Waist-high shelves stood in the middle of each alcove. I stopped abruptly. The warm air of Giovanni’s breath and the flare of his energy rippled over my neck and shoulder. “What is it?” he asked.
“That carving there, the spiral.” It was the one I’d seen in the memory bound to the key. I walked to the next alcove and then the next, past the busts of Jonathan Swift, Sir Isaac Newton, Socrates, Shakespeare. Beneath the stern faces of the world’s great writers and thinkers, every single pew of books had this same scrollwork carved into the end pieces of the shelves: a winding spiral with a flower in the middle. I rubbed my temples as I racked my brain for ideas. Where would my mother hide her journal in a place like this? If she and my father and I had anything in common, she’d have hidden it in plain sight.
I walked down the length of the enormous room a second time, hoping against hope that if her journal was here, she hadn’t tucked it away on the second floor with no public access. As it was, double ropes cordoned off parts of the floor, keeping the public from handling the valuable books. Even if I found something, I wasn’t sure how I’d get my hands on it. My eyes scanned for anything with a lock in which the key might fit. The faces of each marble bust mocked me with blank, staring eyes. One bust in particular ridiculed me more than any other: Cicero. My father kept a handwritten quote of Cicero’s under the glass on top of his desk at home. It said:
Are you not ashamed as a scientist, as an observer, and investigator of nature, to seek your criterion of truth from minds steeped in conventional beliefs? -Cicero
I’d had to stare at that quote a million times as I sat at his desk during the years I was homeschooled. I retrieved my mom’s letter from my pocket and examined her neat, slanted script. Yes. It was the same as the script in my memory. I looked again into the colorless eyes of my messenger. When you have nothing to go on, you’ll go on anything. I tilted my head to look at the books on the shelves in the alcove next to Cicero.
“What would it be titled?” Giovanni asked.
I gave him a tired look. “I’m guessing it will be titled X Marks the Spot: The Musings of a Missing Scintilla.” Giovanni’s eyebrows shot up and he walked past me. I scanned the rows and rows of books all in shades of mud brown, faded blue, and maroon. I was about to move on when a red book caught my eye. One word was written in silver script where all the other books had gold: Grace.
“Giovanni,” I hissed. With long strides, he stood back at my side. I pointed at the book. “That one. That’s it, I know it.” I was so desperate to touch it that my fingers tingled. I hopped up and down on my toes. I leaned against the teal ropes keeping me from the book I was sure was my mother’s. Her name, Cicero’s bust, even the color of the shiny foil lettering. “I have to have that book.” My voice was a desperate plea, and my stomach knotted like cable.
Giovanni pointed at the security personnel in the room. “Go ask him what is required to gain access to the upstairs section.”
His command stymied me, but I trusted he had a reason, and I believed he wanted to help. I walked along the glossy planked floor toward the man he’d pointed at, willing myself not to look back at the book.
Before I’d even gotten my whole question out, Giovanni was next to me. “We’re running late,” he said with a curt nod to the security guard. “Maybe next time?” He took my elbow and led me out of the library.
“Listen, I—you can’t just—”
“Don’t worry about it, Cora.”
“How can you tell me not to worry? We need to go back in there!” I tugged on his arm, but he held it firm against his waist. Giovanni stopped outside the gate to the college and opened his jacket a fraction. The silver lettering inside gleamed at me. I stared openmouthed. He winked.
I held out my hand. “Let me see.”
He began walking again. “Not here. Let’s find a coffee shop where we can sit in the privacy of a crowd.”
We walked without speaking for a couple of blocks. I didn’t ask how he got the book. Honestly, I didn’t care. I’d have snatched the book if I could have, and I supposed he probably didn’t survive his entire childhood on his own without using some sleight of hand once in a while.
The coffee shop was warm, and I was grateful for the respite from the chilly breeze. Giovanni and I scooted into a café table in the back corner. He slipped the book from his jacket and held it out to me. I thought about my apparent new affliction: psychometry—the ability to pick up information from an object. As best I could tell from the Internet, that’s what had happened to me with the phone and the key. As if seeing auras wasn’t crazy enough, I got to add another extrasensory ability to my repertoire. Not surprisingly, my search didn’t yield anything on “spontaneous tattoos.”
I took the journal and inwardly winced, expecting a rush of object-memory to overtake me, but nothing happened.
Nothing.
“Why do you wait?” Giovanni asked. Then his large palm covered mine. “Your hands are shaking.”
Despite just meeting him, I was thankful to have him with me. “This might not be it,” I said. I had been so sure my mother’s journal would be infused with memories accessible with a touch, its silence crushed me.
He ran his fingers soothingly over the tops of my hands, then removed them, leaving a cloud of energy over my skin. “Open it.”
I did.
The first thing I saw was the quote by Cicero in the same familiar script as my father’s note. My head bowed and a sob-laced breath fell from my lips. I let the book fall open, deciding it would tell me what it wanted to tell me.
The pages were covered in scribbles, the first one a sketch of the pyramids tip to tip, like in the key. She seemed particularly interested in Brú na Bóinne, the Irish name for Newgrange, as there were pages of notes and drawings of that one place alone. It was majorly important to the Irish, who could boast in a superior “Our megalithic temple is one thousand years older than your Stonehenge” kind of way. It was important enough that even Finn had the triple spiral tattooed on his chest. Talk about pride of place. But why was Newgrange so important to my mother?
There were also newspaper clippings, quotes, pictures of religious icons and saints, many of which I’d seen when I held the key for the first time. This was my mother’s journal, a piece of her in my hands. I couldn’t wait to devour every word. “If—if we could walk back now, I’d like to go to my room and read a while.”
Giovanni nodded. “If you don’t mind, I’d very much like to know anything that might pertain to us.”
“You got this for me, and no one has told me more about myself than you have, Giovanni.” I took a deep breath. “I’ll tell you. I promise.”
Twenty-Six
The book weighed down my purse, but it wasn’t a burdensome weight. It was heavy with my mother’s history. I was going to catch hell for it, but coming to Ireland hadn’t been a mistake.
We crossed a busy street in front of a large park called St. Stephen’s Green. The sun fell behind the buildings, casting intermittent shadows on the edge of the park. Giovanni and I walked through the shadows, heading toward the Temple Bar district and my hostel. My mind was on one thing: to get back and immerse myself in my mother’s world. It was like she was waiting for me to get to know her.
I barely registered Giovanni, and finally realized how much we had walked today. “This is totally the opposite direction from your hotel,” I said. “You don’t have to walk me.”