Kingdom Keepers: The Return Book Two: Legacy of Secrets (11 page)

“I didn’t see Tim all day either,” Amanda said, nudging her friend.

“Is that right? He must be around here. Probably with Emily.”

“No, I saw Emily. She hadn’t seen him either.”

“Is that right?” Jess said.

“Okay, now I know there’s something going on. I haven’t seen you make that face since Mrs. Nash almost caught us eating her frozen waffles. What’s up with you two? You can tell me!”

Amanda sounded unbearably excited by the notion of romance. Jess hated to let her down. “Actually, it’s not like that. I kind of wish it were…but it’s not. It’s the Hollingsworth files.”

“We’ll never get back down there.”

“I’m in. I was asked to inventory the collection by Professor Fielding.”

“Seriously? Do you think they know something?”

“If they do, they obviously don’t suspect me. I’m allowed to ask one other student to help, but it has to be a boy. I’m going to choose Tim.”

“This must be because of our being almost caught down there—Emily and me.”

“Probably. They want an inventory to know what’s missing. But I can put back the files we took so they won’t be noticed.”

“They? Who are they?”

“Ah…Professor Fielding didn’t just make this up on her own, right?” Jess had nearly slipped up. She hated lying to her best friend, but rules were rules. And lies were worse! Each lie was a link in a chain that eventually bound you to them. Jess knew to keep details out of her explanations. Details came back to bite you. “Hey, it also gives me and Tim a chance to search for anything else to do with Hollingsworth. We’ll see every piece of paper in that entire place.”

“That’ll take forever.”

“We’re going to help them, Mandy, I promise.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Amanda said, her voice fragile, her eyes aimed at the floor.

*  *  *

An hour later, Tim and Jess rode an elevator from the dorm lobby down to the mechanical basement level, two stories underground. They were met by a sour-smelling, craggy-skinned man. A stubble of white beard on his cleft, pointed chin stretched up onto the sunken cheeks of his narrow, pinched face. He looked like someone large had sat upon him as an infant, and then put him on a rack in a dungeon and stretched him into Jack Skellington. But he had an even voice, which made him sound much younger than he looked.

“Ever been down here before?” he asked. Being that it was against DSI rules to enter the basement, and that there was no known way to even get down there, the question was either meant as a joke or was an attempt to measure the students’ expressions, in light of the break-in that had recently occurred.

“No,” said Tim, “but I love what you’ve done with the place.”

The former hotel—and its vast basement—covered an entire city block of Anaheim. Down here, it was all giant rusted pipes, metal columns, concrete, and narrow rows of metal shelving that held all manner of hotel furniture, lighting, mechanical parts, carpet scraps and replacement parts. It looked like a furniture store of yesteryear. Dirk the Jerk—as the students called him—harrumphed and led them into the grid of shelving and aisles. The end caps of the stacks carried references to the contents of a particular row:
LL FURN, HVAC, EL MISC
.

Jess tried memorizing the route—left, left, right, left—but lost track fairly quickly. Tim followed alongside, his head tilted back, watching the ceiling. After a time, Jess realized he was using the overhead wires and pipes like a road map.

Dirk walked quickly, again belying his apparent age. Jess knew of the robots he’d modified into mechanized sentries; suddenly, Dirk made sense: a displaced Imagineer, ousted decades before.

Sweat trickled down her ribs. A third person had been on the elevator with her and Tim. Emily Fredrickson, whose foray into tech fabrics had led to the invisibility suit she currently wore, had walked off a step behind Tim. The plan called for her to immediately break away and parallel them, so as not to risk Dirk hearing or sensing her. Emily had been down in the basement before, with Amanda and Tim, wearing the same suit. She knew which direction to head.

“Did you know Wayne Kresky?” Jess asked, trying to distract herself.

Dirk stopped dead in his tracks and turned. Jess immediately thought something had failed on the suit and that he’d spotted Emily. “What’s it to you?” he said.

That inquiry allowed Jess to also stop and steal a look behind Tim. Thankfully, if Emily was there, she remained invisible. Jess wasn’t made for such subterfuge, for spying and lying. She wasn’t comfortable having to role-play; she liked being herself, had enough on her plate contending with her random dreams and the way they often foretold the future.

“He was a friend of mine, that’s all,” she said, somewhat defensively.

“Was he?” Dirk considered this a moment. “Well, never mind that. He’s gone, isn’t he.” It wasn’t a question. “A good man, Wayne. A favorite of Mr. Disney’s right from the start. That was a long time ago.” Bitterness colored his voice.

“You were an Imagineer back then,” Jess said, taking a guess—and possibly a chance at riling him. “Probably still are.”

“What one was before hardly matters. It’s what one is now that counts. I’m good with keeping this old lady up and on her feet.” He lifted his arms like a priest, indicating the walls around them.

“The hotel,” Tim said.

“You see any other old ladies?” Dirk asked scathingly. “Look.” He fixed Tim with a searing gaze. “I know them were your sneakers I seen in the dumbwaiter that night. Never no mind they gone missing from your room. You took down two of my best, and I ain’t the forgiving type.”

Tim and Amanda had short-circuited the two modified inventory robots with a combination of laundry soap and water. The robots had sparked and smoked and, in all likelihood, melted their motherboards. Dirk was probably still trying to repair them.

“You searched my room. How’d that work out?” Tim said defiantly. Jess winced; she’d be trying to keep him and Dirk from exchanging blows if they didn’t hurry up and reach the storage room. “I’m as interested in you and this basement as Jess is. It’s all new to me.”

“Uh-huh. So how’d you bark your knuckles?”

Tim hesitated, incriminating himself immediately. Despite looking like a person who lived on the streets, Dirk had mettle—and he was showing it now.

“Ah…moving furniture around,” Tim said, almost fast enough to sound convincing. But not quite.

“And how many other DSI students in this dorm do you think walk around in size thirteen sneakers?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“One, and you’re him.”

“And that’s significant, how?”

“Size thirteen shoe prints all over the laundry room. Leading to the very spot where I seen a pair of large blue sneakers and a set of very long legs crammed into the dumbwaiter.” He stared pointedly at Tim’s long legs. “But I suppose that’s just coincidence.”

“Without being completely rude, I thought we’d established that you searched my room and found no pair of sneakers.”

Dirk harrumphed again, dissatisfied and displeased.

“Is that it?” Jess said, pointing enthusiastically.

“Yes it is, missy. Quite the job the two of you are fixing to do. Necessary. Long overdue, to be sure. But not something for the faint of heart. As I understand it, you’ve been sworn to secrecy.”

“Many times over,” said Tim.

“I wasn’t talking to you, Daddy Longlegs. I don’t trust you, pal, and I don’t believe a word you say. Neither should you, missy. A boy the likes of this one here will get you in more trouble than it’s worth. Expelled if you’re lucky. Arrested, more like.”

Jess swallowed dryly. She’d been thinking the same thing practically from the first time she’d met Tim Walters. “Yes, sir. I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Practically speaking, missy, let me offer a word to the wise.” Dirk stopped them in front of the reinforced wire door and chain-link, floor-to-ceiling walls that enclosed the archive. “This here is under lock and key. Plenty of secrets are at home in this place. You been sworn to keep ’em that way and,” he said, addressing Tim, “that’s all well and good, but it’s only a piece of paper. So let me tell you this: you will be held to your word. By me, and by others, too.”

He peered over Jess’s shoulder as if he could see Emily standing there in her invisibility suit. The gesture reminded Jess to be wary of this man and his overly keen senses. Hopefully Emily had moved into the room and was in hiding. Jess shifted from foot to foot as Dirk continued speaking.

“Best if you check your curiosity at the door. Take your inventory by matching the file tabs with the list pasted under the lid. Nothing more. You start reading and, first, it’s going to slow you down to a crawl. Second, well, there’s stuff in there you ain’t never going to get out of your head once you read it. As special as that may make you feel right now, it’ll bore down into you like a weevil and eat you from the inside out. Take it from one who knows.”

Perhaps it was the stark lighting catching his angular face just so. Maybe his eyes flashed red for a millisecond. Or maybe it was the sound of sucking between his teeth that gave Jess a sickly feeling. Whatever the cause, her gut did a couple of somersaults. How far to the nearest restroom? she thought queasily.

“We got the download already. Thanks anyway,” Tim said rudely. Jess could have kicked him; it was senseless to provoke Dirk. It would achieve nothing and would only intensify his scrutiny, which they could ill afford, what with Emily only two feet behind Jess.

“An added warning, you two, though I don’t know why I bother. Security down here has been beefed up, not that you two need to hear that, given your being sworn to secrecy and the rules of behavior as you been. I have some inventory machines of my own you may encounter. Just step out of the way and present your dorm room card if asked. You got that?”

This was new information to both Jess and Tim. “Dorm room card,” Jess repeated.

“Got it,” said Tim.

Both were wondering exactly what Emily was supposed to do if one of the robots picked up a heat signature or used some other kind of technology to detect her.

“And listen, I don’t mean to scare you,” the old man said, savoring the moment. “But it would be unfair not to warn you of the ghosts and other inhabitants, holdovers from the night of the lightning and the fire, the earthquake and the terror. The bodies that were found—they did fine, even the dead ones. But those that were trapped, or crushed and mutilated—there were twenty-three souls unaccounted for that night—they got stuck in a kind of limbo, if you will. It ain’t often, but it ain’t never neither that they come poking their heads out all curious and cold. My robos can throw up a charge between their hands that would fry a stuffed pig in minutes. Strong enough to powder those plasma-dripping, vacant-eyed remnants. But I don’t reckon it’s anything either of you should mess with. They come a-haunting, the best thing you can do is scream your heads off. My robos hear that, they’ll come a-running. They can take it from there.”

“Ghosts,” Tim snickered dismissively.

“Laugh, and the world laughs with you, sonny boy. Cry, and you cry alone.”

Dirk unlocked and opened the door. Then he left them, shuffling off, caught beneath one hanging lamp, then the next, appearing and disappearing like a time lapse of the moon in the sky.

Jess let out an audible sigh, looked up high into Tim’s somewhat pale face, and stepped through into the caged room. Listening carefully, she could hear Emily, right behind her.

D
ISAPPOINTMENT HUNG OVER
Jess, Tim, and Emily like a cold mist. They sat in a glum row, poised on the edge of one of the two beds in the girls’ dorm room, and explained their lack of a discovery to Amanda.

“All we found were these,” Tim said, holding out a small group of newspaper clippings. “Filed under Legal, Concerns, Conspiracy, and Collusion. It was a lucky find; we’d have missed it, except, as you can see, someone scribbled and then highlighted Amery Hollingsworth’s name with a question mark after it.”

“The really weird thing,” Jess said, “is that the article is dated 1959 and has to do with a wild lion discovered on the Jungle Cruise during morning run-through. There was a lion escape reported by the zoo at about the same time—the two articles are stapled together. If that lion had attacked park guests…”

“So the obvious question is: Did the lion escape, or was he kidnapped? And if so, why is Hollingsworth’s name written onto the article?”

“And why is any of this in the archives?” Amanda asked, exasperated.

Emily spoke for the first time. She still wore her skintight invisibility suit, which was made of woven fiber-optic threads and Mylar. Her Spider-Man–like hood was pulled off, leaving her hair in a tangle.

“At the risk of sounding stupid,” she said, “do you think the boy you told me about could help? Nick Perkins? Wasn’t he the one who knew about the Legacy of Secrets and Hollingsworth in the first place?”

“Yeah. We met him at an ice hockey game, of all things,” Jess said. “He’s not a real public kid.”

“If the point is to find your five friends,” Emily said, “and if their disappearance is tied up with the Legacy of Secrets, then isn’t Nick the person to ask?”