Nineteen

Other voices rose, sharp and angry.

“Mom,” Pip whispered. They rushed back to the top of the stairs, trying not to make any noise. Otto had closed the door most of the way when he left, so they could peer through the crack together. All they could see from this angle were feet, and only because the people were standing right in front of the tall fireplace, but that was enough to see what was going on. Ms. Foster’s sharp heels stood in front of Otto’s scuffed-up, dirty sneakers and a pair of black, polished men’s shoes. It looked like the man had Otto by the arms.

“Otto, darling,” Ms. Foster said. “We have been looking all over for you. You’ve had us quite worried. Practically beside ourselves.”

“We know what you’re doing,” Otto said. “We’ll stop you.”

“Yes,” Ms. Foster said, unconcerned. “We. Where is my daughter? And the delightful Eleanor Barton?”

“You’ll never find them,” Otto said.

“We’ll see about that,” Ms. Foster replied. More footsteps approached. Two more men. “Take him out to the car. And search this house. Top to bottom.”

Pip’s hands tightened on the walking stick, but Eleanor shook her head. There was no way they could fight a bunch of adults. They’d just get captured themselves.

Pip glared at her, but she knew Pip wasn’t really angry at her. She was angry at the men below.

“They’re so well hidden, you could look all day and never find them!” Otto yelled as they dragged him off. He was telling them to stay put. And Eleanor didn’t see what else they could do.

Ms. Foster stayed behind. She turned in a circle, like she was looking around the room. There were tiny daggers painted on the backs of her high-heeled shoes.

“Unacceptable,” she muttered. “Simply unacceptable.” She sighed. “It will all work out. You’ve planned for every eventuality. You have this under control.”

Eleanor and Pip exchanged bemused looks. Eleanor supposed that it was a good sign that Ms. Foster had to give herself a pep talk. She just wished the woman didn’t sound quite so cheered up by it. Pip gave a shrug as if to say She’s always like this.

“And of course Claire’s daughter would be the one to cause so much trouble,” she continued. “Always such a troublemaker herself, sneaking off with that boy of hers. I wonder if the girl shows any . . . Not that it will matter, after tonight.”

Eleanor thought she was talking to herself, but then a floorboard creaked, and a new voice spoke. “Why do I get the feeling you’re making excuses?” a man asked. A shudder of fear went through Eleanor at the first word. Pip stifled a gasp, and they grabbed each other’s hands tight. The man had a strange voice. Like honey and like vinegar. Eleanor couldn’t see his feet, or any part of him. “You don’t need to make excuses, Delilah. They don’t matter one bit to me or to my sisters. Either you bring the children to the doorway after dark, or you don’t. We will be just fine either way. You, on the other hand . . .” He chuckled. “You know the deal. We’ll see you after sunset, at the place it all began.”

The floorboards creaked. Ms. Foster let out a sigh. “What a horrible man,” she muttered, and then she walked away, too, her heels click-clack-clicking on the floor.

Eleanor eased the door shut.

“What are you doing?” Pip whispered.

“They’re going to look all over the house. So we need to hide in here until they’re gone,” Eleanor said. “Then we’ll go after Otto.”

“We can’t let them take him. Who knows what they’ll do to him?” Pip replied, nearly forgetting to whisper in her agitation. “They don’t know we’re here. We can sneak up behind them and—”

“And what? Hit them with a stick? Then what?” Eleanor demanded. “We can’t just charge right in!”

“What if they hurt him? We have to—”

“You heard him. Mr. January. He said that they had to bring us to the door after dark. They don’t have any reason to hurt Otto until then.”

“So what, we do nothing?”

Eleanor balled her hands into fists. She was right. She knew she was right. But so was Pip. Hunkering down here until dark didn’t solve anything. They needed a plan, but she couldn’t think of one. There were too many pieces missing. “What would Otto say?” she asked.

“‘We need to collect more data,’” Pip said in an exaggerated version of Otto’s usual hyper-fast voice.

“I think Otto would be right,” Eleanor said. “Charging in isn’t the answer, and neither is sitting around doing nothing. There are still things we don’t understand. Let’s look around in here first. We can’t go anywhere else right now, anyway. Not with the Society searching the house.”

Pip nodded reluctantly, though her hands were tight around the walking stick, and Eleanor could tell that she was thinking about how it would feel to wallop one of the January Society goons with it.

“This is like a museum,” Pip said, speaking each word slowly as she thought it through. “So shouldn’t there be some kind of . . . record or something? A list of what’s here and what it’s for?”

Eleanor perked up. “The desk at the back, maybe?”

Pip held out her hand, and Eleanor took it, not sure which of them needed the contact and reassurance more. Pip pulled them to the back of the room.

The desk looked familiar, and Eleanor stared at it for several seconds before she realized where she’d seen one like it before. “This looks like your mom’s desk,” she said.

“That’s what I was thinking,” Pip exclaimed. The legs were carved with the same sort of gnarled tree trunk shape. It wasn’t exactly the same—the corners were curved instead of straight, and the wood was a different color—but it might have been made by the same person. “Her desk was made by Bartimaeus Ashford. He made stuff for all of the founding families. People are always bragging about ‘having a Bartimaeus.’” She rolled her eyes.

The desktop held only a few objects: a silver letter opener, the handle shaped like an elongated owl; an inkpot; an old-fashioned dip pen; and a single sheet of old, brittle paper, set out as if ready to be written upon.

“There’s nothing in the drawers,” Pip said as she finished her quick examination of them. “Maybe one of them has a false bottom?”

Eleanor frowned at the paper. It reminded her of the paper in the book of tales—and those pages had been blank, too. Until they weren’t. If there was writing hidden on it, was there a way to see it?

She took the crystal lens from her pocket. Things had looked different through it once—maybe they would again. She held it up to her glasses and closed her other eye.

Words spilled over the page, written in an elegant script that she struggled to read. She spoke the words aloud for Pip’s benefit.

To Whomever Has Found This Room,

The objects held within this vault are safe, or relatively so, the unnatural powers within them benevolent. If you have found your way here, I assume you are clever enough to learn how to use them without my instructions, and I do not have the patience for explanations in any case.

Use what you can, and take what you must. The People Who Look Away must be stopped. Come and find me if you can.

B. A.

“Bartimaeus Ashford,” Eleanor guessed, and then she smacked her hand against her forehead. “B. A. is the person who wrote the book! The book of fairy tales! He’s the one that’s helping us! The plaque by the coffee shop said that nobody ever recorded a date of death for him. And the cat-of-ashes talked about him like he was still alive somehow.”

“Then he’s got to be the Storyteller,” Pip said excitedly. “In the book the heroes go and ask him questions, but they don’t ask the right ones. If we can find him—”

“And ask the right questions—” Eleanor continued.

“Then we can beat Mr. January once and for all!” Pip finished.

Help. Finally they would have help. They had been on their own this whole time, but here was someone who knew what was going on, who knew about wrong things and magic and Mr. January. Surely Bartimaeus Ashford, if he truly was still alive, would help them. And he had to be better at stopping Mr. January and the Society than three newly minted teenagers.

“So where does a somehow-not-dead-even-though-he’s-like-a-hundred-and-thirty-years-old guy go to hide?” Pip asked.

“Well, he’s not in the house. He built other places in town, though, right?” Eleanor asked.

“Yeah. A lot of the buildings, actually,” Pip said. “I bet he’s hiding out in one of them! We can search the town.” Outside, footsteps thumped angrily across the floor, and Pip deflated a bit. “After they’re gone,” she added.

For now, they had to wait.