“No, but I learned about it in my teens. I might have played a practical joke or two on the local constabulary.”
As the paper heated up, Dane found himself holding his breath. At first, it seemed like nothing was happening,even as the paper grew hotter. Then, words began to appear, faded but visible nonetheless. They formed two short sentences:
Look in the place where the father of the raven conjured an elk. You will find the noblest of birds and the sign of our Lord where the lover and the hermit meet.
Bones snorted. “Oh good, that cleared everything right up.”
Dane allowed himself a weak chuckle. “I think you were right about the library research. But it’s not all a mystery. The father of the Raven has got to be Edgar Allen Poe.”
Marshall cocked his head. “Was the Raven even written by 1847?”
“Yep. I memorized the poem back… in another life. It was published in 1845 and was pretty much an instant hit. I seem to recall Poe wrote a story called The Elk as well. Haven’t read it, though.”
Bones stroked his chin, a gesture Dane had trouble not laughing at given how rarely the man seemed to ponder anything seriously. “The noblest bird is probably a bald eagle if we’re talking about the founders and the Constitution.”
Marshall responded after a moment. “The only thing I can think of is the reference to the Library of Congress. It says Franklin hid something there. The thing is, the original Library of Congress wasn’t founded until Franklin had been dead for a few years.”
Dane pointed to the document. “It actually said he arranged for it to be hidden. So it’s possible.”
“Could be. But then we have a second problem. The original library was burned in 1812 by the British. Everything was lost.”
Bones appraised the older man. “Now it’s my turn to ask: how do you know all this?”
“History major. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer and that was a common major for future lawyers. It wasn’t for me, though.”
“Right, instead you decided to fund the mob.”
Dane hastened to derail this line of discussion. “None of that matters. We have to get to a library. Find the Poe story. Research the original Library of Congress. See if either of the riddles seems more manageable after we do that.”
“Makes sense to me, dude.”
Dane looked at Marshall. And you’re going to look into the plane, right?”
“Right. So we’ll touch base tonight and you’ll share what you find and I’ll tell you what I found.”
Dane put a hand on Bones’ arm before the big man could protest. “Sure. You want to meet here?”
“Yes. Make sure you’re not followed, okay?”
As they drove off, Bones took his eyes off the road and glanced at Dane. “Marshall seemed a little more pushy today.”
“Bones, when we first met him we were pointing guns at him.”
“Good point. Still, I think there’s more to this than he’s letting on.”
“There always is. In this case, one of those things is very obvious.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s no such thing as a private investor who lends money to the mob. Assuming he wasn’t completely making it up, there are only two possibilities. One is that he’s paying them off like we first suggested.”
Bones snapped his fingers. “Can I guess the other one?”
“Sure.”
“The other is that he actually is the mob.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Look at that! We gotta have time to do some bouldering, and some of those are V10 problems.”
Bones gestured to the huge rocks and small cliff faces that surrounded them, glistening with the melting snow. In stark contrast to the blizzard of two days earlier, the early afternoon sun had raised the temperatures north of fifty degrees and the ground was nearly clear.
Dane decided to push back a little bit. “Nah, V7 at the hardest. Though I understand how you might think it’s harder than it actually is.”
He and Bones were talking about the difficulty ratings scale for the sport of bouldering, a form of rock climbing targeting small rock formations. A “problem” described the route a climber would take.
Bones let out a belly laugh. “Oh no, Maddock is talking smack. I forgot you were into this stuff.”
“I’m more into real climbing, but bouldering has its appeal.”
“Dude, we have got to go climbing once we’re done solving two hundred year old mysteries and running from killers.”
“You’re on.”
They had just left the marked trails in Wissahickon Valley Park, and despite being less than a mile from the city streets, Dane felt like he was in the wilderness. The sound of the nearby Wissahickon Creek heavy with runoff drowned out almost all the sounds of mankind.
They had spent several hours at the library after leaving Marshall’s apartment. They still didn’t know the nature of the secret of Edmund Randolph and Ben Franklin, nor did they have an exact location for this afternoon’s search. Nevertheless, they had learned enough to give them hope.
The easiest clue to resolve was the setting of Poe’s story, “The Elk”: Wissahickon Valley where they now stood. They found some information about the original Library of Congress as well. Founded in 1800, it was burned by the British in 1814 and the official Congressional record concluded that its entire holdings were lost. Afterward, Thomas Jefferson provided a large number of volumes to begin a replacement. But they also found several reports that suggested some of the items may have been saved.
Bones had been convinced of a conspiracy. “I’m telling you, Maddock, this guy Patrick Magruder, the Librarian in 1812, reported that they had taken a whole wagon-load of stuff out of the city to a secret location. Another guy mentions a couple years later that some of the books were saved, but Congress concluded they weren’t. This has cover-up written all over it.”
“But why would they do that, Bones?”
“Who knows? Maybe to protect the secret of Ben Franklin.”
Dane wasn’t inclined to agree with him, not until they stumbled on the answer to another piece of the riddle by accident. The information on the original library of Congress showed that it was founded with seven hundred-forty books and three maps. This had to be what Richard Bache’s letter referred to when it said to look for one of the three not the seven-hundred-forty. They were looking for one of the maps from the original Library or Congress.
When they looked for more information on the Wissahickon Valley, they found at least part of the answer to the riddle about where the lover and the hermit meet. Lover’s Leap was a well-known cliff in the park where a tragic Native American couple supposedly jumped to their deaths due to a tribal dispute. Not all that far away was a deep chasm known as Hermit’s Glen.
However, the park contained several other hermit references due to the fact that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a lot of mystics and others who wanted to drop out of society gravitated towards Wissahickon. The most notable of these was a man named Johannes Kelpius, for whom a cave in the park was named. There was even a modern Kelpius Society dedicated to a combination of mysticism and Kelpius history.
Satisfied that they could start looking near the area of Lover’s Leap and Hermit’s Glen, Dane and Bones had been ready to leave the library when Bones spotted something in a report from the Parks Department. A structure known as the Lauriston Cottage, which the city had torn down some years earlier due to dilapidation, was known to have some ties to Kelpius. This seemed like an even better place to start.
Finding it proved difficult. Standing by the creek and looking up at the rock formations near Lover’s Leap, Dane still didn’t know exactly what they were looking for. A document? The lost Library of Congress? Something else? It was a little like searching for a needle in a haystack, but he wasn’t going to give up without at least looking. He knew Bones felt the same way.