Part 10 (2/2)
According to the tourist map, the library wasn't far. Now that she was a bit more dry and had eaten something, Alice seemed almost cheerful. He guessed that at this point there was no way she wasn't getting in trouble, so maybe she'd just stopped worrying about it. She took the lead, Poppy trailing behind Zach, holding the Queen as though the doll had become very heavy. They walked down a few blocks until the library came into view, its stately front looking out onto the water. It was domed on top, with red stone making up the body and carved white stone tr.i.m.m.i.n.g on the windows.
It looked out of place, too grand for what surrounded it. It was also closed. It had been closed since one in the afternoon and wasn't due to open again until Monday morning.
”Who closes a library on the weekend?” Poppy said, kicking one of the steps softly with the toe of her shoe.
Zach shrugged, then turned to see what Alice thought. She was crouched near a bas.e.m.e.nt window, pus.h.i.+ng on the gla.s.s.
”What are you doing?” he whispered.
The window slid up a little ways, and Alice wedged her boot into the open s.p.a.ce, scrambling to push it higher. It seemed stuck; probably the wood had swollen from changes in temperature and being unopened for years. ”What does it look like?” she said.
”Breaking into a government-owned building that we could get arrested for being inside of.”
”Yup,” she said as the window slid up abruptly with a squeal. ”That's exactly what I'm doing.”
”Well,” Poppy said. ”Okay then.”
Alice s.h.i.+mmied inside, hesitating once she was perched on the inner sill. The room was too shadowed for them to see what she was about to drop down onto.
”Alice,” Zach said warningly.
She jumped. There was a crash and a sound like something metal hitting the floor.
”Alice!” Poppy yelped.
”Shhhhh,” Alice called back from the darkness, smugness filling her voice. ”See, I'm not so bad at quests after all.”
”That was amazing,” Zach said. ”Exactly what Lady Jaye would do.”
”Well, come on then, William.” Alice's voice, from the dark, was eerily changed. It was like he was talking to Alice and the character she played at the same time. For a moment he wasn't sure who that made him. And in that moment he wasn't sure who he wanted to be either, but he was grinning like an idiot.
He glanced back at Poppy. She looked crushed, like she was on the outside of a gla.s.s looking in at something she wanted desperately. They were playing, and he could tell she knew that if she tried to play too, he'd stop. For a moment he felt bad, but he was too happy to feel that way for long. It was fun to act like William with Alice, and it was fun to sneak into a building in the middle of the day, when even scary things weren't that frightening.
”What did you land on?” he called to Alice, moving to slide his legs through.
”Desk,” she said. ”Wait a second.”
He heard rustling and something else tip over, cras.h.i.+ng and hitting the floor. Then the lights flickered to life, revealing a room filled with metal desks and filing cabinets, their surfaces covered in mounds of paper. Some kind of administrative storage area.
Zach kicked off the wall, jumping wide of the desk that Alice had probably hit; paper was scattered around it, and one of its desk lamps was lying just above the floor, dangling from a cord. He landed near a tall filing cabinet, nearly stumbling into it as he tried not to lose his balance.
”Wow, what is all this stuff?” he asked, walking through the s.p.a.ce. Books were piled up next to lamps and old black-and-white photographs of the town in tidy black frames with engraved plates. A bookshelf had been shoved against the back wall, and one of the shelves was filled with old pottery.
It was exhilarating to be somewhere they weren't supposed to be. Like being on the boat. A real adventure, like William and Lady Jaye would have had.
”Hey! Come take Eleanor,” Poppy called, holding out the doll as she s.h.i.+mmied down through the window.
He did, putting the Queen on top of one of the cabinets. Lying on her side, the doll's eyes watched Zach accusingly as he helped Poppy down. As he did, a gust of cold wind blew through the room, scattering papers.
”We're not going to be able to close that without a ladder,” Alice said, pointing at the window. ”It's too high up.”
”We won't be here long,” said Poppy, picking up the Queen and walking toward the door.
Zach b.u.mped his arm against Alice's as they followed her. ”I guess you're not going to loot the place, huh, Jaye?”
”Let's wait and see what we find upstairs,” she told him, grinning, as they stepped into the darkened hall.
The bas.e.m.e.nt of the library was warm and smelled like wood polish and old paper. Zach inhaled deeply. He felt like he could relax for the first time since they'd gotten on the bus. They weren't cold and exposed like they'd been outside, and they weren't in front of people who could get them in trouble, the way they had been in the donut shop and at the diner, or hanging on for their lives, like they'd been on the boat.
Plus there was so much to see. They explored the conference room, the bathrooms, and two more storage rooms on the bas.e.m.e.nt level. There was an exhibit of china vases behind gla.s.s, and the whole cabinet shook gently as they ran past.
Then they jogged up the steps and saw the vaulted ceilings, iron railings, and marble of the main floor. According to a legend on the wall, Carnegie was a famous philanthropist who'd been born super poor in a small Scottish town, made money in steel and used it to build libraries on the East Coast, among other good-deed-type things. In the picture, he looked like an angry old man with a short beard.
He didn't look like the kind of guy who liked stories, but Zach thought he must have had to, to have built so many libraries.
”Hey,” Poppy said, calling to him from the second floor, where there was a rotunda that looked down on the reference desk on the first floor. ”Come check this out!”
He grinned and ran for the stairs, quest forgotten.
There was something about being alone in an empty building. There was something about racing up the stairs and hanging over the balcony, your shout bouncing off the walls. Zach and Poppy and Alice dashed through the upstairs gallery, through the big rooms. And without really ever saying so, they started playing. Not their old game, which was still contentious, although Alice and Zach slipping into those characters on the way in made it easier to slip into new ones. First Poppy and Zach pretended to be monsters hiding in their library lair when Alice as monster-hunter came in. She chased them around for a while, trying to slay them, before they ganged up and chased her back, threatening to turn her into a monster too. They slid across the floor in their stocking feet, hiding behind stacks and riding on the book carts, shrieking as they went.
When they got tired of that, they went behind the back of the reference desk and rifled through the drawers, findinga”in addition to pens, pencils, a flash drive, and a bunch of rubber bandsa”a pair of silver hoop earrings, a mystery novel with the cover ripped off, and an eraser in the shape of a delete key. At the desk Zach was even able to call the marina and leave the promised message about the boat while Poppy looked on.
Alice found a break room with a small kitchenette. There was a coffeepot, tea bags and sugar packets, and a refrigerator that contained five slightly wrinkly apples, a low-fat yogurt, a dry-looking hunk of cheddar, and a nearly full package of Oreos. Four folding chairs surrounded a table covered in review copies of books that hadn't been released yet.
”Look at this!” Poppy held up a book they'd all been waiting fora”one that wasn't due out for months.
”And no one's going to be in until Monday,” Zach said, sitting in one of the chairs and stretching out, dumping his damp jacket onto the table. ”We can sleep here tonight. We are going to be warm and dry, and it's going to be amazing.”
Alice snickered. He smiled up at the ceiling stupidly.
”We still have to go to the graveyard, remember?” Poppy stood, all the giddy joy draining out of her. ”We can't get comfortable.”
And just like that, all the fun of running around the library was over. Alice's mouth pressed into a thin, resentful line as Poppy stalked off toward the main room. Their feud was back on.
He sighed. It was true that he didn't want to go out into the cold either. And now that the end of the quest was so close, some part of him didn't want it to be over. He didn't want to go out into the graveyard and find out there wasn't any magic after all. It seemed easier to goof around in the stacks and worry about burying the Queen in the morning.
Alice looked after Poppy, scowling.
Zach stood up, pacing the small room. ”You guys have to make up. You're friends. You're supposed to be friends. You can't just not talk, or talk in the weird not-talking way you've both been.”
Alice shook her head. ”You don't understand. It's justa”it's easy for Poppy. She wants this one thing, and I better want it too. Either I'm with her or against her, you know? And she's like that about everything.”
”I don't think it's easy for her,” Zach said.
Alice sighed. ”If she wants to be friends, then she can say so. I get that the quest is important, but it seems like maybe it's the only important thing.”
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