Kingdom Keepers: The Return Book Two: Legacy of Secrets (28 page)

Nearing the top of the hill, they lay flat on their stomachs and crawled. The grass was damp with dew, but smelled fresh-cut and sweet. The five scrambled up the hill and took their positions, moving like the well-oiled team they were. Charlene and Philby advanced across the lawn while Maybeck swept left through a curving flowerbed that ringed the backyard. Willa moved opposite of Maybeck, finding a lookout spot that allowed her a view of Wayne’s truck as well as the Disneys’ driveway. Finn held back, pretty much where he was, with a view of the terrace and the sliding glass doors leading out to it.

Philby and Charlene stayed on their stomachs, moving as fast as frightened lizards. From their perspective in the grass, the miniature train, rising up in the distance, looked eerily to scale—a gleaming red-and-black locomotive trailed by a coal car and then two long boxcars, the first of which was open and able to carry two or three people straddling it. The locomotive had a single seat; Philby could almost picture Walt Disney sitting in it, wearing a blue-and-white-striped engineer’s cap.

Once they were alongside the train, Charlene spoke in a whisper. “What exactly are we looking for?”

“A Walt-type clue, or the pen itself, I suppose.” The train was spectacularly real looking. The locomotive was six feet long, the trailing cars slightly longer. Every detail was perfect, right down to the rivets holding the locomotive together. “Amazing. It’s a working steam engine,” Philby whispered.

“I don’t think I care. I don’t love the idea of being arrested for trespassing in Walt Disney’s backyard. Maybe we can just get on with it?”

“I’ll start in the front and work back. You take the caboose and work forward.”

Philby took his time studying the locomotive, admiring the attention to detail involved. He should have moved faster, but every brass band, fixture, and wheel was functional and gorgeously rendered. Charlene made some noise pulling on one of the seats, seeing if it would move.

A dog barked from within the house.

Finn saw the curtain covering the sliding glass door move, as did Maybeck, who signaled Philby. A dog’s wet nose smeared the glass.

Charlene froze the moment the dog barked. She didn’t appear to hear Maybeck’s whispered warning: “Take cover!”

“Psst!” Philby struggled to remain calm while trying to win her attention. “Charlie! We’ve got to move!”

Finally, Charlene heard him. “What?”

Finn saw a light turn on behind the curtain and whistled softly. A yellow haze spread across the backyard. Charlene turned toward the house as a man’s hand appeared, gripping the curtain. Finn heard Maybeck whistle twice, sharply. Floodlights came on from either corner of the roof.

Philby rose up and dove over the locomotive. Something clattered loudly—what was it? Charlene practically flew above the boxcar on her way to the other side.

Finn ducked. He peered through a bed of yellow flowers. A man walked out onto the deck wearing a satin bathrobe and bedroom slippers. He was backlit; Finn couldn’t see a face, but who else could it be? Transfixed by the thought that he was once again looking at Walt Disney—
the
Walt Disney—Finn paid no attention to the other Keepers. He watched the great man come outside, a tall poodle with him.

“Hello?”

There was no mistaking that crackling voice. Finn had heard it so many times. It was Walt Disney himself. Finn could barely move.

“Anyone there? I don’t appreciate people nosing around my property, so skedaddle, would you please? I’d hate to have to call the police. Now, begone and good night!”

Finn realized they probably weren’t the first Walt Disney fans to pay the legend an uninvited visit. The man and his dog went back into the house. The sliding glass door closed and clicked. The floodlights remained on.

Philby, lying flat on his stomach, heard the condemnation and found it hard to breathe. Walt Disney himself, about to call the cops. The low point of his life.

When Maybeck whistled once, softly—
coast is clear
—Philby started crawling toward Charlene, who was on her back, breathing hard, terrified of being caught.

Something slipped off Philby’s leg. He looked back. It was a
piece of the train
! He’d broken Walt Disney’s beloved locomotive!

He pivoted, trying to grab hold of the object. What—no! Of all things, it had to be the sign:
LILLY BELLE
. His pants had caught on it. Just great! Philby thought, in total misery now. He kneeled, keeping his head low, wondering if there might be some way to reattach it. Running his hand along the back, he felt cold metal on either end. Magnets!

Charlene reached him. “I think I’m dying,” she said.

“You and me both. I broke his train!”

“We’re doomed. This is the worst night ever.”

“Wait a second!” Philby lifted the nameplate higher into the light. Charlene swatted it out of his hands.

“Are you crazy?” she asked hoarsely. “We need to get out of here.”

“We need Maybeck to memorize this,” he said. “Go get him.”

“It’s probably a serial number or something. We are
not
sticking around for that.”

“Tell Maybeck I need him, Charlie. Then you, Finn, and Willa get back to Wayne’s truck. We’ll meet you.”

“That’s not going to happen, and you know it.” Charlene scurried off on hands and knees toward Maybeck’s hiding spot.

Philby angled the nameplate to catch the light, allowing him to more clearly see the words inscribed on the back.

It was not a serial number.

I
NSIDE
W
AYNE’S WORKSHOP,
under the dim illumination of three flashlights, Wayne and Philby worked late into the night. On the table before them was a flickering image, mostly blue and white and black, courtesy of a small, battery-powered transistor radio Wayne had rewired to transmit. The device was just strong enough to project the sparkling hologram of what looked like a piece of paper. The same piece of paper that had been discovered attached to the neck of Jingles.

“It’s no surprise this arrived,” Wayne said. “After all, you five made it through. The challenge will be to send something back.”

“We have analog transmission,” Philby said. Wayne looked at him, confused; he backtracked, trying to explain. “Basically, it’s this: climbing onto Jingles ourselves would kill whoever tries it. We can maybe send a few small objects, but we have nowhere near the bandwidth we need to transmit a human.”

“I don’t get it,” Maybeck said.

“I don’t think anyone does,” Wayne said. “It seems that by carving his initials, Finn created a change in the present that carried into the future. This note isn’t like that. It came from the future, where the technology exists to allow its transmission. Gee whiz, we’re barely able to
see
what they sent, much less duplicate the process in reverse. But we’re working on it.”

“We’re thinking,” Philby said, “that it’s just unstable. Wayne thinks he can fix that. Let’s give it a try.”

Wayne pointed at the floating image. It looked like a magic trick, the way it hovered a quarter inch off the worktable. The piece of tape and the torn bit of note hovered at the top. Wayne continued to work, a tiny screwdriver in one hand, the oversize knob of some kind of power supply he called a rheostat in the other. The equipment hummed and buzzed loudly.

“I love that smell,” Philby said, mostly to himself. “Like after a thunderstorm.”

“Or a burning wire, but yes, it is rather pleasant.” Wayne continued to tinker. Philby watched as the scratches on the hologram began to connect. Another few adjustments by Wayne and the lines became fuzzy and indistinct. Philby wanted to coach him—
A little more this way! Now that!
—but knew firsthand how annoying such advice could be.

A final adjustment…and it was like a PowerPoint projector’s lens focusing. The note came suddenly into view.

Wayne couldn’t hold it; the image vanished.

“That’s okay! I’ve got it!” Philby said, lifting a pen from the back of a sheet of sandpaper. He’d written it all down.

“What does it mean—‘Castle has sparkling spires’?” Wayne asked.

“She’s telling us the date. For the sixtieth anniversary of Disneyland,” Philby said, “they changed the castle. She’s just telling us it’s the sixtieth. If the note had been found by someone else, they wouldn’t understand. Call it code.”

“Amazing.” Wayne stepped back and sat on a high stool. He stayed silent for a long time. “I keep waiting to wake up,” he said eventually, his voice very soft.

“You and me both.”

“I just read a message written in 2015? Am I supposed to believe this?”

“It’s up to you, I suppose. The first time you brought Finn back here, it was in the 1960s. You brought him through a television set. He returned the same way.”

“No idea how I did that.”

“You’ll figure it out.”

“Not without a lot of help from Philby,” Wayne said.

“It’s weird to me, too,” Philby said. “I’m not saying it makes sense in terms of physics.”

“A.H.,” Wayne said. “It’s Mr. Hollingsworth, isn’t it? Amery Hollingsworth.”

“Must be?”

“‘Beware of A.H.’ We all know him. The same Mr. Hollingsworth who gave that speech in the Golden Horseshoe. The same man fired by Mr. Disney for stealing animation cells from the studios. He said he was innocent, of course, and he made up all sorts of lies about Mr. Disney stealing his ideas. Foolishness! There were other people in those meetings! Mr. Disney didn’t steal anything. Some of his villains and stories go back to the European fairy tales, but golly, who cares about that? Mr. Hollingsworth’s lies never made sense. There were lawsuits. Mr. Hollingsworth never won. But he doesn’t stop trying. He’s jealous, that’s all. The people who work here, we all love Mr. Disney like a father. Other people don’t get it. There will always be sore folks like Mr. Hollingsworth, I guess, but it’s not fair to great men like Mr. Disney. Not one bit.”

“I agree completely. But let me get something straight: Amery Hollingsworth is alive and kicking in 1955?”

“Very much so. Why? And who is O.T., anyway? I can’t think of anyone with those initials.”

“It’s not a person. It’s more like a group.”

“And you know this group?” Wayne asked.

“I know this group,” Philby whispered, wondering at the message Amanda had been trying to deliver.

T
HE THREE
F
AIRLIES SAT
in Amanda and Jess’s dorm room with the door closed. Jess was on the bed, Mattie and Amanda in desk chairs. A grim air filled the room, the kind of silence that follows a team loss in a championship match.

“When Finn described his first time travel experience,
after
he got his memory back about what had happened, he talked about being chased into the TV set by a Dapper. What if it was the same guy? What if he was trying to help Finn, not hurt him?”

Amanda spoke first. “We need to find the Dapper Dan. This guy Ezekiel.”

“Overtakers play all sorts of tricks,” Jess said. “You put any faith in that?”

“This is my fault,” Mattie said. “It all happened so quickly.”

“Tell us again,” Jess said.

“I’ve told you three times!”

“Once more. Please.”

“I touched Joe right as Hollingsworth was mentioned. Things went crazy. His mind went all frantic, which makes it so difficult to read. He was inside a vault, like a bank vault. He reached for a drawer—second row, third from the left. There was a brown folder inside with Hollingsworth’s name. A black-and-white photograph of a man. There were Disney villains like Maleficent and the Evil Queen, too. Superclear and colorful. Animated, for sure, not the characters in the parks. There was a photo of a gravestone. And yeah, he was thinking about a Dapper Dan—a thought, not a photograph—Ezekiel? Ebsy? Some name like that. And a businessman of some sort, and this other guy I can’t really describe except to say he was maybe the same age as the others. I don’t know.”