The Secrets of Winterhouse

by Ben Guterson

  At this, the red light burst into a shower of sparks that flared and died, and the entire lantern glowed a rich purple. The crowd began to clap and cheer; the lantern became an even more lustrous shade of purple, and then, incredibly, it began to grow larger. Within seconds, it was twice as big and expanding quickly. Some of the people in the hall shouted in amazement, and several people laughed and yelled; the clapping swelled.

  “And the girl…” Norbridge shouted above the noise as the lantern rose higher and higher and continued to inflate, moving to the center of the hall. “Lived happily ever after!” he yelled. The lantern was now almost touching the ceiling, and it was as big around as a small car, throbbing with a bright purple light.

  “The end!” Norbridge shouted. The lantern burst with a tremendous noise, like a cannon going off, and an eruption of confetti shot to all corners of Winter Hall and descended on the crowd like a sudden squall of snow. Everyone was shouting and clapping and cheering. The hall was a riot of sound, confetti was sparkling everywhere, and the band broke into a loud rendition of “Jingle Bells.”

  Elizabeth was astounded. She’d seen Norbridge do his tricks before, but this one so surpassed anything thus far, she couldn’t even bring herself to clap but just stood staring at her grandfather as he grinned at the front of the hall.

  “Okay!” Freddy said to her. “That was beyond awesome!”

  Elizabeth looked to the table where she’d seen Elana and her grandmother. The old woman was still seated, glancing at the people around her with a look of complete indifference; to her, apparently, the excitement was nothing more than a curiosity. Elana, too, had remained sitting and was adjusting her tiara with a pensive expression.

  What is wrong with those two? Elizabeth thought.

  “Music and dancing in Grace Hall after dinner!” Norbridge shouted. “I’ll see you there! But first, join me in song!” And with that, he reared back and began to bellow, “On the worst day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, a Pop-Tart with a sardine!” The crowd exploded in laughter as Norbridge waved his hands about as if to excuse a mistake.

  “Let’s try that again,” he shouted. “The right way!” And with that, everyone joined, and Winter Hall was filled with singing.

  * * *

  The party after dinner was long and raucous—Elizabeth and Freddy enjoyed the music deep into the night, and the huge crowd remained happy for hours, no one wanting to let the fun end or to return to their rooms too early. Elizabeth looked for Elana or Mrs. Vesper occasionally, but they seemed to have left; the Powters had never appeared, and she wondered what sour spirit existed among those two families that kept them from joining in the fun.

  “Quick break?” Elizabeth said to Freddy as they drank some punch near one of the hall’s doors.

  “Definitely,” Freddy said, and they stepped into the hallway, which was relatively quiet, even with the clusters of guests talking and snacking there.

  “This way,” Elizabeth said, heading for the stairwell up to the second floor.

  Freddy shook a finger at her. “We are not going to the library. No way!”

  He didn’t need to remind Elizabeth that exactly one year before, at midnight on Christmas Eve, the two of them had sneaked into the library, and Elizabeth, for reasons still unclear to herself, had shouted Gracella’s name three times. By some residue of dark magic Gracella had left stored in Winterhouse, this had revived the sorceress’s spirit and allowed her to reclaim her bodily form before making her assault on the hotel a few days later.

  “No library!” Elizabeth said. “I promise!” She glanced at the stairs that wound above her. “Let’s look at the lake from the window.”

  Freddy joined her as they climbed the stairs. “I’m not even tired yet,” he said.

  “Good, because the party’s only halfway over,” Elizabeth said.

  Suddenly, they heard the sound of feet padding quickly across the carpet of a corridor, though they couldn’t tell if the noise came from above or below. They stopped and listened.

  “Someone’s running,” Freddy said, and they peered over the railing; the noise was on the level below on the second floor, and then it died away. But just as it did, the sound of someone else running arose. Suddenly a blaze of red bellhop’s uniform came into view, and Elizabeth and Freddy watched as Jackson dashed beneath them and then clumped down the stairs to the first floor.

  “What was that about?” Freddy said. “He was chasing someone.”

  Elizabeth looked to him with perplexity, and the two of them hurried down to the second-floor landing. She pointed in the direction Jackson had run.

  “Maybe he saw something,” Elizabeth said. “He must have come from the library.”

  Freddy shook his head quickly. “We’re not going there. Jackson’s got it covered.”

  “But maybe…” Elizabeth began before shouting, “I’ll meet you downstairs in five minutes!” She turned toward the library.

  “Elizabeth!” Freddy said. “Stay here!” He reached out a hand to grab her, but she was already racing down the corridor.

  “Five minutes!” she shouted. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Elizabeth!” Freddy’s call died away behind her.

  She turned two corners and was at the library before she knew it. The doors were wide open—strange enough at this hour—but what was even stranger was what met her eyes when she stepped inside. There was just enough illumination across the first floor that she saw that the far wall—the very one Leona had pointed out to her two days before—was in disarray: a half dozen paintings hung at skewed and drooping angles, two large banners sagged from where they’d been torn off their nails, and three tall bookcases leaned against the ones before them, half toppled and with their books scattered across the floor. Someone had vandalized the library.

  Elizabeth was in disbelief. The library was such a peaceful, orderly place that to see it in this state made her not just sad but frightened: Who would have done such a thing? She surveyed the damage and considered that all the careful work put into maintaining things had been completely ruined. She stepped closer and looked at the wall itself. At a point where the top of a door might be, and at a spot that had been concealed behind one of the now-tumbled bookcases, was a brass plaque. It was identical in size and shape to the one Elizabeth had seen in the candy kitchen, and on it were these words:

  SPRING

  ITS MIGHT IS ALL BUT HIDDEN TILL

  IT SEES ITSELF IN GLASS YOU FILL

  Elizabeth dashed over to the card catalog, grabbed a scrap of paper and a pencil, wrote the inscription down, and then, folding the paper and putting it in her pocket, turned to race out of the library. Then she stopped. Something drew her back to the plaque, to the empty wall above which it was displayed. The wall was completely bare, an expanse of white that had most likely been covered by bookcases for decades. She put her hand on it and ran her fingers across the cool surface. And then she leaned into it and placed an ear against the wall. A low, rumbling noise, once again so faint and indistinct it took her a moment to hear, sounded from somewhere deep behind the wall; it seemed to grow louder as Elizabeth stood listening.

  She backed away, glanced at the plaque, and then ran for the corridor back to Grace Hall.

  PART THREE

  BETWEEN TWO HOLIDAYS—AND THE MAGIC HARMONY BREAKS

  CHARM

  CHAPTER 21

  THE NINETY-NINE-YEAR-OLD WOMAN WORLD

  Christmas morning was blizzardy and ten degrees below freezing. Elizabeth understood it was likely everyone would stay inside the hotel the entire day.

  The evening before, after Elizabeth had returned to the party, she and Freddy watched Norbridge and Jackson and several bellhops head with urgency to the library. She knew they would clean up, lock the doors, and try to figure out what had happened. When Elizabeth saw Norbridge an hour later in the corridor outside Grace Hall, looking anxious and distracted, she’d asked him what was wrong, and he merely informed her there had been
an incident in the library. When she told him she and Freddy had heard someone running and that Jackson had been chasing the person, Norbridge thanked her for the information but said nothing more. She’d told Freddy what she’d seen, of course—that there had been a plaque behind the toppled bookcases—and although they tried to enjoy the rest of the evening, the mood had been spoiled. Elizabeth went to bed with a swirl of concerns on her mind.

  Now, the next morning, after she’d opened her gifts—five books from Norbridge, six books from Leona, a kaleidoscope from Jackson, and a bag of jelly beans from Freddy—and eaten breakfast, Elizabeth found herself looking at a long day alone. Norbridge was occupied with hotel business, Freddy was feeling sick from too much cake the night before, and even Leona was going to rest most of the day—the library was closed, and she felt wrung out from the damage it had sustained the night before.

  Elizabeth passed the day reading and then wandered from floor to floor of the hotel, examining the interesting objects displayed along nearly every corridor: the hulking mahogany and bronze music box on the fourth floor whose only thick metal disk played “The March of the Helvetii” with a turn of a brass knob; the astrolabe on the seventh floor, a gift from the artist Salvador Dalí that was, supposedly, a reproduction of the one Vasco da Gama used on his sea voyages; the “Tooth from the Mouth of Prizefighter Jack Dempsey—Dislodged by Donald Falls, March 17, 1930, During a ‘Dispute’ in the Candy Kitchen” (as announced on a small placard), which was, simply, a tooth sitting under glass on a small tea plate on the ninth floor. At midafternoon, as she was working on the puzzle in the lobby with Mr. Wellington and Mr. Rajput, Sampson approached and said Norbridge wanted to see her.

  “He’s in Kiona’s room,” Sampson said. “You can find him there.”

  “Right now?” Elizabeth said.

  “He told me to let you know.”

  Elizabeth had never been in Kiona Falls’s room, an apartment on the first floor she shared with her daughter, Lena, who was deaf and mute. Although Elizabeth had seen Kiona on only one occasion—during Christmas Eve last year—she knew she was the oldest surviving member of the Falls family at ninety-nine years old. She had passed Kiona’s room on several occasions and often wondered just what it was the elderly woman and her daughter did all day, because it was clear they left their room only for special occasions. This year, perhaps, they’d been too ill even to attend the Christmas Eve dinner.

  It was a curious thing, but—as Elizabeth remembered from the family tree on the wall outside Winter Hall—nearly every woman in the Falls family had lived to be one hundred years old. Not ninety-nine and not a hundred and one—one hundred precisely. When she’d asked Norbridge and Leona about this, there had been no explanation; it was as much of a mystery as anything else about Winterhouse.

  Elizabeth knocked lightly on Kiona’s door. Norbridge greeted her with a silent nod, put a finger to his mouth, and motioned her inside.

  “Everything okay?” Elizabeth whispered.

  Norbridge nodded again and then led her down a short hallway and pointed through an open doorway. There, sleeping soundly beneath a layer of quilts and looking as peaceful as a baby in the dim golden glow of a lamp on a low bureau across the room, lay Kiona Falls. In a bed beside her and sleeping just as soundly was Lena Falls.

  Norbridge motioned with his head to Elizabeth, and they left the women to their rests.

  “Quite a Christmas,” Norbridge said as he settled into a stuffed chair in the living room. Elizabeth couldn’t tell what he meant by this—it sounded a bit ominous—but she had spread out on a roomy sofa across from him and was admiring the walls. Every surface had been painted with pictures of people of all types and in a variety of situations—some walking outside, some sitting and reading, some praying in church, some singing or laughing, and on and on, a riot of color and scene that spread everywhere, even on the ceiling.

  “This room is incredible,” Elizabeth said.

  Norbridge chuckled. “Kiona is quite an artist. She always loved to paint.”

  Elizabeth glanced at the books on the coffee table between them. “Is she okay?”

  Norbridge wiggled his hand before him. “So-so,” he said. “I’ve been having the doctor stop in more frequently, and we’ve been experimenting with some herbs.” He sighed. “I wanted to talk to you about last night. Along the way as I sorted out the events of the evening, I heard from one of the workers that you might have been down in the library around the time everything went haywire. Someone saw you coming from that direction. I know you told me you and Freddy heard someone running away from the library, but you didn’t mention anything about being in the library yourself.”

  He set both elbows on the arms of the chair and clasped his hands, getting right down to business. Elizabeth was taken aback. She didn’t want to lie to Norbridge or disappoint him in any way. But she also wondered if she should reveal to him what she’d learned. Would he work through the trail of clues with her or explain there was nothing to worry about? She’d prepared herself for the latter because she had seen it too often already; this time she resolved not to be deterred.

  “I know something’s going on,” Elizabeth said. “Last night we saw Jackson running back from the library, so I went to take a look. I saw a plaque on the wall on the main floor, and I actually saw one just like it in the candy kitchen after Mrs. Trumble was attacked there. I didn’t tell you about it, because I didn’t want to get in trouble. But I know it’s there. And the riddle tells about a hidden charm.”

  “I don’t know whether to be impressed with your investigating or troubled by your recklessness,” Norbridge said, looking to Elizabeth with weary eyes. “You’ve already proved how resourceful you are and how pointless it is for me to remind you what curiosity did to the cat. So tell me: What have you deduced?”

  “I think there’s definitely someone trying to get into the secret passageway. I just don’t know why, but someone knows something and wants to get in. I think Rodney Powter or Mrs. Vesper is involved. Maybe Elana, too, and even Rodney’s parents.”

  Norbridge sighed. “Two facts to share. The Powters and Mrs. Vesper and her granddaughter were in their rooms last night. All had room service brought to them, and the bellhop confirmed everyone had stayed put.”

  “Maybe Rodney snuck into the library and slammed stuff around, and then got back to his room before anyone saw him.” Elizabeth began to feel desperate. As she verbalized her theories, she wondered if they were just random facts, a set of coincidences or oddities that were unrelated and that added up to nothing significant. She had to confess, even as she was explaining things, she wasn’t sure if there was a connecting thread, an actual plot.

  “I’m mostly concerned about your safety,” Norbridge said. “If you’re dashing off here and there when there’s trouble afoot, you’re bound to get hurt.”

  Elizabeth felt a flicker of anger inside her. Norbridge wasn’t taking her seriously—again. “I’m twelve. I’m not a little kid.”

  “I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong about things. I’m only saying we should remain vigilant, but without getting distracted.”

  This final word—“distracted”—brought Elizabeth’s anger to the surface. It was what Uncle Burlap said whenever he mentioned a problem at work: Oh, my boss is always correcting me, and it gets me so distracted I can hardly concentrate the rest of the day! Elizabeth found she couldn’t abide the word—and now Norbridge had used it.

  “Maybe last year we didn’t get distracted enough by everything Gracella was doing,” she said. “And then she almost destroyed Winterhouse!”

  “Elizabeth.” Norbridge’s tone was conciliatory. “I do take your fears seriously.”

  But she was too upset to hear him; she felt something like what she’d felt in the library recently, on those occasions when she had tried to assist people but had failed because she’d become frustrated or riled. A part of her knew she was being a little unfair, but she also felt she had to stick
up for herself and couldn’t back down now.

  “I just feel like when I try to explain things, sometimes you don’t believe me,” she said.

  The room was quiet, but Elizabeth had the definite feeling that someone in the bedroom had awakened. She looked behind her.

  “Don’t worry,” Norbridge said. “If Kiona wants to spy on us, she’ll do it.”

  Despite herself, Elizabeth laughed, and the tension that had grown in the room broke.

  Norbridge gave a tiny smile. “And I do believe you, by the way.” He gestured to a book on Kiona’s coffee table entitled The Walled City of Sehrif-Kala and said, “Give it a try.”

  Just as in the observatory two nights’ before, Elizabeth fixed her attention on the volume and allowed the feeling to gather inside her. The book leapt right into her hands.

  “Oh, she’s good,” someone said from the corridor. Elizabeth looked, even as she lowered the book to her lap. There stood Kiona Falls in a nightgown, wearing a red scarf over her hair. Her face, though creased with wrinkles, was gentle and kind, just as Elizabeth recalled.

  “She is,” Norbridge said. “We’ve just been talking out here.”

  “I heard,” Kiona said. “I may be about to reach triple digits, but my hearing is just fine.” She raised a finger to Norbridge. “Be careful what you say around me!”

  Elizabeth laughed. “It’s very nice to finally meet you.”

  “The pleasure is all mine,” Kiona said. She moved forward as both Norbridge and Elizabeth stood to greet her. She waved them down with a scowl, shook Elizabeth’s hand with both of hers, and lowered herself to the sofa with a wince.