Greenglass House (31 page)

“Maybe,” Negret agreed, “but I still want to take a look at the garden.”

Sirin shrugged. “It'll be covered in snow. There'll be nothing to see.”

“Okay, but I don't want to
not
look at it. Like you said, it's bad reconnoitering, right?”

“I guess,” she grumbled, and turned to look down the hallway. “But I don't know what you're hoping to get from it, except cold and wet.”

Judging from the doors that were open, Brandon and Fenster had chosen the two rooms closest to the stairs. Once again, Negret tried to be extra observant as he and Sirin headed down the hall. The same wallpaper, the same carpet, the same sconces, the same ceiling. The same painted-shut dumbwaiter door at the end of the hallway. The table under it was square, and the poinsettia on it was red.

Clem's old room was 5W at the end of the hall. It was just like all the rest: bed, dresser, desk, chair, luggage rack, bathroom. She'd tugged the linens into place before she'd left, but Negret could tell nobody'd been in to make the bed up fresh. They found nothing interesting there.

On the fourth floor, the two doors closest to the stairs were also closed, so Negret and Sirin headed for the end of the hall and started with the room Georgie had vacated. She'd left her bed unmade, but the room was just as lacking in items of interest as Clem's. Negret started to move the luggage rack to its correct place on the other side of the door, then realized that the rug underneath it sat unevenly against the wall. He decided maybe his mother had put the rack there on purpose to hide the crooked edge and, with effort, left it where it was, even though his sense of order was still disturbed. Then he and Sirin crossed the hall to the last empty room.

Negret pulled the door to 4E mostly closed behind them, just as he had in the other rooms. It seemed like a good idea to avoid drawing attention to what they were doing, even though, apart from some heavy snoring on five, the adventurers hadn't seen or heard a single person during their search.

They looked in all the likely hiding spots—nothing—and were just about to call it quits when the door swung shut.

It happened so quietly that if Negret hadn't been facing the door, he might not have noticed a thing. But as it happened, he not only saw the door swing shut, he saw the knob turn at the very last moment, accompanied by a soft click.

“Draft?” Sirin asked, following his stare.

“I . . . guess?” But it hadn't moved the way doors usually did in the old house's drafts. And drafts definitely didn't turn doorknobs.

Then a second soft click got him on his feet and reaching for the knob himself. It wouldn't turn.

“No,” he said, incredulous. He rattled the doorknob. “No
way!
”

“It's locked?”

“It's locked!” He stepped back and stared. “I don't believe this.”

“From the outside? You can't unlock it from in here?”

“I could if I had the key,” Negret said patiently. “These all lock with keys, from the inside or the outside.”

“So . . .” Sirin bent and put an eye up to the keyhole. “So that means . . . ?”

“Yeah.” Negret aimed a kick at the heavy, old wood. “Somebody locked us in. With a key. On purpose.” He dropped to a seat on the luggage rack. “You know what we didn't do?”

“Check for traps?”

“Yeah.”

Sirin examined him thoughtfully. “You're taking it pretty well.”

“It only looks that way. I promise you, I'm not happy about it.” He set his rucksack down beside him on the rack, opened it, and took out Clem's lockpick kit. “Do you think there's any chance at all I can make these work?”

She shrugged. “It would probably be silly not to try.”

He unrolled the packet and looked over the picks.
Gotta start somewhere,
he thought. He reached back into the rucksack and found his pair of Wildthorn's Crackerjack Gauntlets, for Pickers of Locks and Creepers Through Windows Needing Nimble and Foxy Fingers, pulled them on, then chose a pick with an end that looked like the teeth of a key. He slid it into the keyhole.
Now what?

Come on, Moonlighter's Knack.
Presumably it was good for getting past locks and combinations even if you weren't out to steal things. He wiggled the pick. He poked around with it. He tried rotating it as if it
were
a key, but that didn't accomplish anything either. Negret repeated this process with one pick after another until he'd gone through the entire contents of the roll. Finally he slid the last pick back into its spot, folded his arms, and slumped against the wall. “Some escaladeur,” he grumbled. “I've actually got lockpicks, and I still can't open the door.”

Sirin patted his shoulder. “Don't be too hard on yourself. You don't know how to use them. It's not like there were instructions in there.” She turned around. “Come on, Negret. I guess we could always bang on the door until someone hears us, but do we have any other options?”

“Let's hope we don't need any.” Together they set to banging on the door and hollering at the top of their lungs. Long minutes passed. No one came.

“Unbelievable.” Negret stared at the locked door in frustration. “Somebody must've taken one of the passkeys. The guest keys only work for their own doors.”

“So there's another key for this room somewhere?” Sirin asked.

“Sure, in our study on the second floor, not that it helps us.”

Sirin looked at him sharply, opened her mouth, then closed it again. “No, of course it doesn't. But maybe . . .” She took him by the arm and shoved him at the door. “Look closely, Negret.”

“I am.”

“No, closer.” She gave him another push, shoving him right up against the wood and somehow tripping him in the process so that he fell smack into it.

“Ow!” Milo shook her off and rubbed his nose. “What's wrong with you?”

She sighed. “Sorry. Clumsy me. So how do we get out of here?”

“What did you want me to look closely at?”

“Just the lock. You're the escaladeur, after all.”

Milo gave her a suspicious look, then turned to the lock. “I don't see anything. We'd need either the room key or one of the passkeys to open it.” So the thief hadn't just been poking around on the guest floors. He or she had been sneaking around on the second floor, looking through his parents' stuff, too.

It made sense, of course—most people locked their doors when they were sleeping, so the thief had to have had a way to unlock them. Still, it was maddening to know his family's private space had been violated again. And not only had something been stolen from their private space, it had been used against him. He was incensed. On top of that, surprisingly, he felt the sting of wounded pride. Negret was not pleased to have been out-blackjacked, even if there was really no way he could've seen this coming.

“Negret.” The scholiast waved a hand in front of his face. “Stick with me. You've got to get us out of this room.”

“All right, all right.” He focused and looked around. “Fire escape.” He crossed the room to the window, which opened without difficulty. A frigid, whistling wind shoved its way inside, flinging a spray of snowflakes against the screen. “We're going to have to take this out.”

The lockpicks proved perfect for popping the screen free from the window, even if it wasn't their intended use. Sirin craned her neck and peered out, then recoiled, shaking her head hard with her hands pressed to the wall for support. “I don't like the looks of that. Not at all.”

Negret leaned out next to her. “Uh-oh.”

Climbing onto the fire escape would be easy. It was so easy, Milo's parents had specifically forbidden him to do it, except in an emergency or with their supervision. The red metal stairs attached to the outside of the house were steep. They had railings, but they were rickety and they swayed with every step. And then there was the snow and ice that lay thick on every surface. A fall from the fire escape would mean a drop of anywhere from two to five stories.

The wind blustered through the nearby trees and sent up more unholy creaking.

Only in an emergency, his parents had said. Well, this counted, didn't it?

“Do you actually think you can get down without slipping?” Sirin asked dubiously.

Negret bit his lip. “I really don't know.”

Just then a huge icicle fell onto the steps below the window and shattered. The noise was loud enough to make them both wince. They looked sharply at each other.

“We could—”

“Yes. But if they didn't hear us banging and yelling from inside, will they hear banging from outside?”

“If anyone's in the kitchen, they will. The fire escape ends right above the kitchen window, and it'll carry the sound right down. We need something metal.” He thought for a minute, then snapped his fingers. “I know what.”

Negret sprinted to the door, folded up the luggage rack, and carried it awkwardly back to Sirin. Together, they maneuvered it out the window. It was just wide enough, and the fire escape just narrow enough, for them to rest one end of the rack on the sill and clang the opposite end against the ice-coated bars.

And it made a
spectacular
clanging.
Clang clang clang clang clang!
Like an out-of-tune church bell.
Clang clang clang clang clang. Clang clang clang clang clang!

A minute passed. Then two. Then five.

Clang clang clang clang clang!

Then, at last, a figure came running around the side of the house: Milo's father, looking completely bewildered.

“Oh, thank goodness.” Negret gave the luggage rack one more clang for good measure, then leaned around its edge and waved.

Mr. Pine stared up at them. “Milo? What on earth are you doing?”

“We're locked in!” he shouted back. “The fire escape's too icy to climb down. Come up and unlock the door!”

A look of disbelief flashed across Mr. Pine's face, then he disappeared around the side of the house again.

Not long after, the sound of a key in the lock announced his arrival. “What on earth is going on?” he demanded as he opened the door.

“Somebody locked us in on purpose.” Negret squeezed past him into the hallway and looked around. “We were looking for the satchel, first upstairs, then here . . . then somebody locked the door.”

“Hang on, I'm confused—”

Negret ignored him and poked his head into Georgie's old room. “We must have been getting close to something that the thief didn't want us to find.”

“But we searched in here,” Sirin protested, peering around Negret for another look. “We were thorough.”

Mr. Pine scratched his head. “We were?”

But the room appeared exactly the same. If the thief had moved something while they were locked in, that meant they had missed something before. But what?

“Milo,” Mr. Pine was saying, “I'm totally at a loss here.”

Negret opened his mouth to respond, then stopped. The little ripple in the carpet, the one he thought the luggage rack had been hiding, was gone now. The carpet lay smoothly against the wall.

He moved the rack aside, pulled the lockpicks from his bag once more, fished one out of its pocket, and slid it between the edge of the rug and the wall. With a little levering, he managed to make enough space to get his fingers in.

“Milo, what are you—You're going to—Don't pull up the carpet!”

“It was already like this, Dad,” he protested. “The rug was messed up earlier, but now it's not. Somebody smoothed it out. I bet
that's
why we were locked in. To check that we hadn't found whatever's under here, and make sure this spot wouldn't stand out if we came back for another look.”

“You keep saying . . .” Mr. Pine shook his head and stopped asking for explanations. “Milo, there could be tacks—be careful, okay?”

Negret heard the warning, but it barely registered. His fingers had just found something that wasn't carpet and wasn't floor: heavy paper, folded.

He drew it out carefully. He expected it to be more of the greenish, gate-watermarked paper, but it wasn't; it was thick and cream-colored. Official-looking. The kind of paper you'd type an important letter on.

The first thing he saw as he unfolded it was the seal of the City of Nagspeake printed in blue at the top of the page. Then, some equally official-looking typed words:

 

Be it hereby known and confirmed throughout the City and Beyond that the Bearer of this Letter has been deputized by the Customs Department of the Sovereign City of Nagspeake . . .

 

Sirin gasped.

“Oh, no.” Mr. Pine, who'd squatted to look over Negret's shoulder, took the page from his hand. He read it through, turned it over and back, read it again. “Oh, boy.”

“What's it mean, Dad?”

“It means somebody here's not who they say they are, and that Fenster really needs to not blow his cover.” Mr. Pine folded the letter and tucked it in his pocket. “This was Georgie's room, wasn't it? I would never have pegged her for a customs agent.” He looked out the window and into the swirling snow. “I wonder why she has us calling a launch, not that I think anyone's coming. You think you can keep mum and pretend you don't know anything about this? I gotta go talk to your mom.”

“Sure, Dad.” Georgie Moselle, a big-time thief
and
a customs agent? Could you be both of those things at the same time? And if you could . . . did that mean she'd locked them in? Did that also make her the person who'd been stealing from the other guests? None of it seemed like Georgie. “I think she was telling the truth about wanting to leave. Plus it's weird she'd have left that paper behind when she moved rooms, isn't it?”

“Maybe she decided she didn't want it to be found with her stuff, if anybody went looking,” Mr. Pine said.