So there was probably a hidden trigger or switch that opened up the airship. There were all the little sandbags and such dangling from the side, but pulling on one seemed risky. It would be too easy to pull the entire model down. So a switch or a knob. The five cannons seemed the most obvious choice. Of course if she was wrong, she might be snapping off delicate pieces. It occurred to Louise that as far as Esme knew, there were five children in her family, thus the nicknames for the flying monkeys. Esme was number three or the middle cannon.
Louise carefully twisted the center barrel. It turned easily. There was a small click and the floor of the quarterdeck flipped up, revealing a small compartment built into the stern of the ship. Inside was a key card.
The method to Esme’s madness was revealed in the secret room beyond the door. By covering the windows and creating the framed steampunk cityscapes, she’d been able to disguise the fact that she had actually created a fake wall four feet out from the real wall. It created a long, tall, narrow treasure room stuffed full of things that Esme wanted to keep hidden from Edmond and his staff. Louise couldn’t imagine, however, how Esme had managed to get everything past the elves unnoticed. There was a huge supply of freeze-dried food, both in packets like Joy had carried out and in large cans.
“Food?” Joy danced on the shelf in front of the large cans.
Jillian picked up one. “Turkey tetrazzini. Yes, it’s food. Twenty-five-year shelf life — and it’s still good. Makes ten one-cup servings. It’s a lot of food. Diced turkey, asparagus, and gourmet pasta noodles in a flavorful sauce. I wonder what kind of sauce is tetrazzini.”
“Is it yummy?”
“I’m not sure.” Jillian sorted through the cans. “There might be something more familiar. Spaghetti with meat and sauce. Chicken teriyaki with rice. Blueberry cheesecake.”
Joy squealed, making them all wince. “Cake! Cake! Cake!”
Louise laughed, suddenly giddy with the sense of relief. Esme’s spirit was here in this secret room, strong and protective. They weren’t totally alone.
34: Shutdown
The secret room and all that it promised lifted Jillian’s spirits. For the first time since the play, she almost seemed normal. They spent the day inventorying everything the room held, killing the hours before Shutdown. Some of it was extremely logical, like lockpicks and Swiss army knives, some more eccentric, like sharpened wooden stakes and a mallet.
Jillian held up one of the stakes. “See, we’re not the only ones that see them as vampires.”
“That’s probably from before the first Startup. I’m fairly sure Esme knew they were elves after that.” Maybe.
Joy held out something wrapped in foil. “Candy?”
Louise took it and eyed the item. “No, this is a glow stick. It’s not food. I’m not sure if it’s even any good.” She unwrapped it, snapped it in the middle, and shook it. The chemicals had degraded to the point where the glow stick barely gleamed, but it was enough to impress the baby dragon.
“Ooohhh.” Joy murmured at the glow. “Pretty.”
“It just makes light.” Louise handed it back to her. “It’s not good to eat.”
Joy disappeared into the upper shelves, a faint gleam of green marking her passage.
Louise crouched to check the bottom shelf. There were plastic storage boxes with airtight lids. She opened the first one and found old newspaper clippings. Louise actually had never seen a newspaper before. She spent a few minutes in awe of the feel of the paper and how thin it was. She puzzled over the section of text on one side, talking about two airplanes colliding in midair. Then she flipped over the clipping. Neil Shenske in full spacesuit gazed up her. The headline read “Astronaut Killed in Shooting.” It was the same photograph that Esme had included in the Chinese puzzle box, only that picture had identified him as the King of Denmark. The newspaper gave all the pertinent details. Why had Esme left them the mislabeled photograph and not this article?
Almost as if in answer to her question, she noticed that the words “police have no leads” had been underlined in red.
In Hamlet, the King of Denmark was killed by Claudius, who then married Queen Gertrude and became Hamlet’s stepfather. Esme had labeled Anna’s photo as Queen Gertrude. If the roles continued to pair up, then Ming was the king’s murderer. Esme must have believed that Ming had killed Neil Shenske so he could marry Anna.
Louise flipped through the clippings. They were all on the shooting. Three people had been killed and five more wounded when a lone shooter opened fired at a high school science fair. In an age before cell phones, the person had evaded the handful of surveillance cameras on the school grounds. Witnesses stated that the shooter was tall and slender, but that was the end of the agreement. Follow-up stories spoke of candlelight vigils and angst-filled funerals, but there was never more evidence that led to a killer.
“Joy!” Jillian cried from the other side of the narrow room. “Oh, oh, don’t get that on the paper!”
Louise glanced up and groaned. Empty glow sticks lay on the floor, snapped in two after being activated. There were little gleaming paw prints all over the shelves and walls. Joy perched on Jillian’s shoulder, holding on to her hair while trying to finger-paint on the paper that Jillian was studying.
“No, no, this may be important.” Jillian tried to hold the paper farther away from the baby dragon. “Here, let me find something else.”
“What is it?” Louise quickly tucked away the box of newspaper clippings. Jillian probably would see Neil’s murder as proof that Ming had killed their parents. The possibility still rocked Louise, but like Esme she’d found no evidence. At least not yet. Jillian couldn’t take another hit. Until Louise found something more than a niggling fear, she couldn’t let Jillian know.
“Esme has dozens of maps of caves.” Jillian held up a blank sheet of paper for Joy to finger-paint. “Here, play with this instead. If Esme was just into spelunking, I don’t think she’d have the maps in here. I think they’re important.”
Louise eyed the crowded shelves of the long, tall, secret room. It was going to take them days to dig through it. In a few hours, though, Shutdown would start. “We should go to bed early. We’re going to get up at midnight and try to reach Orville.”
At first, every attempt to dial through to their cousin resulted in “All circuits are busy, please try again later.” At six in the morning, the phone clicked and Orville’s voice mail picked up on the first ring. “Hi, I’m not on Earth with the rest of Pittsburgh. I got permission from the EIA to ride out Shutdown at one of the enclaves. I got this feeling Tinker might come back from Aum Renau, find everyone had gone to Earth without her and just freak. You know the drill; I’ll be back after Startup.”
Louise stared at her phone. “What is Alexander doing at Aum Renau?”
“Where is Aum Renau?” Nikola asked.
“It’s Windwolf’s palace on the Palisades.” Louise pointed east out of habit. She winced as she remembered the Desmarais mansion was very near to the cliffs. “Aum Renau is hundreds of miles from Pittsburgh. But the only humans that are allowed beyond the city limits are a handful of biologists and the railroad employees.”
The railroad didn’t lead the entire way to the Elfhome equivalent of the Hudson River but instead stopped at an elf settlement roughly in the same location as Philadelphia. There the cargo was off-loaded to ships that would travel downriver to the Delaware Bay and across the Western Ocean to the Easternlands. Humans only knew of the palace by name; no one had ever actually visited it. How did Alexander even get to Aum Renau?