Thesnickechoed in the sudden silence as we held a collective breath.
I lowered the camera as Landon looked straight at me, his eyes sparkling. “It’s unlocked.”
Chapter 13
“It’s unlocked.” Landon’s quietly jubilant words filled my ears. My stomach quivered. We were about to see what was in the secret closet. Was it treasure? A creepy doll collection? An actual skeleton?
“Well, come on!” Sloane said, and her cry was soon echoed by everyone else in the room.
Landon beckoned me over. I couldn’t resist the chance to open the door. I thrust my video camera at Wyatt, who was a photographer as well as a surfer, and he stuffed his phone in his pocket, grinned and started shooting. He and Cali were double-teaming this. It would be the best-documented secret closet opening ever. All of a sudden I felt like I was on one of those dumb ghost-hunter shows.
As I sidled up to Landon, some in the room stepped forward; one or two stepped back. I put my hand on the glass doorknob and looked up at him, frozen in the moment. He gave me an encouraging smile, warmer than the Fireworks, and put his hand over mine, sending a zing of awareness through me.
Together, we turned the knob and pushed.
The dark space beyond exhaled into the room. It was a cool sigh that was echoed by the house, with a creaking and that distant tinkling that seemed like more of a suggestion of sound than an actual noise. I dimly registered that everyone in the room looked just a tiny bit freaked out as they gasped and cursed.
“Do you have the flashlight?” Landon called, and Gary handed him a compact metal flashlight. “Ready?” Landon asked me.
“Turn the damn thing on.”
Landon clicked on the crazy bright LED beam and swept it around the space.
At first I thought the emptiness went on and on, like a tunnel, and a thrill shot through me. But then I realized that Landon wasn’t illuminating a passageway. He was basically illuminating … nothing.
“What’s in there?” asked Sloane, who was right behind me.
“Um.” I didn’t want to admit it was nothing.
“Nothing?” Ez guessed. She was right behind Sloane.
“Maybe?” I said. The sudden adrenaline crash that accompanied my disappointment made me woozy. I touched Landon’s arm and took the flashlight from him, sweeping it around. It was a closet, all right, about the size of my small closet in our apartment. The walls were made of roughly put-together boards that were dark with age. Nothing was in the corners except dust and a couple of vacant spiderwebs.
“Wait,” Landon said. “Let me have that again.”
He took the flashlight back and shone it upward, toward what appeared to be an empty shelf. “There’s something here,” he said.
The shelf was high, and he was taller than I was. “I can’t see it.”
“Books,” he said. “It looks like a stack of books. Four — no, five of them.”
“Books? In a library? That’s crazy talk,” Thea said.
“Smart-ass,” I said under my breath, and Sloane laughed. “Can you get them?”
Landon handed me the flashlight again, and I shone it upward as he stretched up and reached back. The shelf was deep, and it took him a second to drag the books forward and over the edge.
A cloud of dust followed, and Sloane and I stumbled back, coughing. Landon stepped out of the closet with the books in his arms and headed for the library table. The others gathered around — though not too close, as another pyroclastic flow of dust exploded out of the volumes as Landon set down the books with a heavythunk.He dusted himself off, unperturbed by the dirt.
After the last few days in the garden, we were pretty much immune to dirt.
I joined him at the table and stared at the top book on the stack.
It was a little smaller than the others. The cover boards were wrapped with marbled paper, much worn, with brown leather at the corners and on the binding. I reached out and flipped open the cover.
On the first page, printed in a typeface that evoked the nineteenth century, was the word RECORD surrounded by flourishes.
I turned the page again and was surprised to see lines and lines of words and numbers — lists. At the top of the first page, written in a neat hand, it said1896.The next line saidFamily Expenses October.Below that were lists of purchases with impossibly tiny prices next to them — needle and thread and cotton fabric. Onions and lemons. Wages for the servants and payments to the milkman.
