Greenglass House (9 page)

He folded the paper, tucked it carefully in his back pocket with his game papers, and rushed out into the hall. Sirin followed him to the staircase, where he paused for a minute to listen. There were voices downstairs and quiet above. Good.

Negret and Sirin hiked up the stairs, and he found that his escaladeur's feet instinctively sought out the quietest route: stepping far to the right on the third step, putting as little weight as possible on the fifth, skipping the sixth one altogether. All little tricks he'd picked up over years of creeping up and down the stairs of Greenglass House but never needed—not really—until now.

They reached the third floor, and Negret paused for a quick glance down the hall before making the turn up the following flight. This was Mr. Vinge's, Mrs. Hereward's, and Dr. Gowervine's floor, but none of them was in sight.

Up to the next landing they crept, the scholiast following carefully in the escaladeur's footsteps. Negret motioned for Sirin to wait just before they reached the top, and he snuck ahead to make sure the fourth floor was as deserted as the third had seemed to be. The faint odor of Georgie's perfume still hung here, and the rooms lining the hall were all open except the one at the end. Negret peered briefly into each until he reached Georgie's, where he put his ear to the door and listened. Nothing.

He returned to the stairwell and motioned for Sirin to join him. Then he turned and looked triumphantly up at the huge stained-glass window that threw cold blue-tinted winter light onto the floor, scattered with the occasional gleam of green.

“Wow,” Sirin said appreciatively. “All this time, and I never noticed it.”

“Me neither,” Negret admitted. Just to be sure he wasn't imagining the similarity, he pulled out the paper, unfolded it again, and held it up for comparison. Backlit by the window, the watermark shone through clear as day. “That's it, though. No mistaking it.”

What had always looked to Milo like a churchy sort of mosaic revealed itself to Negret as a rendering of an iron gate. You had to look at the metal that held the glass together instead of the glass itself, but it was there. The window and the watermark were iden­tical.

“What does it mean, though?” Sirin wondered. “Maybe there was an iron gate like this on the grounds once?”

“It's a really old house.” Negret turned and looked around, taking in details Milo had lived with all his life. To Negret, however, they were new—or at least different: The rough old beams with their rich chocolate colors, the cream-painted pressed-tin ceilings in the halls, the sconces that had been converted to hold bulbs instead of candlesticks, the ivory and gold embossed wallpaper, so ancient that every once in a while Milo and Mr. Pine had to go around with a pot of thick glue and repaste the corners that always seemed to be peeling back from the walls. And, of course, the window itself, with the once-hidden gate that Negret couldn't
not
see any longer.

“The windows on the stairs are all a little different, but they're definitely a set,” he said quietly, looking at the blue glass. “I wonder if the gate's somewhere in each one.”

Sirin watched him with her arms folded. “What do you know about it? The house, I mean.”

“My mother's parents bought it when she was a little girl. It was empty before that. Or, not empty—the owner hadn't used it as his main house in a while, I guess.”

“And the previous owner was . . . ?”

“A smuggler. One of the famous ones, from ages ago, like the Gentleman Maxwell, only it wasn't him. I can't remember which one.”

Sirin sniffed. “The Gentleman Maxwell wasn't ages ago. That was maybe right before you were born.”

“Okay, but that's still way back, and the owner was someone from even before Maxwell's time.”

“Doc Holystone, maybe?”

Negret snapped his fingers. “That's it.”

“You're kidding! This house belonged to Doc Holystone?”

“Supposedly. My granddad bought it from his brother, after Doc Holystone was captured and died. That's how it came to be an inn for—well, for the kinds of folks who usually stay here. At first it was friends and shipmates of Doc Holystone's who needed a place to stay; then the word got out that it was a safe place for smugglers to put up when they needed some shore time. That's how my mom met my dad, actually. His father was on Ed Pickering's crew, and they stayed here a few times.” Negret tried to keep the pride out of his voice. “He's not as famous as Holystone or the Gentleman, but he was fairly big once.”

“That's pretty neat.” Sirin looked around, impressed. “Then it wouldn't be surprising if somebody thought there was something hidden here. It would almost be weird if there wasn't.”

“It might explain the nautical chart, too,” Negret added.

Sirin scratched her head. “All I remember is that I didn't recognize the waterway. Think maybe it's not a waterway at all? It could be a map that only
looks
like a chart.”

“Could be.” Negret nodded. “If it was made by a smuggler—or anyone who lived on the water, really—it would make sense for that person to use the markings he or she was most familiar with. Or the person could've been actually trying to hide what kind of map he was making.” He looked out the window at the azure-tinted snow that lay thickly over everything. “I hope the depth markings don't mean we have to dig for whatever it is. The ground under all that snow's got to be frozen solid.”

Then he had a disappointing thought. “Or maybe the chart has nothing to do with the house at all. Just because the paper seems to doesn't mean what's
on
it does, too.”

Sirin shook her head confidently. “It's connected. Apart from the watermark, one of the guests went to the trouble of bringing it here. When was the last time you packed something for a trip that you didn't think you'd use?”

“I guess.”

She opened her mouth to say something more, but Negret stiffened and held up a hand. Someone had just stepped on the creaky stair halfway up to the third floor.

“That's one of the guests,” Negret whispered. “Everybody else knows to skip that one. Come on. I want to take a look at the window upstairs, anyway.”

The next staircase had four loud steps and two that murmured, all in a row. Negret showed Sirin how to avoid the noisy ones altogether by tiptoeing up the raised, ramplike base of the banister. They reached the fifth-floor landing without a sound, and after another quick glance down the hall (three more empty rooms with open doors, and one—Clem's—that was closed), Negret and Sirin stood before the big stained-glass panel.

This one was in shades of yellow and gold and deep green: jade and pine and hunter and emerald. Each window had a different pattern, and this one had always reminded Milo of chrysanthemums. Negret looked at it with fresh eyes and saw starbursts.
Not flowers,
he thought. Maybe it was all the talk of smugglers that made him think instead,
Explosions. Cannon fire.

“There's the gate,” Sirin murmured. Negret followed her pointing finger. It was much smaller and sort of tucked away down in the left-hand corner, but it was there. Now Negret could only see the starbursts as fireworks. It was as if the window were a painting of firecrackers exploding in the sky over the mysterious iron gate.

Another squeaky stair sounded, closer this time. So close it had to be Clem, since she was the only one staying on this floor.

There was no good reason for Milo to feel antsy about being found anywhere in the inn, as long as he didn't intrude upon the guests' rooms. Negret, however, didn't want to be discovered. Not just yet, and not looking so intently at a possible clue that he wasn't ready to share with anyone but Sirin. The two adventurers looked at each other. “Now what?” Sirin whispered.

There was one more flight of stairs stretching upward, which he knew would turn past one last stained-glass window and end at a door that opened into the attic. He also knew that even though the door would be locked, Negret would be able to open it if he wanted.

“We can wait on the attic stairs until Clem's gone,” he suggested. “Or in the attic. I can get the door open.”

Sirin nodded. “Good idea. If there's a secret hidden here, we need to know more about the house itself. Let's start right at the top.”

The attic stairs were less familiar, so they hauled themselves hand over hand up the banister ramp all the way to the first landing, pausing only briefly for a look at the window before Negret led them on up the last flight to the door. He wanted to get into the attic quickly, before Clem reached the fifth floor. They could stop for a closer look at the glass image (more greens and a range of browns like the tones in a sepia photograph) on their way back down.

Much of the inn had been repaired or updated or replaced outright at some point over the years, but Negret figured the carved attic door had to be almost as old as the house itself. In the summer, when the wood swelled up, it had a tendency to stick, so that it took two people to get it open, and in the winter, it let drafts through that whistled down the stairs and made other doors swing, ghost-like, on the lower floors. It had a milky-green glass knob and hung from hinges that looked like they'd squeak if you so much as glanced at them wrong. Milo, however, knew that Mr. Pine kept them oiled because they were the only things about it he could control.

There was also a lock, but that was nothing for Negret the blackjack. Especially considering he knew where the key was.

The footsteps on the stairs below at last reached the fifth floor. “Just in time,” Sirin breathed.

Negret nodded. Then he paused. He'd figured it was Clem who'd been on their heels, probably just going up to her room for something. But here it occurred to him that as far as he could remember, since the moment she'd arrived Clem had not once made a noise when she walked indoors, not even when she'd taken the stairs from the first floor to the second at a run.

Now that he'd spent some time trying to move quietly himself, Negret understood that the seemingly effortless, soundless way Clem had been moving didn't happen by accident. It took work, and practice, and awareness, and it probably wasn't something you just turned off like a light.

He also knew that he and Sirin hadn't been hearing the stairs at their loudest. They'd been too noisy for someone who knew how to move silently, but not noisy enough for someone coming up without caring about sounds they were making at all. Therefore, the person who'd arrived on the fifth floor was trying to be quiet, and wasn't doing it very well.

In other words,
not
Clem. Who, then? Why would anyone hike up an extra flight or two of stairs? And why try (however poorly) to be sneaky at it? He listened harder, and now he could hear something else: a slight wheeze. Whoever was coming was way out of breath.

“Hang on,” he whispered. Then, as carefully and as quietly as only an escaladeur could, he crept back down the stairs to the landing under the green and sepia window. He peeked around the banister just in time to see the short, round shape of Dr. Gowervine disappear into Clem's room at the end of the hall.

Dr. Gowervine?

 

four

“What?” Sirin hissed from the landing above. Negret put a finger to his lips and stared at the open door. A moment later, Dr. Gowervine reappeared. Negret ducked out of sight and waited until he heard the door shut again with a soft click. Then quiet-but-not-silent Dr. Gowervine hurried back to the stairwell where Negret crouched out of view above and made his way back down. He was still wheezing a little.
Better cut back on the smoking if you wanna be sneaky,
Negret thought.

“Dr. Gowervine snuck into Clem's room,” he reported breathlessly as soon as the shifty guest was out of earshot.

“Weird! Did he take anything?”

Negret blinked. “I . . . I didn't notice.”
What an idiot,
he thought. He racked his memory, but if there had been anything in Dr. Gowervine's hands, he hadn't noticed—and he was mortified. Some blackjack.

Sirin came down the stairs and clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Don't beat yourself up. We've got an attic to explore, and it isn't like he's going anywhere.”

“He must be the one who snuck into my room, too,” Negret fumed. “He must have the chart. What the heck is he up to?”

“I don't know if we can assume he's the chart thief. All we know is that he went into Clem's room. We don't even know if he took anything. Really, Negret, the bottom line is this: we know nothing about any of these guys. We're going to have to find a way to figure out who they all are and why they're here.” She looked up at the attic door. “But for now, my dear Negret, let's focus on where
we
are.”

“Right.” He reached for the potted plant on the sill under the window. It was fake, with paper-covered wire for a stalk and flowers made of pink glass, and underneath sat the attic key. “Here we go.”