James and I had lived in and around wealth, but among people who chose not to display it openly. Other than clothing and a fancy car or two, old money liked to hide under mattresses and in safe deposit boxes. It didn’t distinguish itself by attracting attention. It was there to serve the purpose of longevity, education, and benevolence. The Carlisle wealth was more the billboard variety. Trumpets, fanfare, and fireworks.
Lexie seemed overly excited, slightly nervous, and possibly embarrassed by her parents. James didn’t have to ask to know that a boy visiting their home was not a common occurrence. Her mother, good-looking in a tennis player kind of way, seemed more delighted than her daughter. She knew of the Moriartys and, as she told James in a bit of a flutter, “your family’s been so generous to the city.”
He joined Lexie on one of the four sofas with a half-dozen television remotes in front of her. They talked through the sail that would follow the next day. James had been invited to eat before going home to Beacon Hill.
The kitchen table was set formally. Dinner was a spicy chicken with rice. Mrs. Carlisle called it a Cuban dish.
James understood it was socially unacceptable to discuss politics with strangers. But what about when it was a person’s job? “What’s it like being a city councilman?”
“Boring,” Mr. Carlisle said, laughing at his own joke. A fit and tanned man—even in winter—Mr. Carlisle had salt-and-pepper hair, thick eyebrows, and a jutting brow that lent him an intensity countered only by his soft blue eyes. “No, no . . . it’s actually quite interesting. Working with the public to explore the common good is fascinating, James. You get kooks, criminals, cops, doctors, gangs, the poor, the dispossessed, and the obscenely wealthy.” He said this as if the last group excluded the Carlisles. “It’s never the same, which keeps it exciting.”
“I’ll bet. Anything big at the moment?” James wondered if he could figure out what interested Lowry about the man.
“So much of it’s ‘big.’ Right now, I’m working on securing approvals for new high-rises that will cost nearly a billion dollars to develop. There’s a great deal at stake in any such deal. You make friends and enemies. It’s tricky.” He chewed and swallowed. “We’re also considering the construction of a floating casino north of the city; we’re dealing with a lawsuit concerning the Big Dig, approving some vending changes in Fenway, and battling the taxi union on ride sharing. That’s this week!” He laughed again, sipped whatever was in his glass, and seemed to get lost in thought for a few moments. Mrs. Carlisle picked up the slack, asking about school.
James answered most of her questions with lies, since she couldn’t handle the truth. I’ve been led through a ritual and initiated into a secret society. I’m going to run the society, a society of criminals if I’m right. I’m here to trick your daughter into allowing me to spy on your husband, and I have no idea why I’m doing any of this.
The more he thought about it later, he probably should have just said what he was thinking at the time. He likely would have won a laugh and nothing more.
After dinner, he and Lexie toured the main level of the home before heading outside, without coats, for a trip to the boathouse and a preliminary look at the tiny boat they were to sail.
On the way back to the house, James saw what looked like an office through lower-level plate-glass windows that faced out to the water. At his request, Lexie showed him this level as well: a weight room, a yoga room, a sauna, a heated indoor-outdoor pool with a lockable glass divider, and her father’s office.
Bingo!
“It warms up midafternoon. Best part of the day for us. My dad will take the boat out to the buoy and back to make sure it’s good.”
“I’m psyched,” James said. “Will your parents be around after?”
“Saturday? My mom should be. Later, not so much. They always have some kind of fancy dinner they attend. If you want to hang around I think my cousin’s coming over.” James gave her a strange look. “I know that’s kinda weird. She’s not like a babysitter or anything. Well, a chaperone, I guess. But you mentioned a movie, and she can drive.”
“That’s cool,” James said. “No problem. Who knows how we’ll feel. You may hate me by then.”
“Doubtful,” she said, giving him a look he didn’t fully understand.
If she caught him breaking into her father’s office, he thought, she would most certainly hate him. Of that, James had little doubt.
CHAPTER 24
AT 2:00 A.M., FRIDAY NIGHT, JAMES ENTERED my room on tiptoe.
“Come on. It’s time,” he said. A bleary-eyed Sherlock stood behind him.
By agreement, we wore pajamas in case a quick dash back into bed was in order.
Lois was a light sleeper. She had tended to prowl the house like a ghost since Father’s death, checking windows and doors just as Father had done in the months before his accident.
Father’s office was chillier than the rest of the house. At least I hoped that was why I shivered. Sherlock took control, moving toward the key buried in the ashes. Surprisingly, James didn’t protest. Within seconds, Sherlock stood behind the desk. He opened the blotter, working to restrain it to avoid the loud pop. There was the gun wrapped in the oily cloth. The manila envelope. The Bible verse and the word “Nevermore” burned into the wood. Sherlock felt around inside the drawer.
“That’s disappointing,” he said, though not specifically to us. He seemed to just be thinking aloud. “No trigger, no trip, no switch. I thought we’d probably missed one the first time.”
“That’s what you were expecting to find?” James asked. “Are you kidding me?”
Sherlock fished a folded sheet of paper from his front pocket. “A hundred and forty-four square feet are unaccounted for in the measurements Mo took. It’s somewhere behind the wall.”
He handed the sheet of paper to James, who unfolded it.
“There is only one possible location for the missing space,” Sherlock continued as James scanned the floor plan. “It’s simple geometry.”
“Geometry is not simple,” James said, “but I see what you mean.”
Sherlock said to me, “He is very good at math, my roommate. A logical mind capable of grasping the point of things quickly.”
I’d never heard Sherlock compliment anyone, much less James. Judging by his expression, it was new territory for James as well.
“I think that bump to your head messed with you,” James said.
“Let’s not go there,” Sherlock said. “It was not a simple bump to the head, and we both know it.”
Studying the sketch, James pointed to the wall opposite the hearth.
“That’s where it would be,” he said.
“And that is where the water was,” I said.
Sherlock laid out the plan. We were to search Father’s library for any other Bibles, because of the verse burned into the drawer. He also wanted us to mark the location of any books written by someone with the name “Timothy,” first or last. Finally, he put great emphasis on looking for the title “Nevermore.”
I took the lower shelves, Sherlock the highest, and James the four between. We would save the library ladder for last, a device that ran on a brass rail on the north side of the room, the side with the most books.
Sherlock referenced both an unabridged dictionary and a fifteen-volume encyclopedia for the word “nevermore,” but found little of interest. Forty-five minutes later and bleary-eyed, the three of us sat down on the rug together in defeat.
“I don’t understand it,” Sherlock said.
“Mo was probably right,” James said. “The missing space must just be under the stairs or for the chimney.”
“But the numbers tell us it’s right there,” Sherlock said, pointing at the shelving. “The water that came down tells us it’s right there.”
“There’s something else,” I said, “isn’t there, Jamie?”
“Such as?”
“That sound we heard when we were in there.” I pointed to the war
drobe to the right of the fireplace. I told Sherlock about me being chased by James, because I’d “borrowed” his journal, and that we’d both ended up inside the wardrobe because Father had come home early. We’d heard a tremendous clunk while in there, a sound that in no way matched the softer click of the desk mat opening.
James nodded. He didn’t fight me for bringing up what we’d heard, but, like me, he didn’t have an answer for it either.
“Nevermore,” Sherlock said. “That has to be our answer.”
“I’ll get my phone,” I said. I was off through the silence of the house before either boy could stop me, through the foyer with the ancient Moriartys looking down on me from their oil paintings, up the staircase like a cat in pursuit, into my room. Both excited and scared, I found the experience electric. I felt more alive, more present than at any time since Father’s death. I felt a connection to something bigger.
I returned to the boys, quietly closed and locked the office door, and addressed them. “‘Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”’ ‘The Raven,’ by—”
“Edgar Allan Poe.” Sherlock sprang for me. “Brilliant!”
I nearly screamed, I was so startled by Sherlock’s sudden movement. He was not one I thought of as agile or light-footed. Jumping at me, he was all flailing limbs and eyes the size of Ping-Pong balls.
He kissed me.
On the lips.
He kissed me on the lips.
HE KISSED ME ON THE LIPS!
It was just a peck, the kind of kiss Mother would give for my getting a good grade. Mistaken aim, no doubt; he was probably going for my cheek and I turned my head too fast. But none of that mattered. Not to me.
“Edgar Allan Poe.” He aimed that sharp nose of his high in the air like a hound on a scent. “Of course!”
Again, I started for the lower shelves, James for the middle. Sherlock stopped us. We turned to him. I didn’t care for his imperious posturing and high opinion of himself. He lacked all degree of modesty, which could be as off-putting as the cologne he wore.
“Give your father some credit!” he said. “It most certainly will not be at a height where a child could latch onto it. Well?”
James and I were unmoving.
“The ladder, you sillies!”
“What the helicopter are you talking about?” asked James.
“The book is how to open the missing space,” I said to James, filling in for Sherlock as he scrambled up the library ladder.
“The hidden space,” Sherlock said, pulling himself and the ladder along the wall of books, his long, manicured thumbnail clicking along the spines, with me helping push the ladder behind him. “Raven . . . raven . . . raven,” he muttered. He stopped the ladder abruptly.
“There!” he said, tugging on a volume. “I’ve got you!”
CHAPTER 25
SHERLOCK PULLED THE BOOK BY THE TOP OF ITS spine.
Nothing happened.
He removed it from the shelf. Turned the book fully around. Opened its pages carefully, as if expecting something to fall out.
“Brilliant,” James said, mocking Sherlock’s British accent. It was rude and uncalled for, and spoken behind glossy eyes and wet lips. This was the new James, the James who put himself at the center of the universe. No wonder these two boys didn’t get along.
“I could have sworn . . .” Sherlock said, crestfallen.
“It makes total sense,” I said. “And it’s so much like Father, isn’t it, James?”
“I suppose.” James teetered between Brother James and Scowerer James. James the Old and James the New.
Sherlock stretched down to hand James the work of poetry. He slid his bony hand into the narrow gap left between the books. “No button or— Hold on!”
A pronounced sound, a clunk like a car’s hood coming released, resulted in a section of the bookshelf popping open.
James and I both recognized the sound. We’d heard it from inside the wardrobe.
“No way,” said James.
CHAPTER 26
THE UNUSUAL THUMP AWAKENED LOIS LIKE A gunshot. She spilled out of bed, into her slippers, and was pulling her robe around her as she raced down the back stairs. She rattled the kitchen door, checking that it was locked; it was. She hurried to the front door; the same. She grabbed a fire iron from the parlor and continued her methodical search, throwing back window drapes, peering behind couches. She headed upstairs to see if one of us had rolled out of bed in our sleep.
Empty beds.
She touched the sheets to measure warmth. Cold. We’d been gone for a while. She checked for our clothes—James would just put on whatever he’d worn the day before. His clothes remained in a pile. She felt more at ease. More comforting, his running shoes were under the pile. James had not left the house.
My room was perfectly tidy, leaving Lois no way to measure if clothes were missing.
She checked the windows, grateful to find them locked. In her mind, the three of us had likely sneaked off to the home theater in the built-out basement. The possibility of any malfeasance or kidnapping seemed slim. She would not wake Ralph without checking herself. Ralph knew who wrote his paycheck. He might report the darlings to Mr. Lowry.
Downstairs again, on her way to the kitchen and the door to the basement, she looked down the short hallway toward the study. Something grabbed her. She took a moment to explore.
The pocket door to the library remained closed, as it had been earlier. The washroom door hung partially open. Perfectly normal. Lois wasn’t taking any chances. She threw open the door sharply, lost her hold, and slammed it against the interior wall. She threw on the light. Empty.
That left only the office.
CHAPTER 27
JAMES PULLED OPEN THE SECTION OF LIBRARY wall as Sherlock descended the bookcase ladder. The three of us faced a dark but cluttered space. We stepped inside.
I used my phone as a flashlight, revealing a room that looked like a magician’s lair might look. Sherlock found a light switch.
We stood in the workshop of a mad professor, a space only a third the size of Father’s office. One hundred and forty-four square feet, I was thinking. It was much cooler inside, the air significantly drier.
Part museum, part library, with books of every sort: fat books, tall books, all of them ancient books. But there was sculpture and statuary, large portfolios tied shut with strips of black ribbon, framed postage stamps, framed paintings standing in groups leaned against each other. There were stacks of wide, four-inch-high mahogany drawers.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” James whispered. “Look at it all!”
“Certainly not what I expected,” Sherlock sighed. He caught my eye, and silently directed me to look at the desk and, as it turned out, the small dark oil painting that hung over it: James Ashlyn Wilford with his gold cross and rainbow of light. I suppose I must have made an alarming sound because James snapped his head toward me.
“What?” he asked in a coarse whisper.
I tried to think what to say. “Jewels!” I pointed out the small stands littered with diamond and pearl necklaces, earrings, gold and silver brooches. “Look at all the jewels.” I slid open one of the drawers. It was lined with velvet and strewn with more jewels. I wondered if we might find the necklace from the painting in one of these drawers. I could tell Sherlock was of the same mind. He started pulling open drawers a little too enthusiastically.
He discovered a stash of freeze-dried food and a small sink hidden into the complex woodwork.
“It’s a safe room,” James said, seeing it. “A place to hide where no one can get you.”
“It’s a vault,” I said. The second drawer I opened required a good hearty pull. I counted twenty-four gold bars, each eight inches long. “Oh my gosh . . .”
Sherlock looked through the framed art. “That’s a van Gogh,” he said. “If that’s an original . . .” He continued through the stack. “Titian. Cezanne. This can’t be.”
“Because?” I asked.
“If these are originals, do you have any idea how much even one of these paintings is worth?” Sherlock gasped. “Tens of millions of dollars. Each painting.”
“W-what?” I stammered. I touched a gold bar and tried to pick it up. It was so heavy. “I think these are real, too.”
I didn’t know if the room had run out of air, but I had. I couldn’t find my breath. Couldn’t catch it. Maybe the room was airtight despite the two grates in the ceiling and what looked like a complicated control panel on the wall. Climate controlled to protect the art, I was guessing.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Father wanted you to find this,” James said. “You, not me. I don’t belong here.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, taking in the elaborately carved antique desk. Alongside it an equally ancient lectern held a small book, leather-bound with gilded edges. I opened the journal, recognizing Father’s handwriting immediately, but not the language. “Anybody?” I asked.
It took Sherlock one look. “Greek. Ancient Greek, to be exact. Like the paper in the drawer. The language of scholars. Greek Orthodox priests. Coptic Christians. Odd.”
“Because?” I asked, drawing my fingers along Father’s handwriting and feeling him in the room with me.
“I doubt there’s more than a few scholars who can still read it, much less write it. All at university, I would think. Your father was apparently one of them.”
Sherlock pointed out what James and I had missed: a plaque over the moveable section of library shelving that served as the door.
It was the same verse that was burned into the drawer. This time, attributed.
For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
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