Kingdom Keepers: The Return Book Two: Legacy of Secrets (23 page)

Jess tugged on a few. They were fixed shut.

“They’re fake, you goofball,” Amanda said. “I mean, they’re real, but glued shut. It’s art or something.”

Jess found the drawer marked Marie Bounds and pulled. It opened. “Yeah, fake,” she said.

There was but a single item in the long drawer. Jess reached in and pinched it between her fingers. Amanda leaned in alongside her. “It’s names and a number!”

“No, it’s a picture.”

The photo, a black-and-white, showed a man proudly posed before a window in a hospital maternity ward. At his side was a young man, about ten years old. In his arms was a boy of four or five. Inside the room behind him was a cradle holding an infant in a dark gray knitted cap, a darker gray than that of two other babies nearby.

“That’s a blue cap. A boy. The others are pink. They’re lighter.” Jess flipped the photo over. Written in flowing blue ink were the words:

March 13, 1965, Glen Cove Hospital, New York
Amery (standing), Ebsy (holding), Rexx

343 Ho 38

“That’s not a zip code,” Amanda said. “Not a phone number, either.”

“If it’s an address, it’s incomplete.”

“Could be a license plate.”

“Yes!” Jess said excitedly. “New York State. We have the date. We should be able to figure this out.”

“It’s a card catalog number,” a male voice said from behind them.

The girls jumped and spun around quickly.

“Nick? What are you doing here?” Amanda asked accusingly.

“I told you: I make these people and their precious Legacy my job. There have been messages sent back and forth about two girls at the library.”

“Texts? You can read other people’s texts?” Jess blinked, shocked. “You’ve hacked people’s phones?”

“What I’m capable of, what I can and can’t do, is nobody’s business but mine,” Nick said. “You can thank me later. What you’re holding is a card catalog number. Appropriate, given what’s behind you. Trouble is, the library stopped using cards decades ago. So if we want to know what book that’s referencing, you’re going to have to ask a librarian.”

“We, not you?” Amanda said.

“I’m glad you’re paying attention, Amanda. I’m a regular here. I practically live at this library. I don’t need to be asking questions like that. You two, on the other hand, are entirely forgettable.”

Jess pursed her lips and nodded angrily. “Man, you’re a real charmer, Nick.”

“My point, in case you missed it,” Nick said, “is that people I can associate with the Legacy are aware of you two. They know you’re here. You got one of them thrown out for stealing—nice job, incidentally. Another got asked to leave the library for entering an unauthorized area. I don’t know if that was you or not—
and I don’t need to know
!” he added, shutting up Amanda. “But, again, my point: others will be coming, are probably already on their way.”

“What do they want from us?” Jess pleaded.

“I doubt they have any idea. They want what you have, or are about to have. They want to protect themselves and the secrets of their Legacy. They probably perceive you as a threat. What
are
you after, anyway?”

“We don’t know,” Amanda said cautiously. “Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?” Jess said. “More like, not at all. We got—”

“—a message!” Amanda said, interrupting. “From a…friend. Seriously, we have no clue if it means anything.”

“Oh, it means something,” Nick said. “The first name? The boy in the photo standing alongside his father? It’s Amery. Someone wasn’t paying attention in class,” he chided. “Amery, as in Amery Hollingsworth.”

I
T TOOK THE LIBRARIAN
at the second-floor information desk less than five minutes to translate the call number on the out-of-date index card.

“That’s located in our Genealogy Room. Although we still maintain many of these books in our collection, you’ll find the computers there of far greater use. A librarian there can show you more about our online system. I wouldn’t imagine you’ll have any trouble with it.”

Jess looked back occasionally; Nick followed behind the two of them like some kind of spy. In the Genealogy Room, a combination reference room and computer lab, the three reunited. The librarian on duty was a ginger-haired guy in his late twenties who seemed to only see Jess and not Amanda. Amanda asked the questions; Jess got the answers. He worked the computer’s keyboard like a pianist, showing off by looking up in the middle of his typing. He punched
ENTER
on the machine and a smile filled his face.

“There!” he said, without looking.

Nick groaned audibly. Jess blushed and thanked him. Amanda cleared her throat to remind him she was still there; if he noticed, he didn’t show it.

“The images are scanned?” Nick asked.

“Exactly! Seventy percent of our genealogy collection is digitized, with more coming online every few months.”

“And we are looking at…?” Nick asked.

“
The American Guidebook of Genealogy
, volume four of seven.”

“It’s like an encyclopedia,” Nick said.

“Correcto-mondo!” the guy said, still working to impress Jess. “The call number is for this volume. It starts with ‘Ho’ and ends at ‘Ku.’”

“H-o as in Hollingsworth,” Nick whispered. The girls leaned in.

“Have at it,” the guy said. “I’m right over there if you need anything.” He meant this only for Jess, who blushed.

Nick worked the keyboard, arriving in short order at the listings for the family name of Hollingsworth. The image scans of the original pages could not be text searched, requiring the three to read carefully.

Amanda was thinking more than reading. All this effort on Wayne’s part to lead her and Jess to the genealogy of the Hollingsworth family—why? Wayne had to have set this all up weeks, perhaps months, before the Overtaker attack on Disneyland, something he couldn’t have seen coming. He would have ranked this information as being of primary importance—Wayne didn’t kid around with stuff like that. Without a doubt he was signaling, intentionally or not, that Nick’s weird stories of the Legacy of Secrets were for real.

“Wayne had no way of knowing we would meet you,” Amanda said aloud. “This…scavenger hunt is supposed to tell me and Jess about Hollingsworth. Who he was, and who he’s related to.”

“I think I’m just about there,” Nick said, continuing to scroll through all the Hollingsworths.

Jess took her eyes off the screen. “I see what you mean,” she said to Amanda. Their conversation continued with Nick caught between them. “No Nick, no Hollingsworth.”

“So, is this all a waste of time?” Amanda wondered.

“Can’t be. Everything meant something to Wayne, and it was always deeper than we thought. Much deeper.”

“Got it!” Nick said.

Together, the three began to carefully read and study the document, a family tree that began in the 1700s at the top and carried down. Outside the scanned image, in the margin, a Web site address had been penned in blue ink.

Nick took charge—no surprise there, Amanda thought—placing his fingertip on the screen and working across the horizontal and vertical lines that connected one name to another. Below the bigger brackets were oversize equal signs representing marriage. To the right of the wives were listed any children born and, to the right of that, a more detailed explanation about the children and their baptisms and burials. Nick’s finger stopped on Amery, one among three children in the bottom listing on the page.

“Oh…my…
gosh
!” Amanda gushed far too loudly. She stepped back from Nick and Jess, leaving them to think it was for dramatic effect. In fact, she was having trouble maintaining her balance. She searched for a chair, finding one among seven others neatly spaced around a long rectangular table. She plopped down into it with a thud.

Jess hurried over. “Mandy? Are you all right?” She reached to take her hand. “Your hands are freezing!”

“I think my heart stopped.”

“Thankfully not.”

“Did you read?
Baltimore!
” Amanda was shocked white. “It’s in the notes! Read the notes!”

Jess hurried back to the screen. Nick was watching their interaction. “Is she all right?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” Jess ran her eyes over the lines of typeface. She found Douglas Archibald Hollingsworth and an oversize equals sign connecting him to his wife, Bethany Blair Longfellow. The branch connected to three children, all boys: Amery Hatcher, Ebsy Balwin, Rexx Upton. The first two had been baptized in the Old Otterbein Methodist Church; the youngest, Rexx, in the Baltimore Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

“Oh, dear,” Jess moaned.

“Is one of you going to tell me what’s going on?” Nick complained.

“It’s…it’s just so Wayne. I mean, this is how he operates. Everything is always right there in front of you, and yet so easily missed. It’s as if all he could ever think in were puzzles. Even when you think you’ve got it, you don’t. There’s always another layer to peel back. He puts stuff out there. He puts it right out there where anyone with a decent mind can solve it, yet it seems to go beyond that, to this place where either you get it or you don’t.”

“Well, at the moment, I don’t. A little help?” Nick continued to look across the room at Amanda. He was obviously worried about her, which touched Jess.

“We…Amanda and I…share a past. An awful past. Every so often we get reminders. We’re currently being hunted like criminals. At least some of the time we are. The Imagineers have tried to help us, to make things better. I’m not so sure it’s helped as much as it’s hurt. We’ve never fully understood what we were part of, what our pasts had to do with anything. Wayne rescued us. Helped us to escape. At least we think he did. We don’t really know.”

“I’m so lost.”

“You never knew him, did you? He was a great man. Really amazing. The kind of person that once you meet him, you want to hang around him. You don’t want to let him get too far away. He was like a grandfather and mentor, a friend and teacher. He was that way to all of us. The word
love
is thrown around a lot, but I loved Wayne. I think Amanda and the Keepers did, too. And the thing is, he never stopped caring. He never stopped working to defeat the Overtakers. He didn’t care how much people laughed at him, questioned him, disliked him. Nothing was going to stop him from trying to protect Walt’s dream. One Man’s Dream? You know, the museum in Disney Hollywood Studios. That sounds like a name Wayne would have thought up. That’s what he lived for.”

She paused, took a deep breath, and fixed Nick with a steady gaze.

“You’re wondering about the Legacy, Nick. You’re wondering if some guy named Hollingsworth could have gotten so hateful toward Walt and the company that he passed that hatred along to his children, to his family. I don’t know how to explain this yet, but I can tell you that Amanda and I no longer think you’re crazy.”

“That’s hardly reassuring.”

“You’re onto something. You are absolutely, one hundred percent onto something.”

“And you know this because…?” Nick asked.

“One word!” Amanda called from her chair. She’d been listening to the exchange. “A word that brings back a million horrible memories. A word that makes a link, a real link, between your world and ours, Nick. Something simple. Something massive. A conspiracy. I don’t think there’s any other way to describe it.”

“You’re killing me here! What word, Jess? What am I missing?”

“Baltimore,” she said.

F
INN’S RETURN TO
the dilapidated Hollywood Hotel began in much the same way as it had the night before. He reached the back door, whose oiled hinges had given him so much concern. This time he had the luxury of knowing the fourth floor was being used as a dormitory, though by whom, he couldn’t be certain. He climbed the stairs slowly and quietly, avoiding the area of concern and working his way through darkened hallways by the pinpoint red light from his laser pointer.

On the final turn, which steered him toward the future dorm room of Amanda and Jess, he heard a crunch behind him. There was no mistaking it for a rat or cat. It was a human crunch, a foot stepping on a piece of litter. Either that, or the rats were the size of bears.