Spirit and Dust (16 page)

Carson tapped his thumbs on the table, looking around as if searching for something to MacGyver into a solution. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “I can give you a minute or two, I think. But we’ll have to split up.”

“What are you going to do?” The last time we’d parted company, he’d stolen a car. Splitting up made me nervous.

“Something with the electricity or the camera feed, I imagine.” He stood and closed the book. “I’m making this up as I go along.”

“Then how will I know when it’s safe to do my thing?”

“Give me ten minutes, then go.”

“I don’t have a watch.”

“How do you not have a watch?”

“I always use my phone, but someone stole it.”

He calmly unfastened his wristwatch, fiddled with it, then took out his phone and set a timer with the clock app. “Ten minutes from … now.”

He started the timer as the second hand on the watch hit twelve. I put out my hand for the phone, but he handed me the watch instead. Obviously he didn’t trust me that much after all.

“I’m going to the restroom,” he announced, stacking up the books. “Meet you downstairs?”

“Sure,” I said, playing my part. “I’ll just put away these journals and be there in a jiffy.”

Jiffy
earned me an eye roll. But he sauntered off like he knew where he was going. I waited until he was out of sight, then dashed over to one of the catalog computers to see if I could access the Internet proper, but no luck. Then I remembered all the offices we’d passed on the walk from downstairs. I rebelliously ignored the sign telling me to reshelve all materials and hurried—trying not to look like I was hurrying—out and down the hall.

I felt slightly guilty for what I planned to do with my ten minutes, but the geas wasn’t weighing in on the subject, so I squashed my conscience and ducked into the first empty office I came to.

The tiny room was its own archaeological excavation, with layer upon layer of books, papers, maps, sketches, more books, and in the middle of it all, a desk with a fairly ancient computer, big enough to hide me from the door.

I woke it with a tap on the keyboard, checked Carson’s watch, then opened a browser window and my web mail account. I had a hundred sixty-seven new messages, all from family members. I guess the Goodnight Alarm System was operational.

I skipped all those and started a new message to Agent Taylor. It was going to have to be short, no time for sweet.

Check out Michael Johnson, grad student at U. of Chicago. Alexis’s boyfriend? Ex-boyfriend? I have a feeling
. I hesitated a second, then added:
Trust me. —D
.

There wasn’t time to do more than click
Send
and close the browser window. I needed to be downstairs and in position in six minutes and seventeen seconds.

I checked the hall before I headed for the stairwell. I was almost there when I heard my name, at a very un-librarylike volume.

“Miss Goodnight!” I turned to see Elbow Patches hurrying toward me, a lock of blond hair falling into his eyes. My first thought was,
Crap, I’m going to get into trouble for not reshelving my materials
. My next was,
Crap, he knows my last name
. And now everyone on this floor knew I was here, too.

He was holding out a book, open to a detailed line drawing. The pages were aged, but not worn; it wasn’t a book that had seen much use. “I found this,” he said, excitedly. “It’s the field notes of Dr. Oosterhouse’s last expedition. Do you think this could be what you’re looking for?”

I took the slim volume from him to look closer, because the sketch was of a jackal-headed man, with an Egyptian collar and skirt. The notations underneath said that it was made of lacquer over wood, with gold leaf and enamel details. I didn’t get any kind of psychic rush, but hope was its own kind of adrenaline. “It could be. I must have missed this in the display downstairs.”

“Oh, it’s not downstairs. I looked it up by the catalog number.” He reached across to tap a number under the drawing. “It’s out on loan.”

I checked the watch. Four minutes and twenty-something seconds. “Where? Please don’t say Australia.”

He chuckled longer than that deserved, being as my desperation was no joke. “No. Not so far as that. Just St. Louis. The St. Louis Art Museum.”

Despite the ticking watch, I wanted to express my gratitude to Elbows. “Thank you,” I said, giving him back the book. “You’ve gone beyond the call of duty.”

He blushed. “I’m an archivist in a very specialized museum. I don’t get to show off very often.”

As he took the book from me, something slipped from the pages. We both bent to grab it and nearly bumped heads. He got flustered, and I got the manila card that had fallen to the tile floor. At first I thought it was the catalog card, but when I turned
it over I saw, drawn in what looked like Sharpie, an ear. Vaguely anatomical, definitely recognizable.

“That’s an odd sort of bookmark,” said Elbows.

Yes, it was. I had no sense for magic, but I had two brain cells to rub together and a bad feeling about this. If it was some kind of spell, what else would an ear mean but that someone was listening?

So much to think about, but the clock in my head was ticking. I ripped the card in half, hoping it would break the spell, then turned again to Elbows. “Can you look up who last checked out this book?”

“Well, you can’t check out books from the archives,” he said, sending that lead into a nosedive. Then he added, “But I can probably see who last pulled it up in the catalog.”

“That would be
so great
.” Maybe I laid it on a little thick, but my gratitude was very real. Spell or not, whoever last looked up Oosterhouse and his Jackal could be the best lead for finding Alexis.

It would be even more awesome if he could go look that up
quickly
so I could get downstairs in the next two minutes and fifty-seven seconds. When the silence stretched to awkward, I pointed toward the stairs. “I’ll be right back. I just need to, um …”

“Oh!” He blushed again, and I was happy to let him assume whatever kept him from asking for details. “I’ll just be in the …” He sidled back the other way.

“Awesome.”

The instant his back was turned, I hurried down the steps, with the pieces of the manila card still in my hand. I put the
scraps in my pocket as I reached the ground floor, and not-quite-ran toward the Egyptian gallery. I reached it with a minute to spare …

… and no privacy. The gallery was full of people. I mean, not packed, but inconveniently occupied. It had to be some kind of tour or class, because a docent was giving a talk around a sarcophagus and showing no signs of moving on.

Whatever Carson was going to do was going to happen in twenty seconds. Short of yelling “Fire,” I didn’t know how to get the group out of there. The mummy inside the sarcophagus might be quietly sleeping, but the guide was going to have plenty to say if I stepped over the low velvet cordon to put my hands on King Tut.

I was still racking my brain when the lights went out, plunging the gallery into pitch-black, holy-crap-I’m-in-the-dark-with-a-mummy darkness.

“Everyone hold still,” the docent ordered. “We don’t want you crashing into anything in the dark.”

Forget that. The faint remnant traces on the artifacts in the cases mapped out the room for me as I ran for the majestic sentry at the other end of the room. But I’d forgotten about the ankle-high cordon. I tripped with an almighty clatter of the brass stanchions, fell flat on my face, and only dumb luck kept me from concussing myself on the basalt pedestal.

“I said don’t move!” shouted the docent.

“I’m okay,” I yelled back, worried someone would come check on me. But I was not okay. I had to make contact before the lights came back on.

The stone was cool under my hands, and the hieroglyphs carved into the base were rough under my fingers. I called into the past, not as far as the ancient artists with their chisels but a hundred years back, in the psychic equivalent of a shout from the rooftop.
Ivy Goodnight, if there’s any trace of you here, please answer
.

Silence.

Aunt Ivy, I need your help!

All I got were approaching footsteps and the bobbing glow of flashlights.

Hope collapsed under the crushing weight of failure, and I dropped my head onto the floor with the rest of me. What now? This was the one thing I could do—talk to the dead. If this didn’t work, what good was I to Alexis?

There was the lead I’d emailed to Taylor. Michael Johnson. And the fact that Alexis had been here with him. And the clue of the ear card. And the jackal statue that was in the St. Louis museum. And the flash drive we hadn’t yet unlocked.

There were all those things, waiting for me to get up off the floor.

There was also a pair of worn leather boots right in front of my nose. Sand-dusted boots that I could see perfectly well in the pitch-dark, what-did-I-summon blackness.

“Y
OU RANG?
”
SAID
the shade standing over me. My eyes traveled up her boots, her jodhpurs, and her really great jacket and scarf and found her looking back down at me, one red brow wryly cocked.

This was not how I wanted to meet my idol. I jumped to my feet, but they were still tangled in the cordon, so I just managed to make a lot of noise. “Stop moving!” shouted the docent, and from the dark someone else called, “We’ll be right there. Stay put until the lights come back on.”

“Who are you?” Aunt Ivy asked. She looked as she did in our family photo—late twenties, totally confident. Not nearly as
surprised to see me as you might expect. She took in my red hair and amended, “The better question might be
when
are you? And where are we?”

No wonder I’d had to call so hard. The trace of her must have been faded almost to nothing. It figured a Goodnight wouldn’t stick around anywhere she didn’t want to.

I’m Daisy
. Even without the audience I would have spoken silently to her, because it was quicker that way—the speed of thought, literally.
Your great-great … Well, it doesn’t matter how many because I’m in trouble and I need to know anything you can tell me about something called the Oosterhouse Jackal
.

“I don’t know what that is.” Before I could curse, silently
or
aloud, she continued. “I know a Professor Oosterhouse. He is—was—faculty here.” She rubbed her forehead, a very
living
sort of gesture. “Sorry. My times and tenses are all messed up.”

Don’t sweat it. That happens
. What could you expect when your past and present and future had all already happened?

She sweated it anyway, as if she sensed my urgency. Her shade flickered with the effort of pulling her memories together, but as I poured more of myself into the psychic link between us, she steadied.

“There
was
something about him,” she said, “and
jackal
is sticking in my mind. He left the Institute in the early thirties, under a dark cloud.”

That would be the nineteen thirties. I added together the timeline with the professor’s German last name and made a wild guess.
Was he a Nazi sympathizer?

“Not at all,” she said, and that seemed to spark a connection. “I was away when he left, but I came back to wild stories that he’d started a cult and swore he’d found something that would defeat the Third Reich.”

My mind went off in some very insane, very Indiana Jones directions.
Like a weapon?

A face-melting
Lost Ark
kind of weapon? The idea shook me down to my curled-in-horror toes.

“I don’t know. Bollocks!” The air went crisp at her frustrated curse. “I only remember gossip I heard when I came back, and that’s just bits and pieces in my head.”

It’s okay
, I assured her. Except that the security guard with the flashlight had finally gotten around to us. As the beam cut across the gallery I curled up in the shadow of the statue, where the guard would miss me until he’d helped the others.

Tell me all the gossip
, I urged Ivy.
His bio in the archives says nothing about when or why he left
.

She spoke fast as the guard went by. “Officially, it was hushed up, but the rumor was he went batty. Got loony ideas based on a translation he’d made of the Book of the Dead.”

I knew what that was. I’d be pretty sucky at my job if I didn’t. It was an instruction manual for how to mummify the body and prepare the soul for its journey into the afterlife. There was no definitive edition because the process and the rituals changed across dynasties.

Ivy went on in a rush. I could see the tumble of memories coming back to her now. “Oosterhouse said he had found a
version written by an ancient cult who believed in the magical power of the soul after death. But there was no proof of such a book—not that I could find, and believe me, I looked.”

Of course she would. A Goodnight couldn’t let that sort of thing go uninvestigated.
So you don’t know if it was genuine magic or just the professor being fanciful?

“
Fanciful
is not a word I would apply to Dr. Oosterhouse.” She frowned. “He didn’t voice theories of which he was uncertain. They say
—said
—the professor tried to re-form this cult among the students. A sort of secret society.”

My heart went graveyard cold.
Like a brotherhood?

“Yes! That’s what it was called. The Brotherhood of the Black …” She paused with a little quake of realization, and I
knew
what she was going to say.

Jackal
, I whispered.

Suddenly I was squinting in the glare of a flashlight. “Are you okay, young lady?” asked the security guard behind it.

Ivy’s shade paced to my right, talking angrily to herself. “Why didn’t I remember that as soon as you said the Oosterhouse Jackal? What a ninny I am!”

“It’s fine,” I said—aloud. “You’re just a shade.”

My great-great-aunt drew herself to her full height. “I am Professor Ivy Goodnight. I am not
just
anything.”

The guard moved the light out of my eyes, and I could see him looking at me like
I
was the ninny. “Did you hit your head when you fell?”