Know Your Enemy

IT IS A maddening fact of life: while you may have a plan of the absolute top-most importance, a million silly chores pop up as hurdles to your great endeavor. Perhaps you are a great inventor, but your glorious doohickey languishes in your laboratory while you vacuum the carpets for an upcoming visit from Granny. Or perhaps you are a great explorer itching to discover a new island, but first you must see the dentist about getting a cavity filled.

Or maybe, like Anastasia, you are an aspiring detective-veterinarian-artist heck-bent on finding your newly lost father by way of your long-lost grandfather, but a mountain of schoolwork blockades your way.

At least, Anastasia pondered, she had a wonderful study spot. A magnificent study spot. The sort of study spot that kindled the special, cozy, open-a-book-and-fall-in region of the bibliophile brain. Cavepearl Library was a big, long cavern with roaring fireplaces and squishy leather chairs and behemoth wooden tables glittering with magnifying glasses and microscopes and all other kinds of neat doodads. Dozens upon dozens of Baldwin’s beloved cuckoo clocks roosted on the walls.

And, of course, Cavepearl Library was brimful of books: large, important books with gold letters on their spines, and humble little volumes that peeped out from between them, and magazines and scrolls and scientific journals, and even (and most important, in Anastasia’s estimation) a complete set of all the Francie Dewdrop novels ever published. These books lined the cavern walls from stalagmite to stalactite, and rolling ladders ran in tracks along the floor so the intrepid bookworm could scale stories of rungs to retrieve an album from the tippy-top shelves.

Penny, the most intrepid bookworm of them all, now perched at the zenith of one of these ladders. “I’m so pleased that young Angus Wata is interested in astronomy,” she called, tugging a volume loose. “I’m going to make a nice research list for you two!”

“Thanks,” Anastasia said, but her eyes were on the Francie Dewdrop collection. How might Francie approach the Mystery of the Missing King? It was a cold case, which is detective jargon for an old, unsolved mystery. Cold cases are especially tricky, because the clues have moldered or dried up. For example: Nicodemus had disappeared centuries earlier. Time had likely swept away any sort of physical evidence. Calixto Swift was long dead, and his descendants were who knew where.

Anastasia frowned. Francie’s investigations percolated with piping-fresh clues, like new footprints to track or a telltale button popped from a villain’s cummerbund. Anastasia scanned the Francie Dewdrop titles: The Case of the Pilfered Waffles…Enigma of the Underground Maze…Ah! The Great Caboose Puzzler. Anastasia had, of course, read that one, because she had read all of them. In The Great Caboose Puzzler, Francie studied old newspaper articles to prove, once and for all, the real culprits behind a Wild West train robbery.

Anastasia’s attention now flicked to the other books in the library. She wouldn’t learn anything by scouring the ground for footprints and buttons, but perhaps some clues nestled within the pages of the Cavelands history tomes.

Reader, perhaps you are familiar with the military strategies of Sun Tzu, a brilliant general and tactician who lived over two thousand years ago. If so, you will recognize this bit of sage advice: know your enemy. That is to say, the more you study your adversary, the better you can calculate their motives and moves. Anastasia resolved to find out as much as she could about Calixto Swift. If she learned what made him tick, perhaps she could deduce where he might hide a hammer and chest and Shadowman. And that would lead her to Fred McCrumpet.

“Anastasia, dear,” Penny prompted gently, coming down the ladder. “How is your Echolalia coming along?”

“Fine.” Anastasia pantomimed jotting answers on her worksheet as her aunt stacked the astronomy tomes on one of the tables. “Aunt Penny?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Do you have a book on the—er—history of the Dastardly Deed? Marm Pettifog is making us write an essay. And I need to learn about Calixto Swift.”

This was a fib. Some nitpickers might even have called it a lie. Either way, it fooled Penny, that purehearted librarian. “Why, of course! We have a splendid history collection.” She scaled the ladder halfway, and then she gave a mighty kick, propelling it and herself across the wall. Anastasia watched closely. She didn’t need a book for a Pettifog paper, of course. But she wanted to see where Penny kept the history section, and she couldn’t very well tell her the real reason.

Nope. For this investigation, Anastasia was a secret agent. She was a dauntless detective posing as a mild-mannered egghead. “I just want to do well in school,” she added for good measure.

She may as well have shouted, Open sesame! Soon a small treasure trove of books cluttered her study table, bearing promising titles such as: A Detailed History of the Dastardly Deed, Scoundrels and Silver Miners: Witches in the Eighteenth Century, and most delectable of all, Ye Olde Compleat Unauthorized Biography of the Treacherous Villain Calixto Swift.

“I hope reading about these things won’t distress you, child.” Penny placed Calixto Swift’s Many-Marveled Inventions (Stinker Though He Was) atop the pile. “These events affected all Morfolk, but especially our family.”

“It’s okay.” Anastasia shrugged. “Everyone else knows about it. I should, too.”

Clockwork ground and Baldwin’s giddy tick-tockers all vomited forth their screaming birds. Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

“Seven o’clock already!” Baldwin roused from his hearthside nap. “Dinnertime! Chef’s prepared us a proper fondue dinner, Anastasia. Some yummy molten cheese will fuel your intellect!”

Anastasia wrenched her gaze from the Dastardly annals. “I hope so,” she said. She would need every last iota of brainpower to unravel the mystery and secrecy and witchery tangling the string of clues leading to her missing kinsfolk.