Why didn’t I bring a flashlight? She had to admit it-Tyler was better at this ninja spy-stuff than she was.
Her footsteps made little smacking noises as she crossed the library to the picture of Octavio Tinker. What was that thing in his hand, that weird brass tangle of curves and wheels? Why was it the brightest thing in the picture? The old man’s eyes seemed to sparkle with self-regard- I know and you don’t! He must have been as hard to put up with as Uncle Gideon.
Lucinda knew she should investigate the little room with the mirror-after all, that was where the other piece of journal had been found-but she honestly didn’t know whether or not she could walk into a place that Tyler said was haunted. Instead she stalled by exploring the rows and rows of books. A lot of the library was shelved in alphabetical order by subject. She found nothing under “Ordinary Farm,” although that seemed a little too obvious anyway, but she looked under “Tinker” and actually found a book about Octavio, titled Octavio Tinker, the Crystal Prophet. Her excitement faded a little when she saw that it was some sort of biography written for kids, a book at least sixty years old with corny-looking black-and-white photos and lots of weird diagrams. Still, she took it off the shelf. It might not be old Octavio’s journal but it was something.
She wandered up and down the aisles, scanning the shelves of books and trailing her fingers across their dusty spines. None of the volumes seemed to be newer than decades old, and none of them looked obviously like a journal, although it would take years to open them all and make sure. She was about to give up when something caught her eye.
Standard Valley.
There were at least a half dozen books in a row with those words on the cover. She pulled them from the shelf, tried to swipe the dust from the floor so she could sit, then realized it was hopeless and took them back to the chairs near the front of the building. Three of them were stapled piles of paper-Yokut County phone books (“containing Canning, Standard Valley, Tentpole, and Harper’s Creek”). There were no listings for Tinker or Ordinary Farm in any of them, so she put them aside. Another was a hardbound book from some organization called the California Grange titled Yokut County Grange, followed by a list of nearby towns, each one with a number, one of which was “Standard Valley #723.” She leafed through it, but it was just some kind of farming thing with information about water rights and who to contact in Sacramento or Washington, D.C., about various farming problems. She flipped it onto the pile with the phone books.
The last one didn’t look any more interesting than the others-something titled Building Allotments and Land Surveys of Standard Valley, 1963 -but it fell open right to a page titled “Property: O. Tinker,” a sort of blueprint drawing of buildings and other things. Even as she stared at it, something like a cool breeze whispered down the stacks, ruffling her hair and making her gasp. She looked around in surprise but the library was empty and all the windows she could see were closed.
Lucinda hurriedly shelved the other books, but held on to the land surveys. Then she took a deep breath as she walked back across the library to the door between the shelves-Tyler’s haunted mirror room. The key was still in the lock.
After the chilly visitation she had just experienced her brother’s talk of ghosts seemed even more meaningful than before. She really, really didn’t want to go in. Still, as she turned and saw old Octavio’s painted, half-amused eyes on her, she knew she didn’t want to just walk out, either. This was a mystery. This was an adventure. She reminded herself of all the brave heroines in the books she’d read, took one more breath, and walked in, the book clutched to her chest like armor.
It doesn’t feel any more haunted than the rest of the library, she told herself. It was just old, and dusty, and probably-ick-spidery.
She forced herself forward. Like it or not, she’d have to pull out all the dresser drawers and see if anything had fallen down behind them. She should probably look under the bed as well, the horrible, cobwebby bed…
She stopped, staring into the mirror. No one looked back but herself, so for a moment she didn’t even understand why she felt so alarmed. Then she saw that on the wall in the mirror room somebody had written a word in the dust: OLIS. She turned, hoping that the strange word would be there too, in the real room, that it was just some stupid thing her brother had traced on the wall… but it wasn’t. The strange word only existed in the mirror.
Lucinda didn’t stop running until she was back in the overgrown garden. The sun was going down and a little wind had sprung up, but this time the cooling breezes of the outside world were welcome.
She was walking along toward the kitchen door in the growing dark when a tall figure stepped out of the shadows, startling her so that she almost dropped the book clutched to her chest.
“What you doing, missy?” It was Caesar, the man who brought Gideon his trays and who helped out around the house. He looked at her with concern. “You look like you seen a haunt.”
She actually laughed-he didn’t know how right he was! Or maybe he did. She didn’t know and she didn’t care. She was sick of mysteries and just wanted to get into her room and pull the blankets over her. “I’m okay.”
“Didn’t mean to scare you. Just taking the old vegetables and such out to the compost heap.” He showed her the bag in his hand. “What you doing running around in the nearly dark?”
“Just… exploring.”
He shook his head. “This not the best place to go exploring after dark. ’Spose they already told you that.”
“Everybody told us that. But they won’t tell us why.”
He gave her a strange look. “And you and your brother all bound and determined to find out, huh?” He shook his head again, slowly, as though he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it. He bent down until his dark, broad face was at the same level as her own. His breath smelled like cinammon. “Look here,” he whispered. “I’ll tell you this for free. You seen the best part. You seen the animals, them unicorns and all. Now go on home. There’s other things happened here ain’t so nice. Not so pretty. You and your brother too young to get tangled up in this kind of nonsense-that old man and his crazy notions-and we’ve had some bad people here too. You go on home.”
“What?” she asked as he straightened up. “What do you mean?”
“You heard me,” he said quietly as he walked past her, headed for the vegetable garden. When he spoke again, it was in a normal tone-a little loud, even, as though someone else might be listening. “You have a nice evening, now, missy.”
As he vanished into the gloom, he was singing a slow song Lucinda didn’t recognize.
“The big bell’s tolling in Galilee
Ain’t going to tarry here
Ohhhh Lordy
Ain’t going to tarry here…”
Chapter 18
R agnar appeared at breakfast and announced to everyone in the kitchen, “I have news, but it is not very good, I’m afraid. Alamu found his way into the Sick Barn and took the unhatched egg. Now we will not be able to study it to learn what went wrong.”
“Oh, no.” Lucinda looked really upset. Tyler usually teased her about her obsession with cute little baby animals-she loved any nature program with tiger or bear or lion cubs-but he felt the sadness too. These were the only dragons in the world, after all: if they couldn’t reproduce, they would also be the last. “When did it happen?” he asked Ragnar.
“In the dawn. He fooled us, for he usually sleeps until the sun is high. Haneb saw him flying away with it in his mouth.”
Colin Needle had just walked into the room. “That’s terrible news!” he said, then began filling his plate.
The rest of July was hurrying past in a round of daily chores and other even less satisfying activities. Tyler
