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“You know I feel the same about you. ” I brought his hand to my heart. Whenever we touched, our heartbeats changed rhythm, as they did now, until they beat together in sync. “I love all of you, Jesse. The good, the bad, even the obsessive-compulsive. ”
He kissed me. “There is something I wanted to show you tonight. ”
I went with him back into the tunnel passage, where he led me down to the very end. There the walls widened into a room filled with mechanical equipment and another ladder leading up to a grate.
Jesse jumped up to the top of the ladder, pushed the grate aside and then turned to beckon to me. “It’s up here. ”
I followed him up through the opening into a narrow, cylindrical space made of rough wood. He pushed against one spot, which swung out like a hatch. As I stepped through, I saw we’d been inside the hollowed-out trunk of an enormous black oak. It had been chopped off about six feet from the ground, and used to form part of an archway engulfed in vines. Big hedges flanked a stone path that wound around overgrown flower beds before it branched off in different directions, some toward the lake and others into the woods.
I looked around. “What is this place?”
“It’s called the Jester’s Maze. ” Jesse guided me over to a small shrine made of stone and shells. Inside the shrine stood the statue of an old-fashioned clown riding backward on a big white horse. “That is Stanas, one of the circus performers who came over to America with us. He built the tunnels under the town for my parents. He created this maze, too, in secret, as a tribute to the girl he loved. ” Jesse gestured to another shrine across from the clown’s. A delicate bower of shell-flowers protected a sculpture of a girl holding an armful of wildflowers. The girl seemed to be smiling at the clown.
“That’s so sweet. Did they get married here?”
“No. ” His expression turned sad. “She was killed during the attack on our caravan. ”
“How awful. ” I glanced at the hedges. “He must have worked on this a long time. ”
“Years. The paths go from the gardens to the woods and keep going for miles. ” He crouched down to brush some dead leaves from the statue. “When my parents discovered what he had done, Stanas told them that whoever solved his maze and found its heart would discover a great treasure he’d hidden there. But no one ever has. ”
“Have you looked for it?”
“A few times,” he admitted as he stood, and his expression turned rueful. “I’ve never been able to locate the center on my own. Perhaps there is none, and Stanas had the last laugh on us all. ”
“That seems like a lot of trouble to go to, just for a practical joke. ” The temptation to follow the path into the maze was almost irresistible, but I imagined the phone in the store ringing off the hook. “Come on, we have a bunch of creepy old books to catalog. ”
Eleven
As we worked our way through another bin of Julian Hargraves’s books, I told Jesse about what had happened over the weekend.
“My parents are very concerned about these missing children,” he mentioned. “My father and I checked some of the unoccupied houses in town tonight. That is why I was so late. ”
“Gray told me that he dreamed of Melissa Wayne being abducted. ” I related the details of what he’d said and how I’d forced him to report it anonymously. “Do you know if the sheriff has any idea what happened to these girls?”
“James believed the Johnson girl was a runaway, but now that the Waynes’ daughter has vanished, he is not as convinced. ” Jesse frowned at a book he’d taken out of the bin. “This will not open. ”
“Don’t try to force it. The pages may be stuck together. ” I looked at the book, which had unmarked covers and a leather binding that looked older than it felt. “No title. Okay. ” Gently I ran my fingers around the edges. “This isn’t paper. It’s some kind of plastic. ”
“Is it a bookend?”
“I don’t think so. ” I felt a seam at the bottom and turned it over, locating a tab. When I tugged it the entire bottom came off. “It’s a book safe. ”
“What is it safe for?”
“Not that kind of safe. The kind you keep valuable stuff in. ” I reached in and pulled out a tissue-wrapped package, which I carefully opened to reveal another, smaller book. “Hmmmm. Why would you hide a book inside a book?”
“It’s not a book. ” Jesse picked up the smaller edition and opened it to show me the writing on the pages. “It’s a journal. ”
I got up and looked inside the bin. “There are more of them in here. ”
We unloaded the bin, which contained twelve more book safes, all with journals hidden inside.
“Julian wrote these; he signed his name inside the covers. ” Jesse put them in order by the date of the first entry. “He began writing these two years ago. ”
“Should we read them?” I thought of how I would feel if someone had found my journals, and felt a pang of guilt. “Or maybe we should put them back. ”
“I don’t think Julian would have any objections. ” Jesse opened the last journal, which was half-blank, and skimmed through it until he found the final entry. “He stopped writing them last October. ” He read the page. “He was very ill. His assistant thought he was dying. ” He frowned. “He didn’t want to go to the hospital. He fired the assistant for calling his doctor to the house. ”
“No one likes to go to the hospital,” I reasoned as I picked up the first journal. “Maybe this is why he left the collection to Mrs. Frost. He didn’t trust anyone else. ”
“Julian was a devoted recluse,” Jesse said. “He likely didn’t know anyone else. ”
The first words written in the earliest journal weren’t in English, so I showed him the page. “Do you know what language this is?”
“It’s German. He quoted a line from Gottfried Bürger’s poem ‘Lenore. ’” He met my gaze. “In English it says, ‘The dead ride quick at night. ’”
“Wait a minute. ” I got up and went to my backpack, and brought the book I’d been reading to the table. After I flipped through the pages, I found the passage I recalled. “Bram Stoker quoted almost the same line in his book. See?” I pointed to the page.
Jesse compared them. “They are the same line. The English is different because Julian used the Ayres translation, but Stoker quoted Rossetti’s. ”
“You know a lot about this poem. ”
“When I was human, Gottfried Bürger’s ballads were very famous. Some considered them the finest ever written in German. ” He hesitated, and added, “Just after we were changed, my parents read everything they could find about vampires. Some scholars believed Bürger witnessed or learned of a vampire attack in a graveyard, which inspired him to write ‘Lenore. ’”
“Supposedly Stoker did the same thing. ” Seeing the line from the novel written in the dead man’s journal was just too much of a coincidence for me, though. “Is it possible that Julian knew about you and your parents?”
“My parents and I have never had any personal contact with the Hargraves family,” he told me. “They were not our people, so they were never included in our circle of trust. ”
“Maybe Julian found out about you anyway,” I said. “He lived here all his life, which was pretty long, and there are things you can’t hide. Like the fact that you and your parents don’t age. If anyone would have noticed, it would have been him. ”
He looked worried now. “He did live here more than a century. ”
“I think we need to read these journals and find out what he knew. ” I checked my watch. “You’ll have to do the reading part. I can’t risk sneaking them home, and besides, Gray will be here to pick me up in ten minutes. ” I explained how Trick had vetoed me taking the bus home.
“Good,” Jesse said, surprising me. “I have been worried about you walking to the bus stop at night. ”
“You’ve been standing on top of buildings watching over me,?
?? I reminded him as I put the journals back in the bin. “There isn’t a girl in this town as safe as—” A hammering sound from the front of the shop interrupted me. “Oh, wonderful, he’s early. ”
I went to the front of the store, but the person banging on the door wasn’t Gray. It was Mrs. Johnson.
My steps slowed as I saw how wild she looked, but I forced a smile and walked up to the door. “Mrs. Johnson, hi. ”
“Open this door,” she demanded, jerking on the handle. “Now. ”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can’t let anyone in the store. ” I took a few steps back and glanced at the phone. “Why don’t I call your husband? I’m sure he’s worried about you. ”
That seemed to calm her down. “That won’t be necessary. ” She turned and went to a little station wagon parked at the curb and drove off in it.
I retreated to the back of the store. “That was the mother of one of the missing girls,” I told Jesse. “She thinks I know something about it, and she’s a little crazy, but she’s gone now. ”
“You handled it very well. ” He kissed my brow and picked up the bin. “I will read through these tonight. Don’t leave the store until you see your brother’s car. ”
After Jesse left with the journals, I put away my paperwork and went around to shut off the lights. Then I stood by the front door and watched for Gray, and when I saw his headlights I set the alarm and let myself out.
A blur rushed at me from one side, and as I saw the hands reaching for my neck something hot and angry billowed up inside me. I brought up my arm and knocked away the hands before I grabbed my attacker’s upper arms and shoved as hard as I could.
Mrs. Johnson went down on her backside and slid four feet down the sidewalk. She scrambled back up and shrieked, “Where is Sunny? Tell me!”