House of Secrets (15 page)

She turned to Will and looked him square in the eyes. Will smiled, but the intensity of Cordelia’s gaze made him uncomfortable. “Cordelia. Why are you looking at me like—”

She reached up, grabbed Will’s face with both hands, and planted a deep, long kiss on his lips.

T
hey all stood frozen for a few seconds. Cordelia kissed Will with every bit of hedonism she could muster (which wasn’t much, considering it was her first kiss) as his eyes went wide in total panic. Brendan and Eleanor were gape-mouthed and frozen: Eleanor with glee, Brendan with disgust.

“
Gross!
Stop! Guys—”

But he didn’t need to pull them apart. Cordelia pushed Will away suddenly.

“What was
that
?” Will asked, holding his palm to his lips and checking his hand for lipstick. There was none.

“Sorry,” Cordelia said. She faced the forest, her face blazing red. “I just thought that if I did something crazy . . . impulsive . . . we could find the book and get our parents back.”

“So you’ve been wanting to kiss Will this whole time,” said Brendan.

“Oh no. Of course not,” said Cordelia.

“Liar! You liked Will from the beginning!” Eleanor grinned. “Cor
delia
has a
boy
friend!”

“Nell, be quiet! That’s not it at all. I was just—”

“Just being selfish. Morally weak. Hedonistic,” said Will.

“Exactly. I’m sorry. I was confused and . . . ” Cordelia started to tremble, tears filling her eyes.

“Shh,”
said Will. “It only lasted a few seconds. Not long enough to be considered amoral. Which is probably why the book didn’t appear. I actually thought it was sweet.”

Ugh,
Cordelia thought.
Now he’s speaking to me as if I
were
a child.
Maybe another tree will fall and put me out of my misery.

That wasn’t all. Cordelia was scared. When she’d kissed Will, she hadn’t been in control of herself. She’d been thinking about
The Book of Doom and Desire
and how to find it. It was almost as if the book, and not Will, had been the target of her lips.

They all started walking back to Kristoff House, lost in thought. Eleanor asked, “So . . . are we gonna find Mom and Dad and go home now?”

“We’re gonna try,” said Cordelia.

“How?”

Cordelia shrugged. “Do what the Wind Witch said.”

“No way,” Brendan said. “I don’t believe a thing that old hag says. Act selfish and you’ll get what you want? What an obvious trap! Besides, you tried to do it and it didn’t work!”

“Maybe
you
have to do it. Or maybe we all do. She seemed like she was being logical, at least. We should try.”

“She’s setting us up. I say we find another way back.”

“I have to side with Brendan on this one,” said Will. “It’s nothing personal. I just don’t trust women with moldy teeth.”

“And he’s from England,” said Brendan.

“I say we listen to her, at least until we find the book, and then maybe double-cross her,” said Cordelia.

“No way, Deal. It’s too dangerous—”

“You’re scared!”

“I’m not scared—”

“Are you aware that your family argues an exceptional amount?” asked Will.

Eleanor stomped her foot.
“No more fighting!”

They all winced. Eleanor could be super loud when she wanted.

“We don’t know who to trust because we don’t know
anything
! We don’t know which book we’re in, we don’t know if the Wind Witch is telling the truth, and we don’t know if those horse-killing warriors are coming back! Until we find that out, there’s no point doing
anything
!”

“How do you suppose we find the answers?” Brendan asked. “Do you see Wikipedia around here?”

“We can read,” suggested Cordelia.

“Read what?” asked Brendan.

“Kristoff’s novels,” said Cordelia. “
All
of them.”

“Say, that’s a good idea,” said Will. “That will show us which books we’re trapped in.”

“We already know some of the stuff here is from
Savage Warriors
,” said Cordelia, “and Will’s from
The Fighting Ace
, but is there more we need to find?”

“Sounds cool,” said Eleanor. “Like a scavenger hunt!”

“Exactly,” said Cordelia. “But first . . . Will, can you stand guard at the door? If Slayne and his warriors show up—”

“Or baldy butt breath,” added Brendan.

“
Or
that giant wolf that almost bit my head off,” added Eleanor.

“Right, if
anybody
shows up, call us, and shoot them,” Cordelia said. “Not necessarily in that order.”

Will saluted. “Happy to do my duty.”

“I’m going upstairs to get that
RW
trunk open,” said Cordelia. “That might be a clue too.”

“
I
want to open the trunk,” Eleanor started, but then she caught herself. “Right. I mean, no fighting.”

Eleanor and Brendan went to the library. With the sun just reaching the top of the sky, there was plenty of light to search the books. Eleanor had already separated Denver Kristoff’s novels from the rest, so she felt like a bit of an expert, at least enough to boss her brother around.

Brendan didn’t mind. He started reading a Kristoff book called
Gladius Rex
. He got twenty pages in before he decided it wasn’t one of the ones they were trapped in. (He was glad, too, because it was full of people getting eaten by lions.) He looked at Eleanor. She was trying to read
Savage Warriors
.

“How far are you?” he asked.

Eleanor scrunched her mouth. “Page thirty.”

Brendan could tell she was lying. “That’s great, Nell, but here, why don’t we switch?” Brendan knew that reading
Savage Warriors
might be the difference between life and death. He handed her
Gladius Rex
. “I think there might be some good stuff in here.” Eleanor accepted the trade and Brendan got into
Savage Warriors
quickly.

It wasn’t only about Slayne and his men. It was also about their boss, an evil queen named Daphne, who lived in a castle called Castle Corroway. Brendan recognized those names from his run-in with Slayne. But there was another side to
Savage Warriors
: the Resistance, a group of freedom fighters who were trying to stop Queen Daphne. They were common townspeople who secretly had jobs as spies and archers and weapon makers. They were led by a general, but more interesting to Brendan was the general’s daughter, this heroic girl named Celene.

Celene had purple eyes. She was smart and pretty and she wasn’t scared of anybody when she believed in something. Precisely the sort of girl who Brendan never came close to meeting in his school, where the only thing the girls were into talking about was one another. Brendan thought Celene was awesome.

He kept reading, getting scared when he came to a part of the book that featured a creature thousands of times more powerful than Slayne, when Eleanor called, “Bren! This book you gave me isn’t helpful! It’s all ancient Rome stuff!”

“Uh, is it?”

“Don’t play dumb with me! You gave me some book you know we’re not trapped in to keep me busy, because I don’t read fast enough!”

“Nell, that’s not true—”

“And now you’re lying! I’m going to help, whether you believe in me or not.” Eleanor put down
Gladius Rex
and picked up
The Heart and the Helm
, a book about pirates. “Maybe we’re trapped in this one too.”

Brendan gave her a hug. “You are helping, Nell. You are.”

Meanwhile, upstairs, Cordelia was secretly nearing the end of
The Fighting Ace
, but the book had a horrifying conclusion. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t finish it.
You’re being ridiculous,
she thought.
He’s just some stupid boy. He’s not even out of high school.
(
The Fighting Ace
had revealed that Will had lied about his age to get into the Royal Flying Corps. He was seventeen.) But no matter how she denied it, Cordelia cared about his fate.

She put the book down and went to the
RW
trunk. The heavy padlock was impossible to deal with, so she tried to smash the latch with a hammer. Unfortunately, the only one she could find was a tiny ball-peen hammer that she got from downstairs under the sink. The hammer didn’t work and she put it back.

She tried to pick the lock. Hanger . . . bobby pin . . . the rusty sword from one of Brendan’s old Civil War toy soldiers that had been blown into the bedroom during the attack . . . nothing worked.

“Will!” Cordelia called downstairs. “I need help!”

Within moments, Will reached the second-floor bedroom. Cordelia explained, “I can’t open the trunk. Do you have any ideas on how I—”

BLAM!

Will smiled and held up his revolver. A whiff of gunpowder slid past his face. The lock lay splayed open on the floor.

“Unnecessary machismo,” commented Cordelia.

Will shrugged. Brendan and Eleanor rushed into the room. “Cool,” Brendan said, looking at the shot-open trunk. “Will, do you think you could teach me how to use your gun?”

Will stashed his weapon. “It’s not a gun. It’s a Webley Mark Six revolving pistol. And it isn’t a toy. I don’t want you going near it, Brendan.”

“Fine,” said Brendan as Cordelia yanked open the trunk. It was a superbly made vessel, suffused with a pleasant tang of oak and brass, but all she cared about was what was inside.

“Yes!” she yelled. “Finally, we might be onto something!”

B
rendan didn’t understand what Cordelia was so excited about. The trunk was full of brown accordion folders packed with stacks of yellowed papers.

“Documents? What are we gonna do with these?”

“Don’t you see the name?” Cordelia said. “Bren, you were right!” She handed him one of the accordion folders. A stamp on top said RUTHERFORD WALKER, MD.

“Our great-great-grandfather . . . ,” Brendan said, trailing off as he turned the folder around in his hands. He thought back to the pictures of the Kristoff family in the hallway.
Time really does make things important,
he decided.
Once these were just ordinary papers. Now they’re history. My history.
He was almost afraid to look. He thought about his parents and how they were still missing, how he was missing too.
There are probably news broadcasts about the disappearance of the Walker children. What if my history ends with me?

“What kind of documents are they?” asked Eleanor.

“They appear to be medical records,” said Will.

“Correct,” said Cordelia, examining a folder on her lap. “Dr. Walker’s records for each patient. Let’s see . . . ‘Mrs. Mary Worcester of Duboce Avenue, San Francisco. Date of first visit: March sixteenth, 1899. Complaint: nervous distress. Treatment: one vitality tonic.’ Huh.”

“What’s a vitality tonic? Like a Red Bull?” Eleanor asked.

“I don’t think so. More like—”

“Quackery,” interrupted Will.

“Excuse me?” said Brendan.

“It’s quite clear. Your great-great-grandfather was a flimflam man.”

“A what?”

“Bamboozler. Con artist. Sham druggist.”

“Druggist? No. He was a doctor!
MD
, hello?” Brendan said.

“That may be, but he prescribed panaceas that—”

“Pana-
what
? Isn’t that a piece of land surrounded by water on three sides?” asked Eleanor.

“That’s a peninsula,” said Cordelia.

“A panacea is a medicine that people wrongly expect will cure all sorts of ills,” said Will. “Look at the rest of this list. Mrs. Worcester was given a new ‘vitality tonic’ every two weeks at the cost of forty cents, for ‘mercurial eruptions’ and ‘neuralgia,’ and she kept coming back for a year, at which point her husband probably told her to stop seeing that Walker quack—”

“That’s our family you’re talking about!”

“Calm down. I’m not
blaming
the man. You Yanks are wild for your ‘elixirs’ and ‘supplements’ and ‘Coca-Cola.’ Put a healthy label on something and you can make a fortune in America!”