“Oh,really. That’s what we’ll do? That’s your plan?” he said, sounding both perturbed and a little amused.
I shrugged one shoulder. “Unless you don’t think you can fly a plane like that...”
“Pfft.”He crossed his arms over his chest. “Not falling for that, am I?”
“Are you sure? That’s what a coward would probably say.”
“You forget, banshee. I have no male pride. Call me a coward. Call me soft. Bothers me not,” he said, shaking his head slowly.
“All right, then. What doyoupropose we do? If what David told us was true, then Father left here yesterday, which makes him a day ahead of us. We need to keep moving to catch up with him. And besides, Sarkany could be back in the citadel along with the police, who you said would question us, so we can’t go back there. And if we just sit here arguing, we’ll likely die of frostbite.”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “Know all that, don’t I? But we can’t fly tonowhere.”
“It’s notnowhere. It’s... somewhere in Romania,” I said dramatically, fanning my hand out over the landscape.
Huck laughed. We both knew this was ridiculous.
“Let’s just walk over to the hangar,” I urged. “Maybe there’s someone working inside the post office who can help us, or I can look at Father’s journal. At the very least, it’s shelter from the snow. One wall is better than none.”
With this logic Huck finally agreed, so we made our way down the dirt road. The brick building had no windows, only a locked door. When we knocked, no one answered, so we headed around back to the hangar. Not much to see there: some locked tool cabinets, a locked back door that led into the building, and an air-to-ground wireless stand—also locked.
The airplane, however, was not. Huck walked the length of it, inspecting the fuel tank, popping open panels and checking cables and mechanical systems. “Fueled up. Probably used regularly. Not the best I’ve seen by a long shot. Needs service badly. But seems airworthy for a short trip. Probably.”
“Marvelous!”
“No,notmarvelous. I could lose my private pilot license back in the States—and completely ruin any chance of getting one in Belfast.”
“If we sit around here and do nothing, I could lose my father,” I countered.
“You act like I’m not concerned about that,” Huck said, irritated. “We’re both on the same side here.”
Point taken. Before we could get into another fight, I hauled my satchel to a workbench and flipped on a small overhead light there. Then I rooted through my clothes and books until I found the journal, laid it out on the workbench, and began scanning through it. “Twins, twins,” I mumbled, flipping through the thick pages.
“Maybe he doesn’t call them twins. Try looking for brothers. Or merchants.”
“Doing that already,” I said in a singsong voice.
“Or maybe it’s one of the coded words you haven’t deciphered yet.”
But it wasn’t. And after going through every page, there was nothing about any merchant twins to whom Father had talked. No traveling merchants. No dealers in arcane items. No estate sales, no visit to the town of Constan?a on the Black Sea.
Nothing but the torn page.
“Damn him!” I said, throwing the journal against the wall. It knocked a pushpin out of the corner of a map, and both the pin and the journal clattered to the floor. Candy wrappers and photographs spilled from the pages. I sighed at the mess I’d made—the mess my father had made, to get technical about it.
“I hate him,” I said miserably.
Huck nodded. “I know. Me too, sometimes.”
“Easy to love, hard to like. That’s what Mother used to say about him.”
“She must have liked him though.”
“God only knows why.” I blew out a hard breath and bent to pick up the journal and the rat’s nest of scraps that had spilled from it. As I was shoving the photographs back into pages, my fingers stilled on a small ivory rectangle of heavy card stock. I didn’t remember seeing this before.... I flipped it over and read the printed type on the front:
ZISSU BROTHERS
RARE JEWELRY AND ANTIQUES
