The Secret Cellar (6 page)

“No women?” Mom interrupts.

“No, just men. Sorry. They were the nine men who were supposed to represent the ideals of chivalry—you know, courage, honesty, honor, that kind of thing.”

“The ability to kill other men,” scoffs Mom. “Those three are soldiers. That’s what you get when you have men deciding who is ‘worthy.’ ”

“Holy cow, Mom. Why are you so anti-man all of a sudden?”

“The first three are all considered pagans,” says Margaret. “The next three are Jewish—they’re all from
the Old Testament: Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabeus. Not the apostle Judas—he was Iscariot. The last three are Christians: King Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon.”

“Okay, I’ve heard of all of those except the last one,” I say. “Godfrey who?”

“First Crusade,” answers Margaret, whose brain reminds me of a lobster trap I saw in Maine. Once the facts crawl inside her head, they’re stuck there forever. “Anyway, we’re looking for a book about Alexander the Great. Or all nine of these ‘worthies’; maybe it’s in the chapter about him.”

“Cool,” I say. “When do we start?”

After school, the four of us knock on Elizabeth’s door, hoping for an update on the Perkatory situation.

The housekeeper invites us inside, immediately reminding me of our first visit to chez Harriman, and of Winifred “Winnie” Winterbottom. Besides being a so-so housekeeper, Winnie was in cahoots with her sleazy, chain-smoking husband, Gordon, my personal nemesis during the quest for the Ring of Rocamadour. She spied on us and passed the information along to Gordon, who then used it to try to steal the ring from under our noses.

Helen, Elizabeth’s new housekeeper, is nothing like Winnie, who was carved from a block of granite: gray, cold, and hard as stone. Rather, Helen is a four-foot-nine
bundle of cheerful energy, inviting us in and immediately offering to make a pot of “Flower Power” tea, which she somehow knows is our favorite.

“No thank you,” I say. “We just have a couple of quick questions for the professor.”

“Uh-oh,” Malcolm says, appearing at the kitchen door and wiping his hands on an apron that looks as if it has been used to clean up a major environmental disaster. “Questions for me?”

“Just two,” says Margaret. “One, have you made any progress on the Perkatory story, and, two, when you were looking at those boxes of books before the auction last night, did you happen to notice any books about Alexander the Great? Or the Nine Worthies?”

Malcolm chuckles. “The Nine Worthies. I hadn’t thought of them in years, but, yes, there was a book—three volumes, in a beautiful slipcase, actually.
Nine Worthy Men
, I think it was called. Why on earth are you interested in those old fossils?”

“Wait! What about Perkatory?” Leigh Ann asks.

“Sorry, nothing yet,” says Malcolm. “I’m waiting to hear back from Mr. Varone, the building owner. I’ll send you a note the second I hear anything. I promise. Am I to understand that there’s been no change—no new signs on the door?”

“You understand correctly, good sir,” says Becca. “That place is locked up tighter than Helm’s Deep.”

“It’s so depressing,” I say. “I thought I was going to
cry when I walked past this morning. And just seeing that ridiculous
COFFEETERIA
sign across the street—grrrrr. Makes me want to go over there and pull the stupid thing down.”

“Back to the worthies,” Margaret says. “Malcolm, the books you saw, were they in one of the boxes that Marcus Klinger bought?”

“Klinger? Yes, I’m pretty sure he bought all the books. And overpaid for them, I’d have to say. He seemed determined to buy them. Same thing with that blasted walking stick. Had to have it, too. Just who is this Marcus Klinger character, anyway?”

“He’s a jerk, that’s who he is,” I say. “He owns this cruddy little used-book store up on Eighty-First.”

“My goodness, Sophie,” says Malcolm. “You are not having a good week, are you?”

“Tell me about it,” I grumble.

Margaret tells him the story of our experience in Sturm & Drang Books, and then I bring him up to date on the paper hidden away in Dad’s fountain pen.

“And now we have to go back for more Sturm and Drang,” says Margaret.

“What? Why?” cries Leigh Ann.

“Because he has
Nine Worthy Men
,” Margaret says. “We don’t have to buy it, we just need to look at it for a minute—if he’ll let us.”

“Well, this time please make sure your hands are clean,” Becca teases.

“Have you tried the library?” Malcolm asks.

Margaret nods. “I checked online. Believe it or not, they don’t have it. Maybe they used to have one, but someone lost it, and they couldn’t replace it. It’s been out of print for a long time.”

“Okay, then. How about the Strand?” Malcolm asks. “What do their ads say they have, eighteen miles of books? If they don’t have it, I’ll eat my hat.”

“You’d better be careful, Malcolm,” I say. “I think you already owe us one good hat-eating. Those tweed caps of yours must taste really good.”

“That’s a great idea,” Margaret says. “Why don’t you come with us?”

Malcolm glances toward the kitchen, shrugs, and pulls his filthy apron over his head. “I was going to bake some bread, but it can wait. And Elizabeth called to say she’s going out to dinner with her friend Alessandra, so I’m on my own for dinner, anyway.”

On the way to the Strand Book Store at Broadway and Twelfth, we decide to turn the search for
Nine Worthy Men
into a competition, with the losers treating the winners to ice cream. It’s Margaret and Malcolm versus Becca, Leigh Ann, and me as we hit the doors running.

There’s a good reason Margaret picked Malcolm instead of me to be her teammate: she knows that when I walk into the Strand, I’m like a moth in a room filled
with flashing lights, flitting from aisle to aisle and table to table. Self-control? HA! It’s a bookstore with eighteen miles of books! Within thirty seconds, I have completely forgotten what I’m looking for. Nine … something, I try to remind myself, but, really, who cares, because I just stumbled into a whole section that should be called “Sophie’s Choices”—so many books by my favorite authors, mingling with a kajillion others that I simply must have. Right now.

Leigh Ann is about to zoom past me, but she puts on the brakes when she sees me with my nose in an old hardcover. “Did you find it already?” she asks.

“What? Oh, um, no. I was just … This is a classic,” I say, showing her the cover of Walter Farley’s
The Black Stallion
.

“Sophie! Come on!”

“Okay, okay,” I say, carefully reshelving the book and running after her.

I make it about thirty feet before I spot something out of the corner of my eye—one of those red notebooks, which I just love. This one is jammed in between a couple of worn copies of
The Catcher in the Rye
. When I’m sure that no one is watching me, I take the notebook from the shelf and glance at the cover. There’s a piece of masking tape with “
DO YOU DARE
?” written across it in black marker.

Do I dare? Well, of course I dare. I flip it open to the
first page, where I find the following message, done in neat cursive:

“Sophie!” hisses Leigh Ann, who then drags me away by the arm. “Come on!” She grabs the notebook out of my hand and jams it between the two closest books.

“But that’s not where it goes,” I protest, returning it to its proper place as Leigh Ann physically pulls me down the aisle toward the nonfiction section.

Ugh. Nonfiction. A strange, alien place, this realm of books about real people. I glance back longingly at the fiction section. “But—”

“No! Stay here, and start looking!” Becca scolds. “Do you even remember what we’re looking for?”

“Y-yes. Of course. Nine … famous … guys.”

Becca stares at me, openmouthed. “If we lose, you’re buying the ice cream.”

“Okay, jeez. I get it. It’s
Nine Worthy Men
. And you think it ought to be around here? Where are Margaret and Malcolm?”

“A couple of aisles over,” answers Leigh Ann.

“Well, that’s probably a good sign,” I say, my eyes already scanning the top shelf. The fact is, when I want to find a book—even nonfiction—I have a gift.

And my gift doesn’t let me down; less than a minute after I start looking, I spot a copy of
Nine Worthy Men
. It’s on the lowest shelf, and I dive to the floor to pull it out.

“Hey—got it,” I whisper to my teammates.

They join me on the floor just as I realize there’s a problem. “Uh-oh.”

“Uh-oh?” they repeat.

“There ought to be three books, but I only see volumes two and three. And Alexander the Great is in volume one.”

“Naturally,” says Leigh Ann. “Nothing is ever easy. Maybe it’s around here somewhere. Maybe somebody took a look at it and put it back in the wrong place.”

“Did you guys find it?” Margaret asks, puzzled by the sight of the three of us on the floor.

“Sort of,” I admit, handing her volumes two and three. “The set seems to be missing the one we need.”

She calls Malcolm over to join the search, but after ten minutes, we still have only six worthy men.

“Now what?” Leigh Ann asks.

“Plan B,” says Margaret. “Back to Sturm & Drang.” Her face looks like she’s sucking on a lemon as she says the name of the store.

Becca pulls Leigh Ann and me close, putting her arms around our shoulders. “Since our team, you know, technically found the book, I think you guys owe us some ice cream.”

“Hey, that’s right,” Leigh Ann agrees.

Margaret starts to protest, but Malcolm the Peacemaker (could he be the Tenth Worthy?) holds up a hand to stop us before we even start arguing.

“Let me settle this the easy way: the ice cream is on me. When we get back uptown, we’ll go by Perka—Oh, right. Tell you what. Will you take a rain check for the ice cream? Let me have a day or two to do a little digging.”

“Oh, I get it,” I say. “Digging. Because you’re an archaeologist. Clever.”

Leigh Ann, who lives in Queens, and Becca, in Chinatown, head home from the Strand, while Margaret and I take Malcolm’s offer of a cab ride home. He gets out at Third and Sixty-Fifth and hands the driver enough money to get us up to our neighborhood, which is very cool, indeed.

We’re almost there when I remember the red notebook with the intriguing message back at the Strand. When I tell Margaret about it, I consider asking if she wants to go back for it, but it’s getting late and I have a ton of homework. I’m pretty sure it will still be there in a few days, and besides, maybe dealing with only one secret message at a time is a good policy.

Raf calls at eight o’clock, and I stay on the phone with him for an hour, which is unusual for me: I’m just not a big phone person. But it has been a few days since I’ve seen him, and you can only convey so much information by texting. You see, ours is a long-distance relationship, New York style: he’s an Upper West Sider, and I’m Upper East. It’s not just the distance and Central Park that are obstacles, the UWS and the UES are like two different countries, and not necessarily friendly ones at that.

The highlight (if you can call it that) of the conversation is when he tells me that he had crossed the park intending to surprise me after school at Perkatory and found it closed.

“Oh. Yeah, I guess I forgot to tell you about that.”

“Are they, like, closed for good?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out. Malcolm is checking it out for us. He knows the landlord. So, what
did you do after you realized Perk was closed? Why didn’t you call me? Not that I was around, anyway. We were downtown, at the Strand, looking for this book about Alexander the Great. It’s a long story.”

“I was getting ready to, and then my mom called and made me go home. But I checked out that new place, Coffeeteria, before I left. It’s really nice. They gave me—”

“NO! No, no, no. You did not go in there. Raf, they’re the enemy.”

He laughs. That’s right: Raf laughs. At me.

“It’s not funny,” I say.

“I’m sorry,” he says, still laughing.

In fact, he’s still laughing as I hang up on him.

My phone rings seconds later. I have my finger on the power button, about to turn it off, when I notice that it’s Margaret and not Raf.

“Hey, I heard from Malcolm about Perkatory,” she says. “You won’t believe it. The inspector saw a rat. The health department closed them down on the spot.”

“What? They forced them to close because they saw one lousy rat?”

Margaret sighs. Loudly.

“Sophie, I love you. You’re my best friend and I would do anything for you. But seriously … are you crazy? Of course they got shut down! Do you really want to eat at a place that has rats?”

“There must be an explanation,” I say.

“Well, apparently the inspector opened a cupboard in the kitchen and this furry little critter was just sitting there, staring right back at him. They’re supposed to have an official, ‘
CLOSED BY ORDER OF THE HEALTH DEPARTMENT
’ sign up on the door, but they’re trying to keep it as quiet as possible. Aldo is afraid they’re going to lose all their business to that Coffeeteria place.”