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“I’m not a thief,” he explained.
“You can still go back and pay,” she said, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand.
“Don’t think my card from the future will work,” he reflected glumly. “Probably should have thought about that before we ordered.” He gave her a sidelong look. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” she said, warmed by his question, by his concern. “I mean I’m not. But I will be. This was the worst thing ever but... but it was also the best. It was life-changing.” She gestured at the diner, shaking herhead. “I spoke to my grandfather. I could speak to him again if I wanted, as many times as I want.”
“If you have the book,” Drummond said, his voice quiet.
“How could you destroy it?” Cassie pleaded. “There must be other ways to protect the books in your library. You want to destroy this book to protect other books—it doesn’t make sense!”
Drummond thought for a while, his narrowed gaze peering through the rain. Then he asked, “Can I show you something? Can you use the book and take us somewhere else?”
“Why?” she asked.
“I said I’d show you what the Book of Doors could do, which I’ve done. And then I said I’d show you why I had to hide the library. I said I’d show you the threat. If you’re willing, I can show you.”
She held his gaze for a moment, and then nodded once.
It was a hot New York summer, the same year that Cassie met her grandfather, but a few months earlier. Cassie and Drummond were sitting at one of the tables in Bryant Park, shaded by the trees and facing the back of the New York Public Library. The heat was helping dry them off after the rain in Oregon. The heat felt good to Cassie. Like a warm bed on a cold day.
It was lunchtime and the office workers from nearby buildings were out drinking coffees and eating sandwiches, sunbathing on the grass. For Cassie everything she saw was familiar and forgotten—a place she knew well but dressed as it had been a decade before. The clothes were different, as were the shapes of the passing vehicles, and even the posters and advertisements, shouting about long-forgotten television shows and movies.
“So why are we here?” Cassie asked.
“I just want to see my friends again,” Drummond said, sounding distracted. He smiled a sad sort of smile. “You saw your grandfather. I want to see my friends.”
They sat in silence, because Cassie didn’t think Drummond wanted to talk, not yet, and she was content to sit and reflect on the meeting with her grandfather. Already it was starting to feel intangible anddreamlike, as if it hadn’t really happened. She wondered what he was doing now, how he was dealing with having met an older version of his granddaughter. And she wondered now about all those times she had been with him as the younger Cassie, all those days after that meeting in the diner. Had he looked at her differently? Had he spoken to her differently, in the knowledge of the woman she would become? She wished she had been more attentive as a teenager, maybe she would have seen something.
“There they are,” Drummond said, flicking his head toward the entrance to the park from Forty-Second Street. Cassie saw two women walking toward a table in the sunlight and sitting down together. One of the women was Asian, short and stocky, and dressed in a bright red summer dress and white running shoes. She was listening intently to her companion, a tall woman with light brown skin and short white hair. She wore a pastel blue suit and blouse, with a multicolored scarf hanging around her neck and thick-framed glasses on her face. She was smiling as she was talking, like she was recounting some funny story.
“Who are they?” Cassie asked.
“That’s Lily and Yasmin,” Drummond said. “Lily is from Hong Kong.Was.Was from Hong Kong.” He frowned as he kicked himself for his own mistake. “She ran a small luxury hotel on Hong Kong Island. Yasmin was Egyptian. She was a historian.”
“So who are they? Are they book hunters?”
“No,” Drummond said. “Not book hunters. Book hunters pursue books for profit, or to use the books for their own ends. But Lily and Yasmin, they were like me. Interested in the books, but wary of them.”
“Wary how?”
“Like we had to be careful with them, just like any other precious item. Lily had two books herself. And Yasmin had three. And there, that man...” Drummond pointed to the other side of the park where a tall, skinny man with a lined face and spiky dark hair was walking. “That is Wagner, from Germany, the man I told you about earlier. He’s a physicist.”
“Was,” Cassie said.
Drummond looked at her sharply. “That’s right, hewasa physicist.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that,” Cassie said, regretting her words. “I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”
“I know,” Drummond said, mustering a smile that showed he meant it.
Wagner was dressed in a light summer shirt open at the neck and light green corduroy trousers. He was carrying a backpack over one shoulder. “He had two books as well,” Drummond continued.
The man joined the two women at the table. There were smiles and hugs and laughter and Cassie could see that these people were friends, that there was real affection there.
“Wagner inherited his books from his family,” Drummond said, watching the group. “Just as I did. That’s how I met them. At one time or another they had all come to me with questions about books, and I had spoken to them about some of the books in the Fox Library. We ended up forming a small group of like-minded people. And at least once a year, we would all meet to catch up, to discuss the world of special books, recent discoveries. All that sort of stuff.”
“What, like a magic convention?” Cassie smirked.
