Bea Flint and Phoebe Lu waited awhile to make sure that Miss Hopkins didn’t return. The evening sunlight shone through the tall windows, casting yellow rectangles on the bookshelves. As the sun began to dip below the tree line the yellow rectangles rolled themselves up slowly like luminous blinds.
“Now what?” said Phoebe, still whispering from habit.
“Now you can climb up and get that book,” said Bea. “It shouldn’t take long to find out what we need to know; then we can put it back and get out through a window. Nobody will know we’ve looked at it.”
They tiptoed back to the bookshelf at the back wall. “Wait a moment,” said Bea. She peeped out of the nearest window into the twilit clearing. There was nobody in sight. The Ledbetter boy had finally left his post. This did not come as the relief she had expected. At least when he was nearby she knew what he was up to. She wondered now what news he was bringing back to Maize Ledbetter, and she felt a sudden shiver. She turned around to see Phoebe perched at the top of the bookshelf.
“How do you spell Arkadi?” said Phoebe. Her voice echoed in the empty library.
“A-R-K—,” began Bea.
“Found it!” said Phoebe. She slid a fat volume from the top shelf and dropped it without warning.
“Ouch!” said Bea, as the book dropped into her outstretched hands like a leather-bound brick. “Careful!”
“Sorry,” said Phoebe, who was back on the floor in an instant. “I had no free hands and it wouldn’t fit in my mouth.”
Bea blew the dust off the book’s spine and placed it on the floor where a patch of dim light filtered in from the evening sky. There were lamps on the reading desks, but she did not want to risk turning one on. She began to flick through the book. She found to her dismay that there were over six hundred pages. She looked first for a photograph of Arkadi, but there did not seem to be any. There were several drawings of him, mostly done from memory by Pearlseeds who had been his pupils or friends. They showed him with a variety of hairstyles, sometimes with a beard or mustache, sometimes clean shaven. He looked different in each one, and Bea could not decide whether any of them looked like the ice-cream mechanic or not.
Phoebe showed little interest in the book. She prowled around the library looking for places to climb, and took a couple of turns sliding down the long banister from Captain Bontoc’s office, until Bea told her irritably to stop.
“Did you find anything?” she asked from the bottom of the stairs.
Bea shook her head. She was squinting at a blurry charcoal drawing of Arkadi. Of all the ones she had seen this one most resembled the ice-cream mechanic. She read the caption with difficulty in the fading light. “‘Arkadi as drawn by Maize Ledbetter the year before her banishment.’”
She began to read from the text. “‘Various accounts have been given of the falling-out between Arkadi and his favorite, young Maize Ledbetter. It was rumored that she had honed her powers to such a fine point that she could predict almost any event with complete clarity, and some Pearlseeds believed that it was a combination of jealousy and fear that led Arkadi to banish her along with her young husband. It seems more likely, however, that it was the girl’s well-known fits of rage and her disregard for the protocols of Mumbo Jumbo that led Arkadi to conclude she was a danger to the entire movement. The place he chose for his former protégée’s exile was the secret refuge of Bell Hoot, which Arkadi himself had discovered by accident less than a year previously.’”
Bea rubbed her eyes. At that moment the moon emerged from behind a cloud and lit the open book with a pale blue glow. The smudgy image of Arkadi seemed to spring to life, and Bea was almost sure that it depicted the Arkadi they knew, despite the fact that it must have been drawn some eighty years earlier. She was about to turn the page in search of more information when a familiar phrase caught her eye: the Hidden Boy. Where had she heard that phrase recently? She read on. “‘Many of the predictions made by Maize Ledbetter have since come true. Among those that she repeated most frequently was that she would live for a century, and that her successor as head of the Ledbetter clan would be a young child known only as the Hidden Boy.’”
Bea stopped reading. The skin crawled on the back of her neck. Give us the Hidden Boy. That was the demand of the Ledbetters when they invaded people’s dreams. Granny Delphine believed that it referred to Theo, and Maize Ledbetter had made no effort to deny it. Bea looked around her. The bookcases loomed over her in the dark, and the library suddenly seemed an unwelcoming place. She closed the book. “Phoebe?” she said. Phoebe was at her elbow in a moment. “Let’s put this back and get out of here,” said Bea.
“You’ll have to lend me the backpack to carry it up in,” said Phoebe. “But I don’t think we’ll be leaving here until the morning.”
Bea looked at her with a sinking feeling. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“I’ve tried all the windows,” said Phoebe. “They’re painted shut, every one of them. They mustn’t have been opened for years.”
“What about the door?”
Phoebe shook her head. “Locked with a key,” she said. “I think we’d better make ourselves comfortable.”
They did another complete circuit of the library, double-checking the windows in case they had missed one that could be opened. They searched the desk for a spare key to the front door, but without success. “Pa will come looking for us when we don’t arrive home,” said Bea.
“We’ll be in trouble,” said Phoebe.
Bea shivered. “I’d rather be in trouble than spend the night in here,” she said. “Anyway, we can pretend we got locked in by accident.”
They released Nails from the backpack and put in the book instead. Phoebe climbed the bookshelves and replaced it among the other books. They looked out into the clearing again, but it was deserted. Bea turned on a table lamp so that if anyone came looking for them they would see the library was not empty.
They dragged two large armchairs out into the middle of the room and settled down to wait. Phoebe had found a large jotter and a pencil behind Miss Hopkins’s desk and she began to draw a world where volcanoes spewed chocolate and people turned into dragonflies. Beside the things she drew she wrote the anagrams that popped into her head—nailed frogs and darling foes for dragonflies, coal ovens and oval cones for volcanoes. Bea took out the Squeak Jar and listened for Theo’s voice. It took a few minutes to locate him. He was whispering for once.
“I can’t talk now,” he said. “The Tree People are listening. They were pretty annoyed when I tried to start a fire.”
“Are you okay?” whispered Bea. She saw Phoebe glance up at her.
“I’m fine. We’ll talk later, okay?”
“Okay,” said Bea. She could try to find him in her dreams. She put the Squeak Jar down and went looking for a book about bees, then seated herself in the comfortable armchair with the jar and the book in her lap. Nails returned from his explorations, disappointed at the lack of insect life and the total absence of worms, and climbed into the backpack of his own accord. Bea began to read about the complex life of bees, trying to distract herself from the creeping sense of foreboding in her bones.
Outside the library window the blue moon shone down on clearing and forest. It shone on the churning pool of Cambio Falls, and beyond it on the still waters of Mumpfish Lake, dark as midnight and cold as last week’s soup. It shone on the rickety wooden causeway that ran from the bare island to the lakeshore. It shone on the blank-eyed, straggle-haired Ledbetter clan, who ran silently along the causeway and slipped into the shadows of the forest, drifting from tree to tree like blown ash, heading for the Bell Hoot Library.