When they approached the door to Darin’s apartment, Roni’s heart sank. It stood halfway ajar. Her lips rolled in as she fought back the urge to scream.
Like a newfound mantra, she said, “No, no, no, no, no.”
She bolted into the apartment, racing down the hall to check the bedroom, slamming open the bathroom door, and ending with the room she knew she would not find him — the kitchen.
“He’s gone.” Her voice was a mouse peep almost drowned out by the rattling air conditioner.
“Don’t worry about it,” Sully said. “Do you know how many times we’ve botched up a job? Goes with the territory. I mean, the learning curve with this position is enough to kill you.”
“I’ll never know.” Roni could not take her eyes away from the empty space in the kitchen where Darin had stood. “Gram will kill me first. Especially if she finds out about this.” That thought jolted her back. She glared and pointed her finger at both men. “Not a word to her. You understand me? Not a single word. Promise me.”
“You think we want to tell her any of this?” Elliot said. “We are here with you. As far as she’s concerned, we are accomplices.”
Roni’s cellphone rang, and before she looked, she knew the name that would be on the screen — Jane Lander. “You two search this place. See if you can find anything useful.” She took a deep breath and accepted the call. “Hi, Jane.”
“I want to speak with my son.”
She expected that — hoped it wouldn’t happen, but the day’s luck clearly had been used up. “I thought you were going to drive over here to see him.” Stalling seemed about the only good approach.
“Never you mind about what I’m doing. Now put my son on the phone this instant.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t. I’m not inside the apartment.”
“You left him there alone?”
“I’m downstairs on the street getting something from my car. I’ll be back up there in a minute. He’s a big boy, and he’s doing a lot better.”
Sully and Elliot’s idea of “searching the apartment” leaned more towards the idea of “tossing the apartment.” They rifled through drawers, sifted paperwork, and threw cushions aside with such abandon, Roni wondered if they had ever gone through police training when they were younger.
“I’ll wait,” Jane said. “Put him on the phone.”
Gesturing to the phone, Roni mouthed a plea for help, but Sully and Elliot shrugged. Without a good option, Roni chose a classic form of evasion. “I’m sorry, Jane, what was that? You’re breaking up. I think my phone is dying. I’ll try to call you soon.” She ended the call.
“Nothing is here,” Sully said.
Pocketing her phone, Roni went back to the kitchen — the last place she had seen Darin. She surveyed the room for any sign of what he had been thinking or where he might ... she smacked her forehead. “I’m such an idiot. I know where he’s going — the zoo.”
“Lots of zoos,” Sully said.
“The Philadelphia Zoo.”
Elliot pulled a laptop from underneath the couch. “Not quite,” he said and he displayed the screen to the others. “Looks like he signed up for an Uber account. And he has Google Maps focused on the Baltimore Zoo.”
“Baltimore? Why go there when the Philly Zoo is so much closer?”
“You said he was thinking clearer for a time. Perhaps he started thinking clearly again. If I needed to get to a zoo, any zoo, and I had already expressed to you that desire —”
“Then you wouldn’t go where you know I’ll end up searching for you.”
“Precisely.” Elliot checked the website again. “He has had about a forty-five minute lead on us. We should be moving now.”
“Paper,” Sully said, snapping his fingers at a notepad on the kitchen counter. “And a pen.”
Roni swiped the pad and a pen, handed them over, and the three went to her car. As she sped down the highway toward Baltimore, she kept one eye on her rearview mirror — not watching the cars, but rather watching Sully. He sat in the backseat with his pad and pen.
Starting at the right of the page and working left, he wrote several words in Hebrew. When he finished, he removed the page from the pad and folded it. Sometimes in half, sometimes unfolding and refolding from a different start point, sometimes only crossing a small portion of the page. After a few moments, he had produced an origami crane.
He opened the car window and lifted the crane. Though Roni knew what would come next, she still found it astonishing. Sully brought the crane’s head close in and whispered to it. Seconds later, the paper bird flapped its wings and soared out the window. With barely a pause, Sully picked up the pen and started over. By the time they spotted signs announcing The Baltimore Zoo, Sully had made and released ten cranes.
After nothing but silence, Elliot cleared his throat. “Are you doing okay?”
“Me?” Roni said. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“I meant with all that you have learned and with Lillian. The last time we talked you had a big decision to make. Now, it seems you have come to regret that decision.”
“I don’t know. I mean I don’t regret it — I’m glad I know the truth — but at the same time, I don’t know. It’s like Santa Claus.”
Elliot had the polite grace not to laugh. “How is that?”
“When you’re a kid — well, not you and not Sully, but when you’re a Christian kid — parents will tell you the whole Santa Claus story. Then one day, somewhere along the line, you learn the truth, and so far as that goes, usually you’re okay. The world existed in one way before and now it’s become something altogether different, but it’s okay. In fact, you might even be grateful to know the reality of the world. That’s how I felt learning all about you guys and the books and the universes and all.”
“Are you going to say that some kids regret learning about Santa Claus?”
“No. But some kids, once they do learn the truth, realize a larger, more horrible truth. They understand that for years, their parents lied to them. Sure, it was all in fun and playfulness and giving presents and all, but they lied. The two people that child expected nothing but truth from lied about something so inconsequential and kept that lie going for years. What, then, would those same people do when a serious problem arose? Does that make sense?”
“I think so.”
“It’s not just being lied to, either. What really screws up those kids — the ones who see the full truth — is that they are then expected to be complicit in continuing the lie. I figured out on my own that Santa was a myth and when I told Gram, she asked that I don’t tell any of the other kids. She said that they might not know yet and that I shouldn’t spoil it for them.”
“Ah,” Elliot said. “And here we are telling you to keep all of this secret. But, of course, this is not a holiday game resulting in presents. Our secret is dangerous information.”
“Don’t you think if Darin had known that information, it might have saved him from ever going near that book? He would have known to be careful around such things, known the consequences of opening the book, maybe he even would have turned down the job because of it.”
“It’s good that you question these things. It’s good that you think this way. That is one reason it is always necessary to bring in young minds. But old minds know a lot, too. We have experience. The dilemma that you describe is not new. It has been argued out for centuries. Sadly, I have to tell you that nobody has come up with a satisfactory solution.”
“What then? Am I supposed to roll over and accept that it sucks and that’s it?”
“Not at all. In fact, you should do quite the opposite.”
“Huh?”
“I told you that this has been argued for a long time. That is because there have always been people like yourself, passionate people, caring and empathetic people, who are willing to argue, to debate, to fight. Without that, those who wish to impose their will on others win.”
Roni’s face scrunched up. “How did we suddenly get to fighting the establishment? Is there an establishment? I thought it was just you three.”
“Did you already forget that we are called in by religious groups to investigate? There are others, too. Governments, sometimes. Private groups. I would not go so far as to suggest that there is an actual establishment, but there are people out there thinking, discussing, and debating the bigger questions of what we do — including how much to keep a secret.”
“Great. How does any of that help me?”
Elliot gave a knowing grin. “Because, you see, your decision is not as Earth-shattering as you fear. Make a choice. Be part of this, whole-heartedly, or do not. It is easy. Most decisions are. They only feel difficult when you waffle between your choices.”
Pointing to their exit, Roni said, “Saved by the zoo.”
“The decision will not go away.”
“I know.” She followed the winding road into the parking area and picked a spot under the shade of a tall tree. “But right now, we have to figure out where to find Darin in this place. I’ve been here before. It’s big. We better get started or we might be here all night.”
Sully snickered. “Wait a moment, please.”
“We’ve already lost most of the day. Let’s go.”
“Such impatience. Only a little longer. A short wait. I promise. Please.”
Roni looked to Elliot for support but he closed his eyes with a calm demeanor as if waiting for a few days in this car was well within his ability. “Is this how you usually run an operation?”
Keeping his eyes closed, Elliot said, “There is no usually in this business. We have learned that the only thing we can trust is each other. If Sully tells me that we need to wait, then we wait. I trust him.”
Though every muscle in her body itched to get moving, Roni eased back in her seat. “Okay. We wait.”
True to his word, the wait did not take long. Only a few minutes had passed before Sully opened his hand at the window. One of his paper cranes flew in and perched on his palm. He stroked its head before whispering to it. In the next breath, the crane stopped moving — it had become nothing but paper once more.
Working with deliberate motions, Sully unfolded the paper. Roni studied the care he put into each step of his process — it was more than a magic gift to him. He treated his work with reverence and love. She guessed that when he had faced the decision to join or not, he had no problems — because Sully knew himself, understood his own heart. Then again, he projected that surety now. Back when he was her age or younger, he may have been more conflicted. After all, he had admitted that it took him a while to accept the shift in reality, so perhaps he had trouble with the bigger questions, too.
Did that mean that eventually she would discover the self-assured confidence Sully and Elliot now displayed? And did they only acquire that through this kind of work?
“Here we are,” Sully said.
On the paper, flattened out on his lap, Roni saw the Hebrew words. However, these were not the same as the ones that Sully had written. Though she could not read Hebrew, she could see easily enough that the handwriting and the number of words had changed.
Elliot shifted in his seat so that he could look directly at Sully. “Okay, friend. You have had your moment. Now tell us what the birdie said.”
Sully winked. “I thought you had the patience and the trust for me.”
“I do. I also know that when the spotlight is on you, there are times when you like to linger in its shine. However, as our dear Roni has made clear, we should consider our limited time. Therefore, I ask you again with the greatest of respect, what did the birdie say?”
“Very well. Mr. Lander is at the wolf exhibit. He went right there from the start and sits there still. That is where we go.”
Roni rested her chin on the back of her seat as she looked at the paper. “That’s weird.”
“All of this is weird,” Elliot said. “If you stick with it, you get used to weird.”
“I mean it’s weird that he picked the wolf exhibit to go catatonic again. When he was like that in the kitchen, he focused on the animal picture on the wall, but it was of lions. I sort of expected him to go to the lion exhibit.”
Elliot shook his head as he pondered Roni’s words.
Sully shrugged. “I only tell you what the crane told me. Wolf, lion — does it really matter? Each world we touch is unique in some way. Some more than others. Who’s to say what we should expect?”
“I guess,” Roni said. “But how do you prepare for any of this, then? How do we know what to do with Darin?”
“We don’t,” Elliot said. “We know how the books work. And the cavern.”
“And our gifts,” Sully added.
“Yes, our gifts, too. The things that exist in our universe are the things that we do understand. But when we must deal with another universe — by that, I mean more than locking it away into a book. Rather I mean something like we are dealing with now, with Darin — well, when we must handle these kinds of situations, we rely on the things we do know and improvise the rest.”
Roni drummed her hands on her seat as she opened the door. “Anybody ever tell you that you use a lot of words to say the simplest things?”
“Our friend in the backseat often tells me so.”
Sully rubbed the back of his hand against the loose skin under his neck. “Ignore him. We have work to do. Eyes open. This could be dangerous.”
The playfulness in their banter had lulled Roni into forgetting the seriousness of the situation. Only for a second or two, but it left her with a sense of being unprepared. As they exited the car and headed toward the main gate, she tried to convince herself that entering with two seasoned veterans ready to face anything would be enough — no matter how old they were. Watching Sully shuffling along the way and seeing how Elliot leaned heavier on his cane than before did not inspire her with confidence.