“Teatime, Doctor.” Gabriel came in with a laden tray. “Your grandfather mentioned you like to have tea and biscotti at four o’clock.”
“It’s four already?” I stretched my shoulders. The first two charts had been particularly thick, and my database stretched to over a hundred columns.
“You must be working hard.” He poured the tea out of an antique silver pot into my favorite childhood mug, white with the picture of a black cat, its tail the handle.
“Where did you find that?”
“There’s a storeroom downstairs off the ballroom. Your grandfather mentioned he had saved several things for you down there.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“I only found exactly where it was this afternoon, and I didn’t want to disturb you. Every time I thought to ask you previously, you were out of the house. And chaos seems to follow you home.”
“I wonder what else is down there.”
“The room gets the afternoon sun, so it would be a good time to look. If you’re not making progress?” He inclined his head toward my computer screen.
“I am, but it’s slow. It’s progress by brute force, not finesse. I’d rather see if he left me anything of his own research to help give me a jump-start.”
“I understand.”
“Help me drink this tea, then, and we’ll see what we can find.”
The main entrance to the ballroom was down the steps that curved to the left of the front hall stairs. I had almost forgotten it existed, but when I was a child, my grandfather and I would go down there and have teatime— or he would have tea, and I would have milk and cookies. We’d sit in the middle of the big, dusty floor and look at the murals illuminated by the afternoon light. It made sense that his laboratory and whatever he left for me would be down there.
Gabriel had opened the heavy red velvet drapes, faded on the window side from years of sun exposure, and I caught my breath as I descended the stairs and saw the familiar floor. The butler’s footsteps marked a trail through the dust, as mine soon would. The marble had been cut and laid so as to mimic the pattern of light on the forest floor. Above me the domed ceiling with its chandelier that tinkled as I walked also displayed years of neglect, the paint and gold leaf from the night sky replete with stars starting to flake. Even so, it showed no evidence of moisture or mold. The walls of the ballroom by the stairs were covered in paintings of trees to give the impression of a forest. My grandfather had wanted to put new creatures in every year. He had done all the painting work himself and contracted the gold-leaf labor, and he had only made one addition. A black wolf peered at me from behind an oak tree, its golden eyes glowing in the afternoon light. It was so lifelike I caught my breath for a moment.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Gabriel’s voice made me jump even though I knew he was right behind me. “I found the room by following your grandfather’s footprints.”
“He never let it get this dusty. He’d always have someone from the village come in and clean it once a year.”
“It sounds like he was distracted for a bit.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me. When he was on the hunt, especially for knowledge, there was no turning him back.”
“What of your grandmother?”
“Died before I was born.”
“Ah.”
The door to the supposed storeroom was by the wolf, its handle concealed as a tree knot. The only time the outline of the door itself would be visible was now, in the late afternoon, as the sun shone directly into the room. By candlelight or chandelier it would blend into the forest painting. I turned the handle, my heartbeat loud in my ears.
The storeroom was lined with metal shelves like one would find in a lab, but no table stood in the middle. It was illuminated by a single bulb on a chain. The shelves were lined with a few boxes, but mostly with objects I fondly remembered from my childhood, toys and cups and even some of the old kitchen equipment like the cast-iron skillets he had taught me to make cornbread in. The boxes held old letters from me to my grandfather from during my school years. I would write to him and give him news about me and Andrew since my brother didn’t like to write as much as I did. Something tickled at the back of my brain, but I decided not to chase it and just let it lie dormant until I could tease it out with intuition.
In spite of the dustiness of the ballroom, this room seemed less dirty. Even the old toys showed no evidence of the dust and dinginess that should have accumulated over the course of twenty or so years. My grandfather must have moved them down here recently.
“Find anything?” This time Gabriel’s voice seemed an intrusion.
“Lots of things, but I’m not sure you’d find it interesting. Old toys and stuff, mostly. Did you take anything else out?”
“Only a cat statuette I thought would look charming on the kitchen windowsill.”
“A cat statuette? What did it look like?”
“It was a little angel cat with your name on it. I was going to show it to you this evening.”
A little angel cat? I didn’t remember one, but my grandfather had pointed my way to important volumes upstairs with statuettes like it. “Do you remember where it was?”
“I believe it was on the pile of boxes in the back, on top of the box with letters.”
Indeed, the back wall held only one set of shelves, the rest of it file boxes piled high. An angel cat. I had found the four terrestrial elements, but to balance them, one needed the fifth element of spirit.
“I think whatever I’m doing down here will bore you, Gabriel. Why don’t you go upstairs and continue doing what you were doing? And maybe Lonna would like some tea or coffee.”
“Yes, Madam.” I heard resentment in his tone, but this was something I wanted to handle alone. I opened the storeroom door all the way back on its hinges to let the light in the little room. Indeed, the back wall held a door set into the wall so closely that again, it required the sun to see it. I moved the boxes away from it, careful to keep them together in case they, too, held clues to this path my grandfather wanted me to follow. I also had to feel around for the handle to the door—the metal type that needed to be pulled out, then turned—but it moved easily and silently once I found it, and the heavy door opened back and into the laboratory I had only dreamed of.
The room took up the entire rest of the first floor of the house. It had formerly been the entertaining kitchen with two sinks, a long wooden prep table with marble top, and marble counters along all the walls. The basic equipment was still there, but now every surface was littered with different paraphernalia. I could only guess at the purpose of some of it. Row after row of long wooden test-tube racks with various substances, burners, and even a large piece of equipment that looked like something from a genetics lab crowded the room. I knew my grandfather had been very intelligent and had almost unlimited financial resources, but this was beyond anything I had ever expected to find at Wolfsbane Manor.
I searched for notes to see if he had written what he'd done, as most scientists would. Nothing. The directions must be in that pile of boxes in the storeroom. I looked around the lab one more time and promised I would be back. My fingers itched to play with the fancy toys all around me. But before I played, or even cleaned, I needed to know what he had done. The question was, where were his notes?
I returned to the storeroom and sifted through the boxes that had been directly in front of the door. I opened one to find letters in childish handwriting, the ones I remembered sending to my grandfather. Instead of being organized by date, they were tied in little bundles with ribbon. I put that box aside and moved on to the next one.
My heart skipped a beat when I saw more pediatric charts. A note in scrawled handwriting lay across the top of them:
The third and fourth boxes held more charts, these very old, including mine and my brother’s. There were also some other papers, yellowed and faded, that appeared to be birth and marriage certificates. I brought these up to the office first, then returned for the other two. I had no idea what the significance of any of it could be, only that
