A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(27)

“Let’s not go overboard,” said Enoch, and then because he had spoken, it was his turn. He twisted his shoe in the dirt for a long moment, then said, “Why’d you have to do something stupid, like get yourself killed?” He laughed dryly. “I’m sorry if I was ever an ass to you. If it changes anything, I wish you weren’t dead.” And then he turned his face away and said quietly, “Goodbye, old friend.”

Olive touched her heart. “Enoch, that was nice.”

“Okay, settle down.” Enoch shook his head, embarrassed, and started walking back. “I’ll be at the house.”

Bronwyn and Olive looked to Emma, who hadn’t spoken yet.

“I’d like a moment alone, please,” she said.

The girls looked a little disappointed, and then everyone but me went after Enoch.

Emma glanced at me. I raised my eyebrows.

Me too?

She looked a bit sheepish.

“If you don’t mind.”

“Of course. I’ll just be over here. In case you need anything.”

She nodded. I walked about thirty paces, leaned against a tree, and waited. Emma stood at the spot for several minutes. I tried not to stare at her, but the more time passed, the more I caught myself watching the back of her head to see if it was bobbing, and her shoulders to see if they were shaking.

My eyes drifted to a vulture circling overhead. I looked down a moment later when I heard a noise in the brush.

Bronwyn was racing toward me. I startled so badly that I almost fell over.

“Jacob! Emma! You have to come quick!”

Emma saw and ran over to us.

“What happened?” I said.

“We found something,” said Bronwyn. “In the house.”

The look on her face made me think it was something awful. A dead body. But her voice was full of excitement.



* * *



? ? ?

They were standing in the room Abe had used as his office. The old Persian carpet that stretched nearly wall to wall had been rolled up and pushed to one side, revealing pale, worn floorboards beneath.

Emma and I were panting from running.

“Bronwyn says . . . you found something,” Emma said.

“I wanted to test a theory,” said Millard. “So while you two were dallying in the woods, I asked Olive to take a walk around the house.”

Olive took a couple of steps, her lead shoes making a heavy thud with each footfall.

“Imagine my surprise when I had her walk through this room. Olive, would you demonstrate?”

Olive started at the wall and stomped across the room. When she reached the very center of the floor, the sound her lead shoes made changed from a solid thwump to something more hollow—and slightly metallic.

“There’s something under there,” I said.

“A void. A concavity,” said Millard.

I heard Millard’s knee connect with the floor, and then a letter opener floated over the floor, point down. It was thrust between two boards, and with a grunt Millard pried up a section of floor about three feet square. It swung back on a hinge, revealing a metal door that looked just large enough for a grown man to fit through.

“Holy shit.”

Olive looked aghast. I rarely swore in front of them, but this was just . . . well, holy shit.

“It’s a door,” I said.

“More of a hatch, really,” said Bronwyn.

“I hate to say I told you so,” said Millard. “But—I told you so.”

The metal door was made of dull gray steel. It had a recessed handle and a number pad. I knelt down and rapped the metal with my knuckle. It sounded thick and strong. Then I tried the handle, but it wouldn’t budge.

“It’s locked,” said Olive. “We already tried to open it.”

“What’s the combination?” Bronwyn asked me.

“How should I know?”

“Told you he wouldn’t,” said Enoch. “You don’t know much, do you?”

I sighed. “Let me think for a second.”

“Could the code be someone’s birthday?” asked Olive.

I tried a few—mine, Abe’s, my dad’s, my grandmother’s, even Emma’s—but none worked.

“It’s not a birthday,” said Millard. “Abe would never have made the combination something so obvious.”

“We don’t even know how many numbers are in the combination,” said Emma.

Bronwyn squeezed my shoulder. “Come on, Jacob. Think.”

I tried to focus, but I was letting hurt feelings distract me. I had always thought of myself as closer to Abe than anybody. So how was it that he never mentioned the secret door in the floor of his study? He lived more than half his life in the shadows, and never made a real attempt to share it with me. Sure, he told me stories that sounded like fairy tales and shared a few old photos, but he never showed me anything. I never would have doubted his stories if he’d made more of an effort to prove them—like showing me the secret door to his secret room.

Unlike my father, I wanted to believe.

Had he really been so injured by my skepticism that it made him abandon some plan to tell me everything? I couldn’t believe that anymore. If he had told me the truth plainly, I would’ve guarded his secrets with my life. I think, in the end, he just didn’t want me to know because he didn’t trust me. And now here I was trying to guess the combination to a door he had never told me about, behind which were secrets he had never meant for me to uncover.