Charles hadn’t managed to undo the knot that bound the oilskin package by the time the elevator opened. As they walked down the hall, Susan hissed at him,
“I can not believe you, Charles Oakenfeld! You almost gave everything away!”
“Oh relax, Susan.” Charles tugged at the string. “You don’t think our hundred-year-old doorman is actually going to believe we discovered the Sea of—”
“Sshh!”
At just that moment, the door to their apartment swung halfway open. Charles’s head snapped up. Some impulse made him want to hide the mysterious package, but there was neither place nor time.
“I thought I heard your precious voices,” their mother said sarcastically. “My dears, if there were a medal for bickering, I would be the proudest parent in the whole building.”
“Mum!” Susan said.
“What are you doing home so early?” Mrs. Oakenfeld smiled wanly.
“Brace yourselves. You’re in for a bit of a shock.” She pushed the door all the way open, revealing the diminutive form of Susan and Charles’s younger brother. Murray’s visible skin—his forearms and ankles and all of his face and neck—was spotted with angry pink dots.
“Murray!” Charles exclaimed. “Have you got chicken pox?”
“I’m afraid he has. He went for a play date with Davey Peterson on twelve. Apparently they don’t vaccinate in South Africa, where he’s from. And Murray was supposed to get his vaccination last year when you went up to your uncle’s.” Their mother shook her head. “Of course, Mrs. Peterson didn’t let him stay, but I’m afraid opening the door was all it took—it’s so contagious.”
Susan looked curiously at her youngest brother. “Davey Peterson? Isn’t he the first grader who spends all his time playing with that ant farm? I thought you didn’t even like him.”
Murray didn’t meet his sister’s gaze. He was too busy staring at the parcel in Charles’s hands. Now Mrs. Oakenfeld noticed it too.
“My goodness, Charles, whatever is that enormous package? Is it some sort of end-of-school thing?”
“It is the end of school!” Susan said before Charles could answer. “And he did receive it today.” She chose her words carefully so that, technically at least, she wasn’t lying.
“It looks quite impressive. Let’s see what it is.”
Their mother ushered them into the living room, where she fetched a pair of scissors from the credenza. Before she could snip the twine around the oilskin, however, her phone rang. Frowning at the caller ID, Mrs. Oakenfeld said, “Can’t those people get along without me for five minutes?” She handed the scissors to Susan and walked into the study.
Susan couldn’t help gloating just the tiniest little bit that her mother had handed the scissors to her. When Charles reached for them, she eluded his hand and deftly slipped the blade under the string and snipped it.
“Voilá,” she said. She had gotten an A on her French final that day, the fact of which she looked forward to announcing at dinner.
Charles was about to unfold the oilskin when Murray spoke for the first time.
“I won’t be going to Drift House with you.”
Susan and Charles looked up with horror.
“You have to go,” Charles said.
“Mum says it’s not safe for me to fly when I’m sick—and I could infect other people.”
“We’ll wait a week or two,” Susan said. “It—it just wouldn’t be the same without you.”
With a gesture the two older Oakenfelds had become very familiar with over the course of the past nine months, Murray reached a hand to his throat and pulled a small golden locket from inside his shirt. He began rubbing it idly as he always did, but then his pockmarked hand strayed to his equally spotted neck and began scratching that instead.
“I’m sorry. I just don’t think it’s wise.” Though he was only five, Murray sounded as though he were the eldest child explaining things to his much younger brother and sister—another circumstance the two older Oakenfeld children had grown used to in the eight months since their first trip to Drift House.
“Murray!” Susan exclaimed. “Did you—did you go to Davey Peterson’s on purpose? To get chicken pox, so you wouldn’t be able to go to Uncle Farley’s?”
Murray half smiled, half shuddered. “That ant farm is the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen. Davey keeps it on his bedside table, right next to his jaw expander. It makes me have nightmares of ants crawling in and out of my mouth.” Still rubbing the locket, he added, “Let’s just call it intuition. I think I should stay off the Sea of Time—something I know the two of you will be unable to do.”
At the mention of the Sea of Time, a thrill of anticipation ran down Charles’s spine. But go without Murray? It just didn’t seem right. “Do you—do you remember something?” he asked his little brother now. “A warning from the future?”
As a boy with a scientific bent, it was hard for Charles to make a statement that was so obviously contradictory. Yet as far as he and Susan knew, Murray had somehow journeyed into the future last fall, returning with the golden locket he never took off, along with a haze of memories of things that might—and then again, might not—come to pass. Charles had even crossed paths with an older version of his little brother, who had been sporting a purple vest and turban like the one Mr. Ramirez had described, not to mention a new name: Mario.
Which reminded Charles:
“Murray,” he said as he unfolded layer upon layer of oilskin. “Mr. Ramirez said the person who gave this to him was wearing a purple vest and a turban. Do you think it was—”
“Me?” Murray said, as if he’d anticipated the question.
“Mario, delivering a message from the future?” He shrugged. “It could have been. There’s certainly something about this book that has me all jittery.”
“Book!” Susan said. “How did you—oh!”
For Charles had pulled back the last flap of oilskin, revealing the elaborately tooled red leather cover of the biggest book either Oakenfeld had ever seen. Thirteen gold letters had been stamped into the cover:
“The… Lost… Cities.”
The words came out in a whisper. Susan wasn’t sure why she whispered. It just seemed like the kind of thing to say in a respectfully hushed voice. “And look,” she went on. “There was some kind of seal or insignia here, but it’s been pried off.”
It was true: below the title, seven horizontal lines, each shorter than the one above it, had been scored deeply into the cover. They floated in the middle of a guitar pick–shaped patch of leather that was darker than the rest of the cover, as if it had been protected from the elements for many years.
Susan allowed her finger to trace the grooves. Charles almost jerked the book away before Susan could touch it, but he was curious to see how she’d react when she put her finger on it. He studied her face carefully, but she showed no signs of experiencing the warm pulse on his lap. The fact that Susan didn’t seem to be feeling what he did filled him with elation, because he was convinced the book really was intended for him, no matter whose names had been on the label.
“Also?” Susan pointed out, since Charles was sitting there with a glazed look on his face. “There’s a note.” And she plucked a card from a fold of the oilskin.
This is all I can give you now.
I look forward to seeing you again.
Susan turned to Murray. He turned his palms up.
“I dunno. I could have sent it. I just don’t remember.”
Susan turned back to Charles, who stroked the book’s cover as though it were a half-tame buffalo. “Well, what are you waiting for? Open it!”
Charles was torn. He was aching to see what lay beneath those strangely empty lines. But he also wanted to have that experience all to himself. He was the one who felt the tingling, after all. He was the one the book was calling. He should have the privilege of seeing what was inside first.
He reached for a corner, but just as he did Mrs. Oakenfeld walked out of the study. Charles quickly slapped the oilskin back over the book.
“Dr. Amy beeped in,” Mrs. Oakenfeld said, sifting through a stack of mail. “She phoned in a prescription for an ointment to help the itching. I’m going to run out and get it—I’ll only be a minute.” As she picked up her purse, she added four words that struck a pit of terror in Charles’s stomach.
“Susan,” she said, “you’re in charge.”
An hour later, when Mrs. Oakenfeld returned, the book had disappeared, and Susan and Charles sat on opposite sides of the living room glaring at each other. Murray sat on a chair between them, playing Game Boy and scratching idly at his rash.
“You’ll never guess what happened downstairs,” Mrs. Oakenfeld said as she pulled a narrow white drugstore bag from her purse. “Apparently Mr. Ramirez took a nap in the mailroom. He got undressed and—” Mrs. Oakenfeld noticed her children’s stony silence for the first time. “Oh dear. Dare I ask?”
“You said I was in charge—”
“Susan was being a bossy—”
Mrs. Oakenfeld held up a hand.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you two. Lately you’ve done nothing but bicker and compete with each other. It’s not too late to sign you up for camp, you know. Hiking and swimming and singalongs and all that.”
It is a particular sort of child who finds the idea of hiking and swimming—and singalongs!—so unappealing that he or she wants to shriek in horror. As it happens, Susan and Charles were both that sort of child.
“No!” Susan exclaimed.
“Please!” Charles begged.
“We’re sorry. We promise to get along better.”
“Please please please let us go to Uncle Farley’s for the summer.”
“Children,” Mrs. Oakenfeld sighed. “I do not want you to be good to avoid being punished. I do not want you to be good so that you can receive rewards. I want you to be good,” she stressed, “because it is the right thing to do. You are very formidable adversaries. But don’t you see that when you work against each other, you just cancel each other out?”
Mrs. Oakenfeld let her words sink in for a moment, then put a hand on Murray’s shoulder. “Come along, dear, let’s see if we can’t do something about that rash. Don’t you want to take off that necklace Farley gave you?” she added. “It must be itching your neck awfully.”
But Murray, rubbing his locket with one hand and scratching his neck with the other, only said, “It’s all right, Mum. I’ll keep it on for a while longer.”