On shelves nearest the desk he found his grandfather’s journals, each numbered on the spine and dated on the front cover in Samuel’s spidery hand. The ending date of the last volume was nearly a year ago. He supposed the answers to his question could be found in any of these, but he wanted to begin with the most recent volume, but where was it? The desktop was clear and the drawers held pens, pencils and paper, but no journal.
He looked around, trying to think like his grandfather. Where would Samuel Stone have hidden the journal? He had left The Lost World as a clue to help Stone find this room. Could there be more layers to the intrigue? Stone thought back to all the times his grandfather had read the story to him. The details of the beloved adventure tale came pouring back into his mind: the Amazon, the rainforest, a plateau, primitive people, ape men and….
He smiled. Dinosaurs! As a child, his favorite scene had come toward the end of the novel, when Challenger, to prove the veracity of his claims to the skeptics back in England, released a live pterodactyl, which flew away across the ocean. He’d always asked his grandfather to read that scene at least twice during each reading of the book, and the pterodactyl had become his favorite dinosaur.
“Alex,” he called. “Do you see any paintings of pterodactyls?”
“No, only this skeleton,” his friend replied.
“Skeleton? Where?” Stone strode to the far end of the room, where Alex stood, inspecting a chemistry experiment in progress.
“Over there, affixed to the wall.”
Stone looked where Alex pointed. A replica of a pterodactyl skeleton, at least, he assumed it was a replica, stretched across the wall at the far end of the room. The fabled flying reptile was huge, with a wingspan of more than twenty feet. Stone wondered what it would have been like to see this magnificent creature take wing.
“Is it important?” Alex asked. He sounded disinterested, his attention focused on a vial of golden liquid.
“Perhaps not, but I have a feeling.” Stone approached the pterodactyl, or pteranodon if he didn’t miss his guess, and looked it over. If it held any secrets, he could see only one possible hiding place. He reached inside the huge beak and felt something thin and solid. Smiling in satisfaction, he withdrew a slender journal book.
“What is it?” Alex hurried forward, his interest in the experiment forgotten.
“My grandfather’s journal book.” Stone opened it to the back and paged forward until he found the final entry, dated the day before his grandfather had died. The thought caused a lump to form in his throat, and he coughed to clear it away. His moment of melancholy vanished in an instant as the final sentences grabbed his attention.
“I must get word to Brock. He needs to understand how much depends on him. And he must know that he is in grave danger.”
7- The Message
“You’re in grave danger? I suppose you found that out on your own,” Alex said. “But what does he mean by ‘much depends on’ you?”
“Hopefully, the answer lies here.” Stone tapped the journal. “Or in one of the other books.”
“You’re going to read all of those?” Alex cast a doubtful look at the shelves stuffed with journals.
“If I must, but I suspect this journal is the key. Otherwise, Grandfather wouldn’t have hidden it away. I have to warn you, I won’t make for good company until I’m finished. I’ll need to concentrate on my reading.”
“Not to worry.” Alex consulted his pocket watch. “I should probably go to work. Will you be here tonight or at your townhouse?”
“Here, most likely.”
“I’ll see you this evening, then.”
Stone bade his friend goodbye, sat down at his grandfather’s desk, and laid the book on the table. He closed his eyes and focused on his breathing. As he drew in each breath, he concentrated on the task at hand, and with each exhalation, he expelled all emotions and distractions until his mind was honed to a keen edge. When he was ready, he opened his eyes and started reading.
He’d always been a fast reader with a gift for remembering what he read, but this focus technique, which he’d learned during his travels after leaving the service, made it possible for him to consume and retain great quantities of information in very little time. He finished the journal in less than ten minutes and tossed it on the table, disappointed. He’d uncovered only a few vague allusions to a message Samuel Stone had wanted to share with his grandson, but nothing specific. Undeterred, Stone returned to the shelf, grabbed the oldest journal, and began reading them in chronological order.
Samuel Stone had begun recording his thoughts in his teen years. Though many of the concerns were typical for a young man of sixteen, such as hijinks with friends and dalliances with the daughter of a local farmer, Samuel had also written lengthy, thoughtful reflections on the issues of the day: reconstruction, westward expansion, and the place of freed slaves in American society.
As Stone read, three facets of Samuel’s character came to the fore: his love of learning, a desire to travel the world, and an eagerness to go to war. Samuel expressed disappointment that he’d been too young to fight in the Civil War, a regret that eventually motivated him to leave the university and enlist in the army.
Whatever it was about war that captivated Samuel evaporated on the plains of America’s western frontier, where the young man witnessed such horrors that he spent the ten years after his stint in the army traveling the world and trying to forget what he’d seen.
As he read, Stone couldn’t help but see parallels between his grandfather’s experiences and his own. During his decade abroad, Samuel had seen and done much more than Stone had, and he’d fastidiously recorded his experiences. The only exception was the final leg of his ten-year wanderings. The ship carrying him from Madagascar foundered in a storm somewhere in the Atlantic. Samuel had survived, reaching Virginia months later, but though he managed to save his journal book, he wrote nothing about how he had escaped death and made his way home, nor what he did during those missing months. For a man who so exactingly recorded the events of his life, this was a glaring omission.
Stone was closing the last volume when Alex returned.
“You’ve been at it all day?”
“Just finished.” Stone rose and stretched. “What time is it?”
“Six o’clock.” Puzzled, Alex looked at the stacks of discarded volumes. “What did you find?”
“He definitely had a message for me.”
“And that message was?”
“No idea.” Stone was still so focused on the contents of the journals, all the things he’d learned about his grandfather’s life rushing through his head, that he felt no annoyance or frustration at his failure.
“You’re joking.” Alex picked up a journal at random and began flipping through. “He left clues to find the room and the book, but no clues to find the message? That makes no sense.” He placed the journal back onto the pile. “Maybe he intended to write the message in the final journal but didn’t get the chance to.”
“I can’t believe that,” Stone said. “Whatever the message is, it’s clearly important. He would have made sure it was preserved somehow.”
“Too bad it’s not like that treasure hunt he put together for us on Easter. How old were we? Ten? That was the first time I learned about…” Alex paused in mid-sentence.
“Invisible ink.” Stone snatched up the last journal, the one Samuel had hidden in the pterodactyl’s beak. “Trinity used to tell me I was the dumbest genius she’d ever met. Perhaps she was right.”