The Name of This Book Is Secret (19 page)

Obediently, Max-Ernest tilted his head toward his plate. Across the table, Cass rolled her eyes in disgust.

Despite her rapturous descriptions, Ms. Mauvais, Cass noticed, didn’t eat for most of the meal. She merely sipped from a tall glass of red wine—at least Cass assumed it was wine. It was the right color but it looked disturbingly thick.

The one dish Ms. Mauvais ate was the last. It consisted of a small quivering mass that pulsed intermittently like a heart. It was served only to her and she did not describe it like she had the others. Instead, she speared it suddenly and violently with a chopstick—then swallowed it whole.

As Ms. Mauvais sighed in satisfaction, Cass thought she detected a new vibrancy in her hostess’s pale white cheeks.

“I have a sensitive stomach,” Ms. Mauvais explained. “There are very few things I can eat. And they have to be very, very fresh.”

After their plates had been cleared, Ms. Mauvais focused her attention on her guests. “Now, my darling young people, I wonder if you know what you have in that notebook. Did you peek inside at all?”

“No, we didn’t,” said Cass before Max-Ernest could say otherwise.

“I don’t know exactly what’s in it myself, but I fear the worst,” said Ms. Mauvais. “You see, Pietro was a dear, dear friend. But I’m afraid he was quite ill—mentally, I mean.”

“Mentally? You mean he was crazy? It didn’t seem like it,” said Cass defensively. She felt somehow as though she was being personally insulted.

“Oh, so then you did read it?”

Cass reddened, not saying anything more.

“Your ears, my dear—think about my offer!” said Ms. Mauvais in a singsong tone. “But yes, to answer your question, I’m sad to say he was totally delusional. He had this imaginary friend—a twin brother—whom he invented as a child. He made up this incredible story about this brother being snatched away from the circus when they were boys.”

At this, Cass and Max-Ernest couldn’t help glancing at each other.

“I see you’re familiar with this story—that’s what I was afraid of. It was very vivid for him, but for most of his life he knew it was a fantasy. Only in his later years did he begin really to believe it....Are you quite well, Doctor?” asked Ms. Mauvais, addressing Dr. L, who had remained remarkably quiet ever since she had brought up the notebook.

His face looked tight, as though he might be choking on something, but he waved off her concern. “I’m fine,” he said, covering his mouth with a napkin.

“Well then,” Ms. Mauvais continued, “when I suggested to Pietro that his brother didn’t exist outside his imagination, he became violent—he actually accused me of being the one to steal his brother, if you can believe that. It didn’t seem to occur to him that I was much too young to have been alive when he was a child.”

Ms. Mauvais chuckled and touched her forehead. “Much too young,” she repeated.

Could that be true? wondered Cass.

Was Max-Ernest right about Ms. Mauvais? Had she judged her too harshly? Just because Ms. Mauvais was a bit chilly and strange? Or because—Cass remembered this now for some reason—Max-Ernest had once said Ms. Mauvais was the prettiest woman he’d ever seen?

Was she jealous? Was
that
all it was all along?

“Then why do you want the notebook so badly?” Cass asked, scrambling to climb out of the mental rabbit hole into which she was falling. “If it’s all made up.”

“Because we don’t want it to get into the wrong hands. Because we loved Pietro, and we want the world to remember him at his best—not as some crazy person.”

The more Cass thought about it, the surer she became that she wasn’t sure of anything.

She had no proof that what the magician had written had really happened.

No proof that Ms. Mauvais was involved in Luciano’s disappearance.

No proof even that Ms. Mauvais was involved in Benjamin Blake’s disappearance.

For all Cass knew, Benjamin Blake was already back home, safe and sound—and there’d been no reason at all for her to come save him.

In her agitation, Cass banged the table—and accidentally knocked the wineglass out of Ms. Mauvais’s hand. The glass flew into the air and — s-p-i-l

l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-e-d—

You know those frozen-in-time moments when life suddenly turns into a kung fu movie and you see everything in slow motion? The glass was in the air for less than a second, but that second was long enough for Cass to think a thousand things—and to realize why the sight of Ms. Mauvais’s wine had disturbed her earlier.

Two words:
monkey blood.

Was it monkey blood? To be frank, I don’t know—some rumors are just rumors. In any event, Cass was about to be greeted by a sight far more disturbing than a glass of blood.

Here, let me put you back in the scene—in real time, this time:

The glass flew into the air, and spilled—wine, blood, elixir, who knows, I won’t delay it any longer— out in an arc, splattering all over one of Ms. Mauvais’s long creamy white gloves.

“You clumsy girl!”

Fury passed in a blush over Ms. Mauvais’s face as she yanked off her glove. “This was my favorite pair. I bought them at the Paris flea market over ninety years a—”

She stopped speaking, following her guests’ eyes with her own.

Gloria stifled a gasp.

Everyone was staring at Ms. Mauvais’s hand, ungloved for the first time.

It was the hand of someone—of some
thing
—else. With fingers so thin and frail you could almost snap them off. With nails so yellow and cracked they were claws. With skin so translucent you could see every bone, every ligament, every vein.

It was the hand of an old woman.

A very old woman.

An older woman than Cass had ever seen.

They say that eyes never lie. But I think it’s much truer to say that hands never do.

It was inevitable, in a life as long as Ms. Mauvais’s, that she expose her hand now and then. Still, she hadn’t lived as long as she had to let a little spill rattle her. Seconds later, she’d already slipped on a new pair of gloves.

As if nothing had happened, she turned to Gloria, who was sitting in a kind of stunned stupor. “Do you mind giving us a moment?”

“Not at all,” said Gloria, not moving.

“Thank you,” said Ms. Mauvais, nodding to a spa staff person who’d been standing discretely nearby. Silently, he helped Gloria out of her seat, and led her away as if she were an invalid—or perhaps an inmate in an asylum.

Ms. Mauvais turned back to Cass and Max-Ernest.

“So. Where is the notebook?” she asked, her chilly voice now an ice storm.

Before telling you how Cass and Max-Ernest responded, let me remind you of something that Max-Ernest mentioned at an earlier point in our narrative: they were only eleven.

They were surrounded on all sides by spa staff. They had no idea how, or if, they were ever going to get home. They had no weapons in their pockets, nor any knowledge how to use a weapon should they have had one. They were not superheroes, in short, they were kids. And they had just seen one of the scariest sights of their young lives (although I think Ms. Mauvais’s hand would have spooked anyone who happened to see it, no matter what age). So please have sympathy when I tell you that they didn’t hesitate very long before giving Ms. Mauvais what she wanted.

First, however, Max-Ernest looked over at Cass. He didn’t say anything out loud but his expression said something like,
okay, you were right, I made a terrible mistake, and now we’re in the worst trouble of our lives, and I’m really scared, and what should I do?

And then Cass nodded back in a way that said something like,
yeah, yeah, I understand all that, I’m really scared, too, just hurry up and give Ms. Mauvais the notebook before she kills us.
(Really, what was the alternative?)

And then, and only then, did Max-Ernest pull the notebook out of his bag.

Ms. Mauvais took it, her re-gloved hands trembling. “At last! How many years have I waited!”

“Well, now you have it, so I think we’ll just go,” said Cass, motioning for Max-Ernest to get up.

“You’re not going anywhere yet,” said Ms. Mauvais sharply.

She opened the notebook and looked briefly at the inscription. Then she flipped through the blank pages with increasing irritation, much as the kids had when they first looked through them.

“This is all? What kind of trick is this?”

“Here, let me look,” said Dr. L.

He took the open notebook and glanced briefly at the inscription, the bare ghost of a smile crossing his face.

Then he handed the notebook back to Ms. Mauvais. “I think you’ll find the notebook’s quite full. If you look on the undersides of the pages.”

Ms. Mauvais looked searchingly at Dr. L. “A code?”

He nodded.

“So then it’s his. It’s real,” she said with palpable excitement.

Ms. Mauvais fiddled with the notebook impatiently, until its accordion-like pages opened up in front of her. Quickly, she scanned the pages, as if searching for a particular word or phrase that she expected to pop out. When she got to the last page, she looked up, enraged.

“Where’s the rest? What did you do with it?”

“We don’t know where it is,” said Max-Ernest nervously. “We thought maybe he ripped out the pages—”

“Liar!” Ms. Mauvais screamed. “You read it. And now you’re keeping it from me!”

Max-Ernest cowered, a far cry from the excited boy of an hour earlier.

Cass tried to defend him. “He’s telling the truth. That’s all there was.”

But Ms. Mauvais appeared for once to have lost control and she was hardly listening. “The Secret. I know he found the Secret. He was so close, he must have. He kept it from us. But he can’t anymore! And neither will you! I won’t let you!”

She gripped Cass and Max-Ernest each by their forearms, showing surprising strength in her frail fingers.

“Tell me what it is,” she hissed. “Tell me the secret!”

At the sound of Ms. Mauvais’s words, Daisy (who Cass had not seen since she arrived at the spa, but who Cass now realized must always have been lurking) appeared at the entrance of the tent, blocking the way out with her tall frame.

Several spa staff stepped closer to the table, closing in on Cass and Max-Ernest. In the eerie light of the tent, their beautiful tanned skins looked like hard shells. And their once-sympathetic smiles turned to stony stares.

Cass’s first impression of the spa had been correct; it was a prison after all.

Have you ever been locked in a room hours away from home by people you have every reason to believe are capable of murder or worse?

Neither have I.

Maybe that’s why I can write about it without shedding a tear.

Tragically, Cass and Max-Ernest did not have the same luxury. They had to experience imprisonment firsthand.

Ten minutes after we last saw them, Max-Ernest was pacing back and forth in a state of agitation extreme even for him. “Stupid...stupid...stupid...” he was saying to himself. “How could I be so—”

“Will you stop muttering, please?” said Cass. “It’s really annoying.”

“You hate me, don’t you? I mean, I don’t blame you. I hate me, too—”

“I don’t hate you,” said Cass in a not very friendly tone. (Max-Ernest might be admitting his mistakes, but the image of Ms. Mauvais kissing his forehead was still fresh in Cass’s mind.) “I’m just trying to think how to get past those guys—you know, so we can get out of here alive.”

She gestured toward the window where Daisy and Owen could be seen standing guard outside the door. From our more comfortable perspective, they were a funny-looking couple: the tall, dour limousine driver and the shorter, freckled butler. But no doubt they were more than capable of keeping a pair of eleven-year-old kids from escaping.

“I knew I shouldn’t have brought the notebook!” said Max-Ernest, still speaking to himself as much as to Cass. “But they said it was the only way I could get a reservation. How else was I going to get in?”

“Forget about it. You didn’t have a choice,” said Cass. “But since we’re on the subject—what I don’t understand is why you had to come here in the first place. I thought you were done investigating.”

“Because I figured out they knew who you were—that’s why.”

“So?”

Max-Ernest looked at her like she was nuts. “So—so, you were here.”

“So?”

“So, I didn’t want them to kill you.”

“Oh...you didn’t?” said Cass, trying to get used to the idea.

“Duh. I swear, sometimes you don’t make any sense,” said Max-Ernest.

“Huh,” said Cass, “I guess sometimes I don’t.”

And she started to smile.

As for the rest of their conversation—well, if some conversations are too upsetting to record, others are too sappy and sentimental. Have you ever heard two people make up after they’ve been fighting? It’s not very interesting unless you happen to be one of those people yourself. I prefer listening in on insults and curses; let everyone else listen to the apologies and declarations of friendship.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how glad Max-Ernest was that he and Cass were collaborators again. However, at the risk of getting mushy, I’ll point out that as glad as he was, Cass was more so. You see, as many times as she had tried to save the world, nobody had ever tried to save
her
before. She was so touched that Max-Ernest had come to rescue her that it almost made up for the fact he had no plan of escape.