“A book,” she said, and a whole section of my logic and my mind collapsed.
“What book?”
“A handmade book,” she said. “Bound in leather with sheets of goatskin instead of paper. Handwritten and dating from the early part of the eighteenth century.”
My heart was beating fast enough to burst. I glanced at Fearless. He didn’t seem to have any reaction at all. Maybe he didn’t connect my prize with Winifred’s loss.
“Why would he take that? Was it valuable?”
“It’s a treasure,” Leora assured me. “More valuable than all the other riches of my family put together.”
I really didn’t want to hear any more. I stood up and went to the door. I pushed it open and looked outside as if maybe I had heard something. I was looking for cool air to clear my head but the night was still hot.
“. . . IT’S A FAMILY HEIRLOOM,” Leora was saying to Fearless when I turned back into the room.
My mind was racing for an answer while she spoke. I didn’t want to give up the book. I wouldn’t give up the book. It was mine. I found it.
“. . . for more than two centuries,” Leora said. “The first woman to write in it was Gheeza Manli, the first woman of the Fine family born here in America. From her time until now our family has kept a diary of our American experience.”
“You say it was started in about seventeen hundred?” I asked.
“No, she said eighteen hundred,” Fearless said.
“Eighteenth century,” Leora corrected.
Fearless didn’t know what she meant so he sat back and let us talk.
“So you sayin’ that you got a goatskin book that couldn’t have more than a hundred fifty, two hundred pages that’s got two hundred fifty years of family entries?”
“Three hundred pages,” she said. “And there are four books. They’ve been in our family for generations. The book that was stolen was the first one, the one that Gheeza Manli wrote in. Winifred’s the current keeper. She was going to teach Son to do it.”
“Why not you?”
“I didn’t want to live at home, and Aunt Winnie wouldn’t let the books out of the house. Anyway, she detested Brown because he always stood up to her.”
“And that’s what Kit stoled?” Fearless asked.
“Yes. BB told him about it. When we were kids Aunt Winnie would take us to her secret library and tell us about our family history. BB was never very interested but he knew where it was.”
“Did the Wexlers know?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What about Oscar?”
“What about him?”
“Where does he come into the story?”
“He’s the one who told me about the book being missing.”
“Does Winnie know about it?”
“Not yet. The only reason Oscar knows is that it just happened to be time for him to clean out that little room. Aunt Winnie calls it a shrine.”
My respect for Bartholomew Perry’s intelligence rose then. He sent in a thief to grab his family’s most precious treasure, and if the thief got caught he could say that he was there trying to get a mother back together with her son. If he was lucky Winifred would be so distracted by the loss of Son that she wouldn’t know about the real theft until Maestro Wexler called.
35
FEARLESS ELECTED TO TAKE LEORA to Esau’s. I stayed behind in Milo’s office. It was my time to shine. I knew almost everything, even what people didn’t know. The one piece that was missing was the identity of the man who had killed the Wexlers and Kit. I would have liked to know that man’s face and name for my own security and peace of mind.
But the biggest problem was Winifred Fine’s family journal. That was what everyone was after. That’s why people were getting killed. And I wanted that book for myself. The only thing I had ever wanted more was the ability to read. When I was a child I fantasized about a book like that, a book written by intelligent Negro minds that told the truth about some shred of our history. I didn’t care so much about slavery or racism. I didn’t want to know about abuses as much as I wanted to know what people were thinking, my people. Everybody else had it: the English, Irish, French, and Russians; the Chinese, Indians, Tibetans, and Jews; even the Mayans and Egyptians had hieroglyphics, and the Australian Aborigines had paintings that went back before all of them. The stolen book was all of that and more for me.
Was it worth my life? No, but maybe I wouldn’t die. There was no one except possibly Fearless who knew I had the book. He wouldn’t turn me over. All I had to do was make sure I knew who the threat was. If I knew the threat I could avoid the problem. That’s what I told myself.
