Kingdom Keepers: The Return Book Two: Legacy of Secrets (25 page)

T
HE
K
EEPERS MOVED THROUGH
the Disneyland crowd with confidence and ease, their 3-D projections and period costumes blending in with the tens of thousands of park guests.

Willa had followed the hunch she’d had in Canal Boats and solved Esmeralda’s riddle:
I named it after you. I hope it moves you as much as it does me
.

“Walt named it for Lillian,” Willa had told them triumphantly. “The operative word is the verb.”

“
Moves
,” Maybeck said. “We’ve been over this already!”

“We left out the railroad,” Willa said.

“Santa Fe?” said Charlene.

“Disneyland
Railroad
,” Maybeck said. “That doesn’t help.”

“Lilly Belle,” Charlene said. “
I named it after
you. I always thought how romantic that was.” She squeezed Finn’s arm. He couldn’t take it anymore and broke away from her, making a bit of a scene.

Maybeck looked ready to split open Finn’s face.

Wayne, oblivious to the Charlene antics, brought the conversation back to where it needed to be. “
Lilly Belle
, the parlor car he built for her! Wonderful, Willa! So much like Mr. Disney!”

The Keepers split up. Finn told Charlene and Maybeck to board the Santa Fe railroad’s freight train while he, Philby, and Willa rode the passenger train that left from above the park entrance. Charlene didn’t appreciate the snub and took it badly; her behavior made Maybeck feel about two inches high. Finn could see behind Maybeck’s cockiness to know how it stung.

Glad to be rid of her for a while, Finn walked briskly. They waited ten minutes on the platform, the last few impatiently. Finally, the train approached.

“So many people,” Finn said. He, Willa, and Philby stood away from the others; they couldn’t risk someone bumping into their projections only to discover there was nothing to bump into. The trouble was, by standing clear, they were last in line. As holograms, there was no way for them to push onto the crowded parlor car. Willa found an open space to the left inside the door; Philby followed Finn in to the right.

“Jammed,” Finn said, his voice clearer and more normal sounding than when he’d been 2-D.

“We need to spread out,” Philby said.

“Good luck with that.”

“Yeah.” Philby rose to his toes as the train doors shut and the car jerked, beginning to move.

The parlor car was decorated to resemble a Victorian sitting room. Down the left side was a row of plush red-velvet seats with dark wood arms. The wood-paneled ceiling had floral inlays, brass fixtures, and a glistening polish. The windows were double hung, flanked by red-velvet window curtains edged with golden tassels. At the far end, a gleaming oak door with a glass window looked out on the receding landscape. Another ornate chair, a marble-top card table, an imitation gas lamp with a smoked glass flute, and a long wood shelf made up the car’s right side.

Finn pushed deeper into the car, the shelf cutting into his projection. Presumably because of his angle, no one could see the wood knifing several inches into his back.

He reached the marble-top card table, hoping he might find something to do with Walt’s pen. A set of leaded glass decanters were glued to the marble. Nothing else.

Finn spotted a brass drawer handle near the wall. He reached over to it, his full concentration on making his right hand material, not a projection. He failed.

He and the other Keepers were guinea pigs for Philby and Wayne’s new, untested device, cobbled together from stolen parts of equipment engineered for technologies in the Stone Age of the information revolution. Without thinking, he’d expected his hologram to perform similarly to his three-dimensional projection in the present. It was not cooperating.

He eye-signaled Willa, who joined him a moment later. “I can’t open that drawer,” he told her. She tried. She couldn’t, either.

“This isn’t good. We can’t play the fear game all the time.”

“No. That wears me out.”

“Cover for me,” she said. Dropping to her knees and fluffing her skirt to the side, Willa tucked herself under the small table. Finn stepped over to screen her from view. A moment later, her hand appeared by his pants leg, and he moved to let her up.

“Drawer is empty,” she said. “It was dark in there, but not pitch-black. No photographs. No documents. How can finding a man’s pen be so hard?”

“There must be a clue in here. Or the pen itself.”

“Agreed.”

“If it’s here,” Finn said, “he could have hidden it out in the open. We could be looking right at it. It might be in pieces.” Finn checked the lamp. Nothing. He searched the visible areas of the car for anything that looked like a disguised part of a black fountain pen. “The barrel would be easy to hide. Maybe the cap. But the actual guts of the thing…I don’t see how you hide that.”

The train’s track was laid in a circle around the property’s perimeter. It moved slowly, guests pressing their faces to the park-side windows, oohing and aahing at what they saw: the Riverboat lagoon, the Stage Line, the Casey Jr. roller coaster. As they circled around the speedboat rides and Autopia, they faced the Rocket Ride to the Moon, an attraction that drew the most number of lookie loos. That freed up space, allowing the three Keepers to meet at the marble-top.

“Nothing,” Philby said.

“Same,” Finn said. “And we have technical problems.” He swiped his fingertips through the tabletop.

Philby imitated him, to the same result. “Oh my…”

“Yeah,” Willa said. “We’re going to need Wayne or someone with us. This is not going to work.”

“Worse,” Finn said, “Maybeck and Charlie may not know their limitations. We’re kind of lucky we figured this out now.”

“We need to get word to them,” Philby said, sounding panicked. “You know Maybeck, always biting off more than he can chew.”

Willa said, “I’m more worried about Charlene. Did anybody else notice how strange she’s been acting?”

Finn hung his head, feeling his cheeks warm.

“Not me,” said Philby.

“You never notice anything about people’s feelings!” Willa complained.

“Ouch,” Philby said.

“Finn?” Willa asked.

“Hmm?” He looked up. “I…ah…I think we need to warn them for sure.”

Willa leveled a gaze that cut right through him. “Finn?”

“It’s complicated,” Finn said.

M
AYBECK SPOTTED THEM FIRST:
two boys dressed as Cast Members, doing a poor job disguising their interest in him and his adorably dressed escort.

The costumes had worked well for Opening Day. But though all women visiting the park wore dresses and formal shoes like Charlene, and most of the men donned coat and tie and pressed slacks like Maybeck,
none
of those guests had black skin. Zero. Maybeck was not only young and good-looking, he was a “colored boy” dressed in rich clothing, sitting alongside a gorgeous, equally young white girl. It turned out at least two young Americans in 1955 found this combination off-putting, even unacceptable.

“They’re fakes,” Charlene said. “Their shirts and pants are wrinkled. I haven’t seen a single other Cast Member with their clothes in that shape.”

“No.”

“They’re looking at us.”

“Yeah, I caught that. I think I kinda stand out.”

“You think they know who we are?”

“I sure hope not.” Maybeck looked around for escape options. The train turned the corner toward Main Street station, where the Disney Railroad train carrying the three Keepers was currently sidetracked.

“Our stop’s coming up,” he said.

“I don’t mean to freak you out or anything,” Charlene said. “But last night when Finn and I were at the hotel, I kind of…ran interference for Finn.”

“Meaning?”

“I may have acted lost in order to buy Finn time to search a couple rooms. What I’m trying to say is: I recognize the guy on the left, and maybe, just maybe, he remembers me.”

“I’ve got news for you, Charlene. There’s no ‘maybe’ about it. Guys don’t forget you.”

“I can’t tell if you’re trying to give me a compliment or if you’re mad at me.”

“Maybe a little bit of both. For one thing, I didn’t actually love seeing you hang all over Finn.”

“Do you think we could talk about this another time?”

“Not really.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“Besides,” Maybeck said. “I know a way to beat these clowns. If they make a move for us, you stay with me.”

“No problem.”

“Did you happen to notice that when we sat down—”

“Yes,” Charlene said, interrupting him. “I didn’t feel the bench under me.”

“Exactly. We’re sitting, but not actually. We just look like we are to everyone else. And that means—”

“We can run away, but we can’t stay and fight.”

“Yeah. That.”

“If we try to take them on,” Charlene said, eyes darting nervously, “it’ll reveal our DHIs.”

“They’ll think we’re ghosts. But that won’t help us,” Maybeck said.

“Hadn’t thought of that. So it’s hide-and-seek.”

“More like tag. They’re ‘it,’ and we can’t let them touch us.”

“Well, all I can say,” Charlene said, “is I hope they’re looking at us because of me and not because of you.”

“And here I am hoping we’ll never find out.”

Charlene turned and scanned the car again, looking for a possible way out Maybeck might not have considered. She saw framed photographs on either side of the doors at both ends of the car. They looked like pictures of trains, but she was too far off to see clearly.

“I’m sorry if I upset you, Terry.”

“I don’t think you are,” he said. “I think you did it on purpose, and I don’t exactly get what I did wrong.”

“It’s weird having this conversation while looking straight ahead. I want to see you.”

“That’s just an excuse.”

“I suppose,” she said.

“Okay,” Maybeck said, “they’re moving. You’ll be happy to hear that we’ll have to talk this out later.”

“That’s not fair.”

“You ready?” he asked.

“Terry.” She tried to touch him tenderly on the arm, but her hand passed through his hologram. “Oh, come on!” she said, annoyed.

“Here we go,” Maybeck said, standing. The two boys—hardly boys given that they looked to be in their early twenties—moved down the center aisle. Maybeck turned toward the back of the car, Charlene right behind him.

“He definitely recognizes me,” she said over Maybeck’s shoulder.

“Told you so,” he said. “This is what we’re going to do….” He stepped aside to allow her to share the narrow aisle with him. “What we’re counting on here, is that everyone is looking in the direction we’re moving.”

It was true, Charlene realized. Passengers were either looking forward or out the windows.

“Terry?” she said, sensing his intentions as they drew within three strides of the car’s back door. “Look!” She pointed to one of the photographs.

“I don’t have time for the art gallery!”

“It’s Lilly Belle! And it’s not the parlor car.” Her brow wrinkled as she read the caption aloud.

“We’ve got to get going!” Maybeck said emphatically.

“It’s the same name: Lilly Belle! ‘Named it after you. Moves you…’ It’s a locomotive!”

“It’s a model!”

“Walt Disney’s Carolwood Pacific Railroad. That’s not Disneyland. What is that?”

Maybeck took a fraction of a second to absorb the photo and what she was trying to tell him. “No way.”

“‘…as much as it does me.’”

Maybeck said, “If we don’t get out of here right now, they’re going to catch us—or try to—and that’s going to win us a lot of attention we don’t want or need.”

Charlene nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”

Together, they faced the train car’s wooden door. Their projections stepped through it and outside. With the passengers’ attention elsewhere, Maybeck assumed only the two guys had seen them vanish. He wondered what they were thinking.

Next, his and Charlene’s DHIs passed through both the iron banister on the car where they stood, and the banister on the trailing car. Their projections moved through yet another door and into the crowded train car, with its rows of benches on both sides.

Maybeck and the Keepers had come to learn that the human brain does not want to process the impossible. It will look for any reasonable explanation to an event, even going as far as to invent it.

If two teens walk through a closed door to a moving train car, then you blink and look again. Seeing the two teens, you laugh or look away…because
there’s no way that could have happened
.

Problems arise with agreement. If
two or more
people agree they witnessed the same phenomena, then the incident is given weight. The good thing about train cars is that most of the passengers are strangers, which greatly reduces the chance for discussion and agreement. Few people want to nudge the person next to them and say,
Did you see those two kids just vaporize through the door!?