Every morning, while they were at breakfast, a team of maids descended on the room to clean. The dust vanished like entropy in reverse. Despite the bric-a-brac, all the lower shelves had been carefully dusted.
The bookcases held everything from obviously beloved picture books like Harold and the Purple Crayon to all fourteen of the Oz books to high school textbooks. (Esme must have left home to go to college and never come back, for there was no sign of anything past the age of eighteen.) On low shelves there were worn toys and on a shelf only reachable by the ladder were seemingly new and apparently unwanted toys. Between the two were random machine parts, interesting rocks, a scattering of seashells, and an animal skull or two. Esme had to have been one odd kid.
Louise paced the length of the bookcases, studying them. Thousands of hiding places, yes, but Esme would have known that the bookcases would be systematically cleaned by the maids the moment her children arrived. Louise pulled out a worn paperback version of Escape to Witch Mountain and flipped through it. Nothing was written on the blank inside covers. There was no scrap of paper tucked between the pages. No, Esme wouldn’t have trusted something so easily found. She would want something like the box she’d left with April, a puzzle to be solved before unlocking its secrets.
Louise slowly turned, studying the entire room. To hide something you wanted found but only by your clever children and no one else. It would be something that would draw the curious person to it, but defeat anyone not smart enough to figure it out. Her gaze fell on the princess vanity that had been spray-painted black and remodeled with an old video screen and dozens of antique knobs and switches into a steampunk spaceship console. She’d tried a few of the controls and nothing seemed to happen, so she’d assumed that they were simply for display. What if Esme had made the controls functional? They could require a combination of settings to get results.
Louise sat down at the vanity and considered all the dials, knobs, buttons, and switches. The number of combinations was daunting. She memorized the initial settings of all the controls. Cautiously, she started to experiment.
There were three banks of controls. A set of simple on-off switches across the top monitor frame activated a Jacob’s Ladder, a hidden mirror-ball light, three of the airships suspended from the ceiling, and finally the monitor itself. There was a webcam built into the frame so that the monitor essentially acted as the vanity’s “mirror.”
The webcam suggested that there was a computer linked to the monitor. The rightmost set of controls was a number keypad from some vintage machine and beside it the keys from a manual typewriter labeled A through F. At a glance they would seem like two separate sets of controls, but a dull black line had been painted around them. It was nearly invisible, but it definitely paired up the keys. They combined to form a hexadecimal keypad. Progress, but it just made the possible combinations go astronomical.
The third set of controls was on the left and was a toggle control and two buttons that Louise guessed to be a stand-in for a mouse.
Assuming that the computer had booted up after so many years of being idle, what was the password to unlock Esme’s secrets?
If Esme thought that Alexander might end up stuck here, then maybe she’d keyed the password to her.
Louise used the hexadecimal keypad to type in “Alexander.”
The monitor flickered, and Esme gazed steadfastly at Louise. Judging by the background, the footage had been filmed with Esme sitting at the vanity. Esme looked too old, however, for the video to be something recorded while she lived in the room. Her hair was cut short and dyed purple, exactly how it was just before she left Earth. Esme looked worriedly into the camera, yet it seemed as though she were looking beyond the lens and seeing Louise.
“Hi, kiddo. I really hope you’re not watching this, but if you are, I’m so sorry this is how this all turned out. I’m recording this on what will be my last time in this house. I just. .” She paused and glanced over her shoulder, as if she realized that she might be overheard. “I just put my affairs in order. In Manhattan.” She meant having the embryos created that would be Alexander, Jillian, Louise, and Nikola. “Tomorrow I go back to China, and in a few months I’ll pass through the orbital gate and leave Earth forever.
“On Elfhome, my dreams are so clear and sure. Here, I have dreams but also nightmares, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. I don’t know if it’s because the magic here is screwy, as if leaking through the cracks in reality messed it up, or what. I just woke up from a doozy that I really hope is just a nightmare. You need to get out of this house. Get as far away as possible. Now. Before it’s too late. In my dream, he found you when you were much too young. Too small. Too helpless.”
Tears filled Esme’s eyes. “God, I wish I could stay now. I know I’ve never laid eyes on you, but I do love you. I’ve seen reflections of you in my dreams; heard the echoes of your laughter. But I have to go and do what I need to do.” Esme pressed her hand to the glass. “Oh, baby, I hope you never see this. You need to find a way out of here and go. Quickly. Be safe.”
Esme had dreamed of them. She’d known that they were going to be here.
Louise stared at the screen, barely able to breathe. She was seeing the future. Her dreams had started when they got the magic generator and had gotten stranger since coming to the mansion.
“That’s it?” Jillian cried when Louise replayed the video for her. Jillian dropped her pitch to parrot Esme. “I have to go and do what I need to do. And do what? Go to a colony a zillion million miles away? What so freaking important about that?”
“I don’t know.” Louise studied the image closely. “She’s afraid that this recording might be found, so she’s trying to be as careful as possible. If Ming had found this, there’s not much to lead him to us or betray anything else she’s trying to keep secret.”
Now that Louise examined the video carefully, she noticed that the angle was off. Instead of showing the middle of the bookcase, it was showing the far end and one corner of the false window looking out at the fantasy Paris landscape. Esme sat off-center, so that the window’s edge dominated the screen.
Had Esme hidden something in the window frame? Louise walked across the room to examine the window. The mural had been painted on a panel that was inset into the wall. The trim covered the seam, but as she peered closely, she could tell that there was a small gap on all four sides.
“I think this is a door,” Louise whispered. She gave it an experimental push, but nothing happened.
Joy bounded over and phased through the mural. Louise pressed her hand against the painted wood. It was solid. No wonder they couldn’t keep Joy trapped anywhere; she could walk through walls!
The baby dragon bounced back through the solid panel a moment later. She had clutched in her hands a foil-wrapped packet. “It says cookie! Is it food?”
Jillian took the packet and squinted at it. “Peach cookie crumble? It’s freeze-dried emergency food. Oh, I think it’s expired. Shelf life is only seven years, and Esme left eighteen years ago.”
“Open it!” Joy clapped her tiny hands together. “I’m so hungry! Gimme! Gimme! Nom, nom, nom!”
Jillian gave Louise a questioning look. Louise wasn’t sure when she got to be the one that decided everything. Had it always been this way and she hadn’t noticed before? She shrugged.
“I think it should be okay. I think when it’s freeze-dried that shelf life means that it’s still at the same nutrient level.”