Ben was wide awake. He looked at his phone for the sixth time—only eleven forty-five. He was supposed to be napping, but he just couldn’t get comfortable. Or shut off his thinker.
He heard low, regular breathing from underneath the table along the other wall of the library workroom—Gerritt wasn’t snoring, but he was definitely asleep. And just a foot away, by the dim light of his phone, he could see Jill’s face—calm, completely composed, a slight smile on her lips, out cold. The phone winked off, but the image of her face was still there, lit up in his mind. A good face.
When Mrs. Sinclair had let them into the school and then led them to the library, Ben had pointed at a painting on the hallway wall and whispered, “What happened there?”
It was a large painting, almost three feet wide, and it was one of Ben’s favorites—a winter scene of Edgeport Harbor, painted in 1822. But now the entire thing was covered with a white plastic wrap.
Mrs. Sinclair didn’t slow down, didn’t answer until she’d unlocked the darkened library and let them inside. When the door was shut behind them, she spoke softly. “That painting? A group from the town manager’s office came through, and all the paintings and everything else that’s hanging on the walls of the school has been wrapped and labeled—some things will go to the library, some to the historical society, some to the new school, and a few are going to the Peabody Essex Museum. They’ll all be taken away tomorrow after school, before the salvage crew comes in to remove the doors and the cabinets, all the old hardware and fixtures—anything that can be sold or reused. Before the demolition starts.”
Her answer had shocked him, and as Mrs. Sinclair opened the workroom and showed them where they’d be hiding out, Ben had had trouble paying attention. Because there were all these people—dozens, maybe hundreds of serious, careful people—who were already starting to treat the school like it was dead. It reminded him of a nature program he’d seen, where a fallen zebra got torn to pieces and carried off in different directions by lions and hyenas and jackals.
And now, lying on the carpeted floor underneath a table, hidden behind cardboard packing boxes and stacks of books, with Jill and Robert sound asleep nearby, that image of the zebra came to haunt him again. He couldn’t remember a moment when he’d felt more uncertain, or more alone.
No . . . that wasn’t quite true. The afternoon when his mom and dad had told him they were going be separated? That was worse. But this was a close second. He hated thinking about that huge pack of predators, circling around the school, nipping, biting, getting ready to rush in for the kill. Ben shivered at the thought.
I can’t just lie here, not until two a.m.—no way!
Because that was Gerritt’s plan—get inside, hide in a safe place, lay low until Lyman and Wally were asleep, and then sneak up to the third floor and figure out how to “climb aloft.”
Ben turned carefully onto his back and lit up his phone again. All the pictures he’d been looking at this afternoon on his iPad were also on the phone—the complete photographic record of their hunt for the safeguards. The pictures were hard to see on the little screen. Jill’s mom had brought their backpacks and given them to Mrs. Sinclair before the concert, and his was under the table, down near his feet. So his iPad was close. But turning onto his back had made Jill stir, and he didn’t want to risk disturbing her rest just so he could have a bigger screen to look at.
He scrolled through all the pictures, one by one, not fast, not slow, just letting his mind roll along with the flow of the past twenty-six days. And where there were gaps in the pictures, his mind filled in the other events—like the day after school when that sleazy real estate lawyer had come to talk to his mom . . . or when he’d sailed down to Duxbury and back with his dad over Memorial Day weekend. So much had happened.
He had some great pictures of Jill. Robert too; lots of good shots of Gerritt. But the pictures he looked at the longest were the ones of Jill—until he noticed that was what he was doing.
When he got to the last of the pictures, the ones he’d taken today, Ben checked the time again—eleven fifty-eight, not even midnight. Two more hours.
Ben pulled in a deep breath, then let it out slowly.
He clicked on the first photograph and began again, scrolling through the pictures. This time, he forced himself to slow down, made himself look carefully at every picture, made himself think.
If I go slowly enough, it might eat up a whole half hour. . . . It might even put me to sleep.
Of the first twenty pictures or so, about half of them were shots of the pages of the big book about the building of the school, the one with the great drawings the carpenter had made. Except on the phone screen, all of John Vining’s drawings were ridiculously small.
This is nuts. . . . The book itself is only thirty feet away . . . and getting over there without waking anyone up? That would be a worthy test of my ninja skills!
Except . . . what if Lyman or Wally walked past on patrol?