While they were getting ready for their trip to the castle the next morning, there came two loud knocks at the front door. Susan opened it and stared out at a high-cheeked man with long, blond hair. There was something about his eyes that unnerved her — they were so close set, and disturbingly intense. He seemed to be staring right through her, or into her.

“Susan Shield, I presume,” he said.

“Yes, but I’m afraid —”

“I am a friend to your husband,” he said, offering his hand. She took it. His grip was gentle, but his fingernails were surprisingly long. “And to your children.”

“Oh,” she said, backing away, feeling as though the wind had been knocked out of her. “Yes, I … think I understand.”

Jaide had poked her head around the kitchen door. “It’s Custer!” she cried, running out to meet him. Jack followed.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “Is something wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong.”

“Would you … would you like to come in?” asked Susan. “I’ve just made some coffee.”

“Thank you, but all I require is a moment with Jack and Jaide, here.”

He gestured at the twins. Susan nodded, turned as though in a fog, and walked three steps up the hall.

Custer squatted down in the doorway in front of the twins.

“We saw you yesterday,” said Jaide. “Out on the estate.”

“Indeed you did, and I will be patrolling again today while your grandmother remains in the hospital.” His upper lip curled, revealing his opinion of modern medicine. His teeth were long and sharp-looking. “Ari tells me that you, too, are returning to the estate. You must be careful. The boundary of the wards stretches across the property. It would be dangerous for you to step beyond that boundary.”

“Why?” asked Jack. “Is The Evil around?”

Custer glanced over their shoulders to where their mother stood just out of earshot, gnawing on a thumbnail.

“That is not what I am saying. I am asking merely for you to be careful.” He reached into an inside pocket of his long, leather greatcoat. “Take these. They’ll tell you when you reach the boundary.”

He handed them a leather wristband each and helped tie them around their wrists. Colorful beads dotted the bands, apparently at random. One of Jack’s beads looked like a tiny six-sided die.

Jaide opened her mouth to ask Custer the first of the many questions she had, but a horn tooted outside and the chance was lost.

The three of them went out onto the veranda to meet Rodeo Dave. He was driving an enormous red car — long, wide, and rectangular, with enormous fins at the rear and a top that was folded down behind the backseat, leaving the interior open to the sky. Two longhorns adorned the grille at the front, looking as though they came from a real steer. The car’s engine sounded like the growl of a giant dog, slowed down to a rumbling throb. Rodeo Dave looked small and insignificant behind the wheel, even with his enormous mustache and an equally incongruous cowboy hat, which was also new to the twins.

“The old companion?” said Custer.

“It seemed fitting,” said Rodeo Dave.

“Young Master Rourke would have hated it.”

“This isn’t about George.”

The exchange revealed nothing to the twins, except that Custer and Rodeo Dave knew each other.

“Hop aboard!” Rodeo Dave called over the grumbling engine. Jack looked at Jaide, who shrugged. The chassis hardly shifted as they climbed in, Jack in the front, marveling at the chrome-finished dashboard and the depth of the seats, and Jaide in the seemingly infinite rear.

Susan hurried out of the house carrying packed lunches, as though they were going to school. She gave them to the twins with a kiss each good-bye, and waved as the giant automobile slid smoothly into motion. They watched her recede into the distance behind them. Custer disappeared as though he had never been there.

“This is Zebediah,” said Rodeo Dave over the engine noise, patting the dashboard. “I only bring him out for special occasions.”

“What’s the occasion?” asked Jaide, wondering if this had something to do with Grandma’s accident. Could he be hiding the van to get rid of evidence?

“Zebediah creates the occasion,” he said. “Without Zebediah, this’d just be another ordinary Wednesday. And that’s absolutely what it should not be.”

Jack couldn’t believe the car was going to fit down the lane, but it did, just.

“Where do you keep him?”

“Gabe Jolson lets me use the dealership’s shed on Station Street. Zebediah doesn’t take up much space when you park him carefully.”

Gabe Jolson ran Portland’s sole car yard, Gabriel’s Auto Sales. Rather like the Book Herd, the twins had hardly ever seen anyone looking at the cars, let alone buying one.

Zebediah glided through the town like a cruise liner, barely bumping when they went over the bridge, and turning into corners as smoothly as cream. People stopped to look as the car swept by, and some of them even waved. It was as Rodeo Dave had said — Zebediah did create an occasion. Jack would have liked to drive around a little longer, but it seemed to take them no time at all to reach the castle gates.

Thomas Solomon waved Rodeo Dave into a parking space large enough for Zebediah. Dave put on the emergency brake and turned the key. With a smooth clearing of its mechanical throat, the car’s engine shut down.

“I reckon you can leave the top open,” Thomas Solomon said to Rodeo Dave. “No rain forecast today.”

Jaide looked up. The sky was cloudy with patches of blue. It seemed the weird weather of the previous days had passed.

As she slid across the backseat to come out the far door, she saw a ginger tail poking out from under the front seat. She reached down and tugged on it gently.

The tail retracted and Ari’s face appeared.

“Hey, watch it!” he hissed.

“What are you doing here?”

“Shhh. I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on you.”

“Why?”

“Who knows? I think Custer wants me out of the way so Kleo can get up to … whatever it is she’s getting up to.”

That was a possibility, Jaide thought. If Ari suspected that there was a giant, vulnerable bird cooped up, who knew what he might get up to? But couldn’t it also be that Custer didn’t trust them? Or maybe it was Rodeo Dave he didn’t trust….

She wished they’d had time to talk to Custer properly that morning. It occurred to her only then to wonder if Rodeo Dave’s arrival had been timed to cut them off.

“All right,” she whispered. “You stay there and I won’t say anything. Just try not to get in our way, okay? We’ve got something important to do.”

“Don’t worry,” he said before she could explain. “I don’t care a bit for old books. I’m mainly here for the mice.”

“Coming, Jaide?” asked Rodeo Dave.

“Uh, yeah, just getting my bag.”

Ari stayed under the seat as Jaide left the car, slammed the door behind her with an echoing boom, and ran to catch up with Jack and Rodeo Dave as they crossed the moat bridge to the castle. Rodeo Dave had a backpack of his own, filled with things that rattled and clanked. He didn’t explain what they were, but it certainly didn’t sound like lunch. He had left his cowboy hat behind, on the car’s dashboard.

Nothing had changed inside the castle. Everything was frozen just as it had been for all the years after Young Master Rourke had moved out. Jack assumed that other assessors would be moving in at some point to look over the furniture, paintings, and other valuable items. Hopefully that wouldn’t happen before they had found the Card of Translocation.

Rodeo Dave put his backpack on the floor of the library and took stock of the job ahead of them.

“Right,” he said. “Here’s how we start. I’ve made a rough list of the titles across these three shelves. I need you to take the books out, check them off against the list, dust the covers, and put them carefully in the boxes over there. If I’ve missed a book, write in the title, author, publisher, and year of publication on the right side of the list. If anything looks really fragile, leave it where it is. Don’t even try to dust it. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Jack.

“I’m going to check the collection in the lodge. It’s mostly paperbacks, but even so, some of those old pulps can be very valuable. You’ll be okay here while I’m gone?”

“We’ll be fine,” said Jaide.

He nodded, picked up his backpack, and left.

“That’s great,” whispered Jack. “Now we can start looking!”

“Not yet,” Jaide said. “First we have to wait, in case he doubles back to get something and catches us gone. We also need to make it look like we did some work. We don’t want to make him suspicious.”

“What if the card is in the lodge?”

“He’s already searched it — or someone has — and it wasn’t there. I don’t know why he’s searching again. Let’s get started, Jack. Otherwise he’ll come back before we’ve even gone.”

Together they went through about half the shelves Dave had indicated, marking off and cleaning the books, flicking through them as they went, before boxing them up as instructed. They were soon filthy, with blackened fingers, and dust and cobwebs in their hair. Jack had found an old notebook (blank) slipped between two volumes of a massive history of the steam engine, and Jaide had found the skeleton of a mouse or a small rat, squashed under a giant book about ship maintenance, but apart from that they found nothing out of the ordinary. No gold card, and no map showing them where it might be hidden, either. Just books, the bust of Mister Rourke, and the painting of the woman in yellow, smiling to herself as though she knew something they didn’t.

Jack put his latest armful onto the ground, puffing up a cloud of dust that triggered a coughing fit.

“I think that’s been long enough now, Jaide, don’t you?” he said when he had recovered.

“All right.” She climbed down from the low ladder she was using to check the top shelves. “Let’s go.”

They took the ring of keys and the witching rod from Jaide’s pack and eased slowly through the library door, after first checking for anyone in the hallway outside. It was empty apart from several enormous tapestries, two suits of armor, and one wooden chest. The air was still and quiet. The only echoes came from the small sounds they made as they shuffled forward and stood for a moment, deciding where to go first. There was no sign of Ari.

“Let’s try the keys on the chest,” whispered Jack. “It looks locked.”

There was no doubt of that. A huge iron padlock hung off the front, shaped like a lion and as big as two fists gripping each other.

Jack moved forward to try one of the keys in the lock, but Jaide held him back.

“Let’s test the witching rod first, before we know what’s in there,” she said, raising the bent wire and gripping it in the way the Compendium had recommended. The wire was surprisingly difficult to keep still, once it was under tension. It flexed and shifted in her hand like a kitten ready to spring on a toy, and it took all her concentration to keep it steady.

She swept it across the wall in front of her, and felt nothing more than its usual jitteriness. They moved closer and she tried again. The wire felt taut in her hand, but it didn’t bend down toward the chest.

“Nothing,” she said. “Okay, open it.”

Jack looked at the lock and then at the ring of keys in order to choose one at random. As he held the ring up, however, one of the keys swung out so it was pointing at the lock, as though magnetic. It looked like it would fit, so he slid it into the lock and tried to turn it. For a moment, it was stuck. He jiggled it a little and it went in far enough for him to turn it with ease.

The lock clicked open, but it took both of them to lift the mighty lid. When it fell back against the wall with an echoing boom, Jaide gasped with surprise. A hideous face was peering up at them with wide, staring eyes and long, sharp teeth.

Then she laughed.

“Another head!” she said.

This time it was a bear’s head, stuffed and mounted, mouth open as though roaring. Its fur was matted and covered with dust.

Jack let out a sigh of relief. His heart was pounding, too, but at least this head wasn’t likely to come alive and bite them, if the witching rod was to be believed. And now they knew that the skeleton key worked perfectly.

“Let’s shut it again,” he said. “Then go get Professor Olafsson.”

“All right. Hey, look — more whales.”

The underside of the lid was engraved with whales, whaling boats, and sailors with harpoons.

“The Rourkes were obsessed,” said Jaide. “There are whales everywhere.”

Together they lowered the lid, unable to avoid another loud boom as it closed. As Jack turned the key again to lock it, he thought he heard the soft chiming of a clock in the distance.

“Did you hear that?” he asked.

“What?”

“A clock, chiming. It was kind of faint….”

“Nope,” said Jaide. “Come on. I want to talk to the professor.”

The death mask was exactly where they had left him, dozing patiently under the dust sheet. His eyes jerked open with a sneeze when they pulled it off.

“Ah, it’s you again. The midgets from the future — no, wait, children, you said. You’re looking for a golden card. You’re starting your collection rather young, aren’t you? Perhaps that’s how you do things in this future of yours.”

“What collection?” repeated Jack, confused.

“Of cards. Every Warden has one, but not usually in my time until they were Wardens.”

Even though the death mask only had blank spaces for eyes, Jack and Jaide had the uncomfortable feeling that the professor was looking right into them. “Perhaps it is the same in this time, too. Why do you seek this card, exactly? And for whom do you seek it?”

“Our father asked us to find it,” said Jaide. She figured she could trust a Warden with the truth, even if he had been dead for hundreds of years.

“What is this card called?”

“The Card of Translocation,” Jack said. “Do you know what it’s for?”

“There are thousands of gold cards. I don’t recall that one in particular. They are, in general, For the Divination of Potential Powers and Safekeeping Thereof. Beyond that, however, I can only speculate. The name is somewhat curious.”

The death mask raised its plaster eyebrows and dropped the left corner of its mouth in something that conveyed the feeling of a shrug.

“Can you tell us where it might be?” Jack asked.

“I can do better than that, if you put me in one of those satchels of yours. That would be a practical solution to my non-ambulatory state — my lack of legs, I mean.”

“You want to come with us?” asked Jaide.

“Of course! I can’t very well help you stuck here on this table, can I?”

She had hoped for directions rather than lugging the death mask around with her, but the professor’s suggestion did make sense. And besides, he had been trapped under a sheet for more years than she could imagine. It seemed only fair that he should have a change of scenery.

She and Jack arranged his pack into a kind of harness around Jack’s neck and shoulders, so it hung down his front. Then they tied the death mask of Professor Olafsson on the front, using the ends of the straps.

“No’ ’oo ’ight — ah, yes, yes, that’s perfect.”

His grin widened as they approached the door and opened it.

“What a marvelous opportunity! I imagined I would be forgotten there forever, you know. A terrible fate for a brilliant mind like mine.”

“Shhh,” Jack said. “We’re not the only people here.”

“Is someone else looking for the Card of Translocation?”

“We don’t know for sure,” said Jaide. “Maybe.”

“We should hear Rodeo Dave coming,” said Jack. “His boots make a lot of noise on the stone.”

“Well, I will endeavor to speak quietly,” said the professor, only slightly more quietly than he had spoken before. “Tra-la-la! I see you have a witching rod. Yes, hold it like that — I believe it is the more efficacious of the two methods. Now, if we take the left corridor ahead, that would be our best course.”

“Why?” asked Jaide. “What’s there?”

“A very large window,” said the professor with dignity. “I have not seen the sun for many decades. After a brief interval there, I will lead you on our search.”

As quietly as they could, the twins moved off down the corridor, with the death mask of the professor humming something softly to himself, a tune the twins did not know, but long ago had been written in tribute to the glory of the sun.