Kingdom Keepers: The Return Book Two: Legacy of Secrets (8 page)

“Nothing,” he said. “Tools.”

Charlene leaned only the head and shoulders of her projection through the next locked door. When she stepped fully inside, Finn and Maybeck followed, their projections crisp and sharp once again.

The room was a spare office, carpeted with a simple desk and chair, a telephone, and a desk lamp. Attached to the side of the desk was a crank-driven pencil sharpener. Several Disneyland posters were thumbtacked to the wall. The room’s two small windows looked out beneath an awning onto Main Street’s Crystal Arcade.

“This has to be it,” Maybeck said. He gestured at the view. “It looks across at a window marked ‘Elias Disney: Contractor.’ Walt and Roy’s father. How cool is that?”

Together, the three searched the desk. They found a rubber-banded bundle of #2 yellow pencils, opera glasses, a paper punch, a stapler, some paper clips, a leather-bound checkbook, and several cardboard-covered ledger books with pages and pages of carefully written numbers. They found letters, blank stationery, an address book, and postage stamps. In the lower desk drawer, Roy Disney had a stash of yellow-and-red bags of Fritos and two bags of potato chips.

“Junk food,” Maybeck said. “I’m liking Roy.”

“No pen,” Charlene said disappointedly. “I mean there are three pens, but they’re all Reynolds Rockets, all ballpoints. No fountain pens.”

“This is getting frustrating,” Maybeck said.

“‘Getting’?” Charlene raised an eyebrow. “What planet are you on?”

“Not sure,” Maybeck said. The three laughed together.

A sharp knock on the office door startled them.

“Mr. Disney? You in there?”

A man’s gruff, low voice. The Keepers hurried to stand behind the door should it swing open, their backs against the plaster wall.

Another knock.

“Sir?”

The doorknob rattled, but the door was locked. All three expected to hear a key being inserted and the doorknob turning. If they timed it right, they could simply step their projections through the wall.

But thankfully, it didn’t happen. There was a protracted silence; it seemed the man had moved on. Charlene tried to elbow Finn, but her elbow went through his image’s side. Still, she won his attention and pointed straight ahead.

At first, Finn saw only the office window. Why would Charlene point it out? he wondered. Then his vision shifted, and he looked through instead of at the glass. Across the street, inside a set of bay windows that carried the name
ELIAS DISNEY
at the center, there was movement.

Charlene, the first to venture forward, led the way past Roy’s desk, keeping to one side of the windows. “Oh my gosh!” she said. “I think it’s them.”

The boys rushed to her side, also avoiding being seen through the window.

“Sure looks like it!” Maybeck said. “Or, if it isn’t…Nah, I’m not so sure it is.”

“Do you recognize the second from the left?” Charlene asked.

“Maybe,” Maybeck said. “It’s hard from this distance.”

“Who’s that they’re talking to?” Finn asked, squinting.

“Can’t see. It’s a guy in a business suit? He’s got a hat like yours,” Charlene said to Maybeck, who moved quickly back to the desk.

“Look,” Charlene said. She reached down for a small, gummed notepad on the windowsill. Someone had been standing at this window, taking notes. Her projected fingers passed through it, unable to grab hold.

The note was a series of numbers—4, 157, 323, 54, 204—and the initials SR.

“Check it out,” Maybeck said. He’d gotten the opera glasses from the desk drawer. Lifting the small binoculars to his eyes, he muttered a string of curses.

“What?” Charlene asked.

“The numbers on the pad are badge numbers. Badges 162 and 51 are over there now. Roy was keeping track of who was meeting in that office.”

“So the other numbers are other Cast Members?” Charlene inquired, bending low as she crossed back to Roy’s desk. “That makes sense!” She concentrated and was able to pick up a sharpened pencil.

“There’s another…” Maybeck said. “Eighty.”

“Eight-zero,” Charlene said as she wrote it down.

“Correct. If the guy would turn his head…but he’s in the dark and his back is to us.”

“SR,” Finn said. “Roy wrote down the initials…of what?”

“Hang on!” Maybeck muttered. “I think they’ve spotted us.”

One of the Cast Members in the center window was pointing directly at them. Maybeck was already setting down the binoculars when Finn saw the adult in the room also turn, his face cast in half shadow. The man pulled the curtains. Finn tried to imprint the image of his face, an attempt clouded by two of the boys taking off at a run.

“I think…” Finn said, watching the same two boys explode out of the recessed doorway of a bookstore to the right of the arcade and sprint across Main Street, “…we gotta get out of here! Come on!”

Finn ran smack into the door as he tried to pass through it. “Fear,” he said, twisting the doorknob, his stomach in knots. As early DHIs, the Keepers had had to deal with fear limiting their projections. Now it was happening again. Maybeck passed through. Charlene waited for Finn to get the door open, and they both slipped out into the hall.

“They’re coming,” Maybeck whispered from the top of the stairs.

“Tool room,” Finn said.

Maybeck—able to keep his cool—passed through the door, unlocked it, and admitted Finn and Charlene. He got the door closed just as the two boys bounded up the stairs, panting.

Finn held his hands apart, then, focusing, swept them through each other in wraithlike fashion. Maybeck and Charlene nodded in agreement. Charlene indicated the tools at their feet, making a motion of clubbing something. Finn shook his head. They would not be striking Cast Members with hammers. Not today.

Door by door, the Cast Members searched the rooms, saying things like, “Nothing,” “Empty!” and “No one!”

Finn tried to concentrate and make his hands lose their all clear. When he tried to clap, his palms passed through one another.

“We back away the moment it opens,” Maybeck said. The others nodded.

Finn heard the door to Roy’s office bump shut. Theirs would be next. Timing was everything. He had no desire for the Cast Members to see three ghosts step through walls—that would start too many rumors. Nor did he want them to have a chance to see and possibly remember their faces. Finn concentrated and picked up the sound of the boys’ shoes on the hallway’s plywood floor.

As those same footsteps slowed, Finn held out his hand, so that Maybeck and Charlene could see him count down with his fingers: three, two, one. They stepped back and through the wall in unison just as the door swung open.

All would have been fine had the Cast Members not left a sentry in the hallway. But one boy entered the tool room, and one remained behind.

He turned. “Got ’em!”

He likely hadn’t seen them step through the wall, but he might wonder later how they’d miraculously shown up only a few feet away. The three Keepers ran for the stairs.

“No sides!” Maybeck called to his friends. He didn’t want the Cast Members to see the side view of their two-dimensional projections: a thin blue line. He took the stairs two at a time. Finn, Charlene, and the Cast Members followed a yard or two behind. At the bottom, Maybeck didn’t hesitate for a second: he headed straight through the wall instead of taking the door leading backstage. Finn and Charlene followed suit, finding themselves in a darkened theater where Disney cartoons played on multiple screens.

“Look, Mommy! They came out of the picture!” said a young boy in shorts with suspenders.

“Don’t point, Jimmy! It’s impolite.” Thankfully, the mother had missed their entrance. Still, she stared, perhaps wondering why the three kids had glowing blue outlines. The Keepers sidestepped out of the theater-in-the-round trying not to reveal their lack of depth.

Getting across Main Street proved trickier. They waited for a horse-drawn trolley to use as a screen, Finn thinking all the while that somewhere behind them were two very confused Cast Members who had to be wondering how three people their own ages had managed to vanish into thin air.

I
N THE SECOND-FLOOR CONFERENCE
room in Disney Studios’ Frank G. Wells building, eight grown-ups and a young woman sat around a blond-wood oval table. Refreshments and drinks awaited on a side table. A projector screen displayed art images of the current project under discussion: a virtual maze to be installed in Disneyland, which would match the one discovered in Cinderella’s Castle in Walt Disney World.

Jess, who considered herself as close to being Amanda’s sister as a nonrelative could get, thought back to Escher’s Keep, a confounding assortment of Hogwarts-like misleading stairways, virtual floors, and trapdoors that, if climbed correctly, led the climber to what had been planned as Walt Disney’s private apartment atop the Castle. Still, as a newcomer to the Imagineers’ “Tink Tank,” an elite think tank comprising the company’s most brilliant creative minds, Jess, one of only two teens in attendance, kept her mouth shut. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to have seen Escher’s Keep in person, much less climbed it with Wayne.

A knock on the locked conference room door stopped the conversation. When the chairman accessed a small security device, Jess gasped at the face on its video screen: Tim Walters. This had to be some kind of joke! She knew Tim from the dorm at the Disney School of Imagineering, where she and Amanda were in residence. He couldn’t possibly be a member of the Tink Tank without her knowing. But obviously he was. So more to the point: How long had he been in the Tink Tank, and had he had anything to do with her invitation to join?

Tim was admitted and the door secured behind him. As he took a seat across and down the table, he looked straight at Jess from his six-foot-five towering height.

For Jess, this changed everything, though she wasn’t sure exactly how. She had been searching for a way to find out more about a new version of DHI that would likely put her friends, the Kingdom Keepers, into the history books and out of service. She’d heard about the version 2.8 DHIs at an earlier Tink Tank meeting and had been terrified ever since. If the Keepers were retired from service, who would protect the parks?

“I wonder if,” Jess said to those at the table, “when the virtual maze is installed, DHIs wouldn’t make the perfect guides? A hologram can step on but not trigger a trapdoor, for instance, or walk through a mirrored hallway, causing all sorts of illusions.”

“I like that,” the man she took to be a film director said. Exact identities of Tink Tank members were not part of introductions. Members simply went by their first names. Jess thought there was at least one Disney animator, an architect or engineer, and a college professor in addition to the film director in the room. But she had many others to figure out. “When we roll out the new line, it wouldn’t be a horrible idea to add a couple DHIs dedicated to just the maze. Thoughts?”

Several attendees nodded. Tim glared at Jess, as if trying to tell her something. His countenance bothered and distracted her. She wanted to ignore him, but found it nearly impossible.

“When would that be?” Jess asked, trying to sound innocent. “Would the timing work?”

“We can leave that kind of detail to the Imagineers,” said today’s chairperson, a woman who was likely an Imagineer herself. “Let’s make a note of it. Good thinking, Jessica.”

Tim’s eyes were like lasers, trying to melt her face like a candle held up to wax. Jess managed to look away. Now she understood: he was jealous!

After fifteen minutes of discussion about partnering with a British aviation company to create a working replica of the
Millennium Falcon
, which would offer flights out of John Wayne Airport in Anaheim, the board members took a ten-minute refreshment break. The Tink Tankers paired off and clustered in small groups to socialize or discuss proposals “off-line.” Jess headed straight for Tim, who seemed to want to avoid her.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Jess said.

“Let me give you the four-one-one: I’ve been a Tinker—that’s what we call ourselves—for six months. Yes, I was asked to keep an eye on you and Amanda, but not like spying, not in a bad way. More like an evaluation, a tryout, you could say. Yes, I recommended you and not Amanda to the Tinkers, and if you ever tell her that, I’ll never speak to you again. Sadly, I had no influence whatsoever. By the time I made my suggestion, they’d already decided to invite you. No, that had nothing do with our friendship.” He shook his head, deep in thought. “Joe knows some of what we’ve done, I suppose….I haven’t told anyone personally.”

Jess, unable to speak, toed the carpet.

“Look,” he said, “I’m going to pull rank on you. I’m older. I’ve been in DSI longer, and I’ve been a Tinker longer. In here, you learn things you can’t tell anyone about, and it drives you a little nuts. You learn to get good at saying nothing when you hear a rumor you know all about, but after a while you become pretty isolated and introverted. You want to watch that with Amanda. Don’t let it mess up you two. I’ve lost some friends I wish I could get back.” He smiled suddenly. “Now, praise the Disney gods! I have someone I can talk to!”