several enormous tapestries, two suits of armour, and one wooden chest. The air was still and quiet. The only echoes came from the small sounds they made as they shuffled forward and stood for a moment, deciding where to go first. There was no sign of Ari.
‘Let’s try the keys in the chest,’ whispered Jack. ‘It l
ooks locked.’
There was no doubt of that. A huge iron padlock hung off the front, shaped like a lion and as big as two fists gripping each other.
Jack moved forward to try one of the keys in the lock, but Jaide held him back.
‘Let’s test the witching rod first, before we know what’s in there,’ she said, raising the bent wire and holding it in the way the Compendium had recommended. The wire was surprisingly difficult to keep still, once it was under tension. It flexed and shifted in her hand like a kitten ready to spring on a toy, and it took all her concentration to keep it steady.
She swept it across the wall in front of her, and felt nothing more than its usual jitteriness. They moved closer and she tried again. The wire felt taut in her hand, but it didn’t bend down towards the chest.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Okay, open it.’
Jack looked at the lock and then at the ring of keys in order to choose one at random. As he held the ring up, however, one of the keys swung out so it was pointing at the lock, as though magnetic. It looked like it would fit, so he slid it into the lock and tried to turn it. For a moment, it was stuck. He jiggled it a little and it went in far enough for him to turn it with ease.
The lock clicked open, but it took both of them to lift the mighty lid. When it fell back against the wall with an echoing boom, Jaide gasped with surprise. A hideous face was staring up at them with wide, staring eyes and long, sharp teeth.
Then she laughed.
‘Another head!’ she said.
This time it was a bear’s head, stuffed and mounted, mouth open as though roaring. Its fur was matted and covered with dust.
Jack let out a sigh of relief. His heart was pounding, too, but at least this head wasn’t likely to come alive and bite them, if the witching rod was to be believed. And now they knew that the skeleton key worked perfectly.
‘Let’s shut it again,’ he said. ‘Then go get Professor Olafsson.’
‘All right. Hey, look – more whales.’
The underside of the lid was engraved with whales, whaling boats and sailors with harpoons.
‘The Rourkes were obsessed,’ said Jaide. ‘There are whales everywhere.’
