Part 12 (1/2)

He watched as the librarian locked the break-room door. Then he followed her through the library to an office on the third floor, where there was a small desk, piled with more review copies of books and papers, scattered with pens. A folding chair with a padded seat rested in front of it and a cloth chair on wheels behind it.

”Have a seat,” she said, sitting down behind the desk. She picked up the phone and handed it over to him. ”You dial the number, but I need to talk to your parents. I'll tell them where you are, and then I'll hand you the phone. I'll go outside to give you some privacy unless you want me to stay here, okay?”

He nodded.

He reminded himself that he wouldn't care if they were upset. He was still mad about what his dad had done and how little his mother had cared. If he kept that in the front of his thoughts, then nothing they could say would bother him. He just wouldn't care.

He wiped his hands against his jeans and hoped it was true. He dialed and handed the phone over.

The librarian took the receiver and started explaining how she'd found Zach sleeping on the couch in the Carnegie Public Library in East Liverpoola”yes, East Liverpool, Ohioa”and yes, he was fine, he had two friends with him, and they were fine too. She gave the address of the library and some abbreviated directions.

Then she held out the phone to him.

Zach took it and brought it slowly to his ear as Miss Katherine went out the door, closing it softly behind her. ”Mom?” Zach said.

”It's me,” said his father. ”You all right?”

Zach's heart sped. ”Yeah, like she said. I'm fine.”

”I never meant to make you feel like you had to run away,” Zach's dad said softly. As soon as his father had picked up, Zach had expected a lot of shouting and the phone getting slammed in its cradle. But his father didn't sound angry. Zach wasn't sure why, but more than anything else, his dad sounded scared.

”That's not what I was doing,” he said. ”I was on a quest. I was going to come back when I was finished.” Once Zach said the words, he knew they were true. He would have gone back. He'd just needed a little break.

There was a long pause on the other end of the line, as though his father was not quite sure how to respond. ”So, this quest,” he said finally, tentatively. ”Are you done with it now?”

”Not yet,” said Zach. ”I thought I was, buta”I don't think that I am.”

”We're going to get in the car, and we're going to be there in two and a half hours. Do you think you'll be finished then?”

”I don't know.”

”Your mother's been real worried. You want to talk to her?”

Zach wanted to tell her that everything was okay, that he was fine, but he didn't want to hear her voice and realize how much he'd upset her. ”No,” he said after a moment. ”See you when you get here.”

His father gave a heavy sigh. ”You know I don't understand you.”

”You don't have to.” Zach just wanted the conversation over, before either of them said something awful.

”I want to,” his father said.

Zach snorted.

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. ”I'm not good at this kind of thing, but even though I don't always get things and your mother tells me I don't know how to talk, I wanted to tell you that I've been thinking about what I did with those toys ever since it happened. It was a mean thing to do. I grew up mean, and I don't want you to have to grow up mean too.”

Zach was silent. He'd never heard his father talk that way before.

”When I saw you with those figures, I pictured you getting ha.s.sled at school. I thought you needed to be tougher. But I've been thinking that protecting somebody by hurting them before someone else gets the chance isn't the kind of protecting that anybody wants.”

”Yeah,” Zach said. It was all he could bring himself to say. He had no idea his father thought about anything like this. All the anger had drained out of him, leaving him feeling as fragile as one of those paper-thin china cups.

”So I'll see you soon,” his father told him. ”Good luck with the quest.” He said the word as though it was a strange, unfamiliar shape in his mouth, but he said it.

”Bye, Dad,” said Zach, and hung up the phone.

He sat there for a long moment, breathing hard. Something had s.h.i.+fted, something seismic, and he needed to be still long enough to have it settle inside of him. Then he stood up and went out the door.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

MISS KATHERINE WAS SHELVING A FEW BOOKS NEARBY and put them back on the cart when he emerged from the office. Her pink hair was as bright as the synthetic mane of a plastic horse.

”Everything okay?” she asked him.

”They're coming,” Zach said, trying to put the strangeness of his father's words behind him. ”Did you see Poppy's doll?”

She shook her head. ”I walked by the table where you left all those maps, but there was nothing else there. Do you want to take a look yourself?”

Zach nodded and followed her to the couches. He noticed her shoes for the first time, bright yellow with bows. She didn't look like any librarian he'd ever seen before. In fact, she didn't look like any adult he'd met before.

Zach looked under the sofa the girls had slept on and then under the one where he'd fallen asleepa”after all, the last time he'd woken up, the doll was resting right next to his head. He knelt down with a shudder at the thought of her lying directly underneath where he'd slept, as though she might reach up her tiny porcelain hands and drag him down through the couch cus.h.i.+ons. She wasn't there, though.

The Queen wasn't under the table, either. She wasn't in any of the chairs, nor anywhere obvious on the rug. She wasn't anywhere he could see.

He didn't feel her either, didn't sense the gaze of her dull eyes watching him from some corner of the room, the way he had when she was in the cabinet in Poppy's living room.

While he searched, Miss Katherine started gathering up the books and maps Poppy had left on the table the night before.

”What was it that you kids were trying to find?” the librarian asked, frowning at him. He could tell that Miss Katherine didn't know what to make of the story about the doll. He wasn't sure that she even believed there was a doll. If not, he wondered what she thought he was looking for.

He shrugged. ”Nothing.”

”It looks like someone was doing research on a cemetery near here,” said Miss Katherine gently. ”Spring Grove? I saw a few pieces of copy paper with directions drawn on them and scratched out. What's in Spring Grove Cemetery? You can tell me, Zach. I promise that I'll try to understand.”

”Have you ever heard a story, a ghost story, about a girl who jumped off her roof ?” He hesitated, pressing the front of his sneaker against one of the legs of the table. He wanted to trust her, but he knew he couldn't trust her too mucha”she'd never believe him if he told her everything. ”Like under mysterious circ.u.mstances? Maybe one named Eleanor Kerchner.”

Miss Katherine shook her head. ”The only Kerchner I can think of was a fancy workera”a very well-known potter locally. We even have a display of his work downstairs, courtesy of the museum. There was a grisly story about him, but I don't know about any Eleanor Kerchner.”

That felt a little too real, there being a potter with a grisly story.

”Downstairs?” Zach took a few steps across the library floor before Miss Katherine cleared her throat.

”I don't think so,” Miss Katherine said. ”I let you look around, but enough's enough. Come on.”

Zach remembered the wall of fragile-looking vases he'd seen in the bas.e.m.e.nt. He'd run past them, not really looking at them, and now he was itching to know what he'd missed. He had to get down there. He had to. His heart started to pound with renewed hope. Maybe there was a secret therea”a secret that might not help them to finish the quest but would prove that it was a real one. A real quest for a real ghost.

He concentrated on that as the librarian led him back to the break room and opened the door with the key sticking out of the lock. Inside, the girls were sitting at opposite ends of the table wearing near-identical expressions of worry.