The Librarians and the Mother Goose Chase Read online

  She doubted he had any such item in his car, but if he remembered the specific rhyme, that might be all she needed to figure out the clues.

  “Gotta hand it to you, little lamb. You know your business. Get an eyeful of this.”

  He tugged on the bottom of his T-shirt, pulling it up over his head.

  “Whoa there!” Cassandra held up her hands to fend him off if necessary, while peeking through her fingers. “Not where I thought we were going with this!”

  “Chill, lamb chop.” He turned his back toward her, revealing a nursery rhyme tattooed across his skin in crooked black script. “Just wanted to give you a wink at my ink.”

  “That’s the rhyme from your sampler?” she asked. “On your back?”

  “You know it. Like I said before, I never want to forget where I came from … and this is a bit more hardcore than great-granny’s needlepoint if you know what I mean.” He shrugged. “Got a reputation to maintain after all.”

  Cassandra didn’t argue the point. Personally, when it came to preserving her family history, she would have gone with a nice scrapbook or photo album, but to each their own. Overcoming her initial surprise, she read the rhyme inked into Cole’s back.

  There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile,

  He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile,

  He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse,

  And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

  Cassandra searched the familiar verses for clues, but came up blank. “Crooked man … well, that covers a lot of ground. A sixpence, a stile, a cat, a mouse. Are there any particularly crooked houses in the vicinity?”

  “Crooked as in felonious,” he asked, “or crooked as in askew?”

  “Don’t ask me,” she said, growing frustrated. “Ask your tricky ancestors. Did any of them ever live in a house that might be described as … crooked?”

  Cole scratched his chin, thinking it over, while Cassandra pondered her next move should Cole be stumped as well. Was there some deeper meaning in the rhyme she was missing? Arts and poetry were more Stone’s thing, or Jenkins’s, or Flynn’s. Why couldn’t this branch of the Goose family have left her a nice chewy math puzzle instead?

  She was on the verge of calling Jenkins for help when Cole had a brainstorm. He snapped his fingers loudly.

  “The Puzzle House! My great-grandpa didn’t live there, but he sure as hell ran the construction team on the Puzzle House, which is about as crooked a crib as they come.”

  Cassandra gave him a blank look. “Puzzle House?”

  “Seriously? You’ve never heard of the Wilshire Puzzle House? Where have you been hanging out, little lamb? Under a rock?”

  “Under a bridge, to be exact,” she said. “But you were saying…?”

  “Let me lay some wisdom on you.” Cole pulled his shirt back on before launching into his explanation. “Ezra Wilshire was this ‘crooked’ robber baron who swindled a whole lot of people back in the boom years after the First World War. Story is he made a deal with the Devil, selling his soul for wealth and luxury, but there was a catch: the Devil couldn’t collect his soul until Old Man Wilshire finished building his mansion. So the sneaky old man tried to keep the construction going forever in order to outsmart the Devil.”

  “Doable,” Cassandra said, speaking from experience, “but probably best left to professionals.” Memories of a certain infernal contract crackled like hellfire across her brain, smelling distinctly of brimstone. “I’m guessing this didn’t work out well for Mr. Wilshire in the end?”

  Cole shook his head. “You could say that. All they ever found was some ashes in the shape of his shadow.”

  “Oh.” Cassandra gulped, deciding she didn’t need all the grisly details at the moment. “Anyway, I get that the late Mr. Wilshere was ‘crooked’ in a way, but, aside from its colorful history, was his house all that crooked, too?”

  “Crooked, crazy, mondo loco … it’s all of that and more. Seems Old Man Wilshire didn’t entirely trust the Devil to play fair, so he made his crib as confusing as possible so that even Old Nick couldn’t find his way around or tell whether the house was done yet. It’s all dead ends and weird angles and secret passages and wacked-out doors and stairways that go nowhere in particular. You have to see it to believe it. It’s not a house; it’s a six-story Rubik’s Cube with no straight edges.”

  And possibly an ideal spot to hide those missing pages, Cassandra thought, intrigued and encouraged by what she was hearing. “You say your great-grandfather used to work there?”

  “No lie. He was the construction chief on the whole freaking job, or so I always heard growing up. His sweat and blood went into building the Puzzle House, working there day after day for year after year, and his fingerprints are all over it,” Cole bragged, his pride in his heritage once more evident. “In fact, my dad snuck me in there a few times back when I was a kid.…”

  A crooked man’s crooked house, Cassandra thought. And a giant puzzle box built by one of Elizabeth Goose’s heirs around the same time that the Treaty went into effect. It all added up, at least according to the peculiar calculations of Library work.

  She eyed Cole speculatively.

  “Just how well do you know this house?”

  “How well? he said boastfully. “Why I know that house like I know—”

  But before he could finish, thunder boomed directly overhead, despite the fact that the night sky had been clear only moments before. Stormy black clouds rolled in from nowhere and a howling wind invaded the parking lot as though intent on breaking up the conversation. Violent gusts swept the lot, hurling every nearby scrap of litter into the air. Fast-food wrappers, concert flyers, cigarette butts, and other debris flew about erratically. An empty beer can whizzed past Cole’s head, nearly winging him. Cassandra batted away a flapping sheet of newspaper that kept trying to wrap itself around her head, even as she assumed that the grimy paper was the least of their problems. The odds against this sudden change in the weather being a natural occurrence were too small to bother calculating. She knew magic when it wailed in her ears.

  When the wind blows …

  “Déjà voodoo!” Cole said, reaching the same conclusion. “I’ve bounced to this beat before!” The convertible began to rock from side to side. Cassandra felt the hostile wind tugging on her, trying to tear her away from Cole and the car.

  “Buckle in!” she shouted over the gale, securing her seat belt and shoulder strap in hopes of foiling the wind long enough for them to get away. “And drive!”

  “You know it!” Cole buckled in and fired up the convertible. A flying beer bottle crashed into a headlight with great force, shattering both itself and the light. “Time to ditch this party!”

  Cassandra searched the sky, watching out for Mother Goose, but the churning black clouds could have hidden an entire flock of giant geese and ganders. Or maybe Mother Goose was wielding her magic by long distance instead?

  Splat!

  A ridiculously large bird dropping, as in at least a gallon’s worth, hit the windshield. Greenish-white glop smeared all over the glass.

  Or not so long distance, Cassandra thought.

  Cole gaped at his grossly defiled windshield. “You have gotta be kidding me!”

  “Just drive!” she yelled. “Hit the gas!”

  “But my windshield’s all messed up! I can barely see where I’m going!”

  “You’re just going to have to make do! Get going!”

  More king-sized droppings fell from the clouds, splattering all around the convertible and despoiling the other cars in the lot. There were going to be a lot of upset drivers when the club let out, but Cassandra couldn’t worry about that. The car peeled out of the parking lot, its windshield wipers getting a workout. Cassandra hoped the car was as fast as it looked. They needed to get away from Mother Goose and get to the Puzzle House in time to find the lost pages.

  Preferably without being pooped on.

&
nbsp; 10

  Oregon

  “What’s this?” Baird asked.

  Jenkins had plopped an old color photograph onto her desk at the Annex, where she had been attempting fruitlessly to contact Flynn or at least track down some hint as to his current whereabouts. Texts, e-mails, and social media had proven a bust, while his appointment book and personal planner hadn’t yielded any actionable intel either. She knew when his dental appointment was, but not what had led him to Mother Goose’s Garden in the first place—and where he had ended up afterward.

  “A souvenir? A mystery? A clue?” He stood solemnly before the desk, offering little in the way of answers. “Your guess is as good as mine, Colonel.”

  Baird inspected the photo, which appeared to have been taken at Mother Goose’s Magic Gardens back in its heyday. A mop-headed young boy, no older than seven or eight, smiled and waved at the camera as he posed in front of Humpty Dumpy, who was in much better condition than it had been when Baird had visited the park only hours ago. Humpty’s fresh paint job was not yet faded or peeling. The lawn and gardens in the background looked neatly trimmed, not overgrown and infested with weeds. A sunny blue sky provided a fine day for a carefree family outing.

  A vacation photo from days gone by?

  Probably, Baird assumed. She had stumbled onto plenty of such photos online while researching the defunct theme park. “Where did you find this?”

  “In a dusty file folder,” he said, “where the Library’s copy of the Mother Goose Treaty should have been.” He brushed some lint from his sleeve. “I thought it best to consult the original document, but when I finally unearthed the correct folder, which required a certain degree of excavation, all it contained was this lone memento.”

  She squinted at the photo. “Well, this certainly doesn’t look like it was taken in 1918 when the Treaty was drafted.” The boy in the photo, she noted, was wearing standard kid attire: a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. His face struck her as vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t quite place it. “Any idea who the kid is?”

  “I don’t believe so,” Jenkins said. “I thought at first that I knew him from somewhere, but I could very well be mistaken. I avoid children on principle, due to their general immaturity and lack of decorum, yet I’ve encountered enough of them over the years that their raw, unfinished faces tend to blur in my memory.” A hint of melancholy entered his voice, if only for a moment. “Aside from that brat Mordred, that is. Now there was a holy terror, even as a child.…”

  It occurred to Baird to wonder if Jenkins had ever been a father and, if so, how many children of his own he might have outlived over the course of his ageless existence. She couldn’t think of a polite way to ask, however, that wouldn’t risk reopening old wounds and it was none of her business anyway.

  Plus, there are more pressing questions facing us at the moment, she thought. “So where is the actual Treaty?”

  “I am at a loss to explain its absence,” he admitted. “Mind you, given the unusual turbulence of the last few years, with the Library being lost, then found, then losing its memory, then regaining its faculties, it’s entirely possible that the document is simply misfiled.”

  “At the same time that we’ve got a real-life Mother Goose up to no good?” Baird didn’t buy it and she doubted Jenkins did, either. “You don’t really believe that for a minute, do you?”

  “No,” he said dourly. “I do not.”

  “Great,” she said. “Just what we needed: another mystery.”

  Rising from her desk, she paced restlessly around the Annex as she considered her next move. She trusted her Librarians to handle themselves in the field, but she was not content to hold down the fort at the Library during this crisis. That was Jenkins’s job.

  “I feel like I ought to head out to assist one of the others,” she said to Jenkins, “but which one? Stone? Ezekiel? Cassandra? Or should I be out searching for Flynn? Hard to say who might need backup … or where ‘Mother Goose’ could pop up next.”

  “Indeed.” Jenkins began to straighten up the office, perhaps just to keep busy. “Might I suggest that—”

  A blaring siren cut him off before he could finish. Baird looked up in alarm, a jolt of adrenaline priming her for action. The siren was a new security measure they’d installed after the Library had been infiltrated one too many times in the last few years. Prospero, Moriarty, the Queen of Hearts, and Frankenstein’s monster had been the last straws as far as she’d been concerned.

  “Jenkins,” she began.

  “On top of it, Colonel.”

  Jenkins clapped loudly to silence the piercing siren. Crossing the room, he yanked away the curtain veiling a magic mirror capable of monitoring assorted locations throughout the Library. Instead of his reflection, the image in the standing wood-framed mirror reflected a large chamber furnished with multiple bookcases, tables, and antique desk lamps: the very iconic image of a library. A sepia tone tinged the vision, which was the enchanted equivalent of a closed-circuit TV transmission. Baird had never quite figured out why they couldn’t just install some nonmagic security cameras, but Jenkins could be quite set in his ways sometimes. And, in any event, that was a debate for another day. For now, the magic mirror had news for them.

  “The disturbance appears to be in the main Reading Room,” he reported, surveying the scene. Fallen books and a toppled lamp, strewn across the floor of the Reading Room, suggested that the siren was no false alarm. “Again,” he added dryly. “We may need to consider charging admission.”

  Baird joined him before the mirror. “Mother Goose?”

  “A goose,” he replied “but not that goose.”

  A large white goose flapped across the silvered glass, flying wildly back and forth around the Reading Room as though searching for the best way out of the spacious chamber. The magic mirror did not provide audio, so Baird could not hear the goose honking, but she could easily imagine the racket the frenzied bird was making. Peering at the screen, it took her a moment to identify the out-of-place avian.

  “Is that—?”

  “The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs,” Jenkins confirmed, nodding, “which, according to the old nursery rhyme, once belonged to Mother Goose and her son Jack.” He cited the relevant passage from memory:

  Jack found one fine morning,

  As I have been told,

  His goose had laid him

  An egg of pure gold.

  Baird watched the fabled goose; the bird had been in the Library’s custody for as long as she’d been a Guardian, but had always behaved itself before. “Never heard that one,” she admitted.

  “It’s like the national anthem,” Jenkins said. “Everybody knows the first part, but the rest…?” He shrugged as though there was nothing to be done about such a lamentable gap in the general public’s knowledge. “In any event, I surmise that this recent spike in Mother Goose magic has agitated our goose, which may be frantic to return to its original mistress.”

  “Or her gander,” Baird said.

  “Also a possibility,” Jenkins conceded. “She doesn’t get out much.”

  Ordinarily, the goose resided placidly in its pen elsewhere in the Library, but something certainly had the goose riled up, as though it had been, well, goosed. Baird winced as the berserk bird knocked over another vintage banker’s lamp in its wild flight about the Reading Room. The lamp crashed to the carpeted floor.

  “Great,” Baird said sarcastically. “As if we don’t already have enough on our plate right now.”

  “Multitasking is often a prerequisite when it comes to the Library,” Jenkins said. “Don’t get me started on the turn of the millennium. Having to deal with Y2K, the Seventh Awakening of the Marsupial Lords, and the Omega Comet made for some very long days, believe me.” He stepped away from the mirror and started toward one of the doors leading deeper into the Library. “Step lively, Colonel, it seems we have a rogue goose to round up.”

  Baird questioned his priorities. “Do we really need to deal wi
th that now? Shouldn’t we be concentrating on Mother Goose instead of a runaway bird?”

  “You may be underestimating the severity of this situation, Colonel.” Jenkins paused in the doorway to expound. “We cannot risk that goose escaping the Library, not with its propensity for laying golden eggs. Not only does this particular bird pose a major threat to the stability of the gold standard, and ergo to the entire world economy, but magic gold in itself has an unfortunate tendency to provoke bloodshed, betrayal, and even warfare out in the world. Just ask Wagner … or Tolkien.”

  My precious, Baird thought. “I get the picture.”

  “In addition,” he said, ticking off his points on his fingers, “a loose goose running amuck throughout the Library is a potentially explosive situation, given that it might well disturb far more dangerous relics, creating yet more chaos and conceivably setting off a chain reaction of escalating disasters … not unlike that time Maxwell’s Demon escaped the Theoretical Bestiary, got drunk on the literal Grapes of Wrath, and nearly opened Pandora’s Box.” His somber tone hinted at the most dire of consequences. “Moreover, I for one have no desire to have to clean goose droppings off the Ark of the Covenant or the actual Mona Lisa.”

  “Enough,” Baird said. “You made your case. Let’s get that goose.”

  Sorry, gang, she mentally apologized to her Librarians. Looks like you’re on your own, while Jenkins and I go on a wild goose chase … literally.

  *   *   *

  Jenkins locked the interior entrance to the Annex behind them, to help ensure that the goose did not escape out into the wild. Baird let Jenkins lead the way to the Reading Room, where the goose had been last spotted. She was starting to know her way around the main sections of the Library, more or less, but Jenkins probably knew its byzantine byways, shortcuts, and subsections better than anyone else on Earth, including Flynn, so Baird was more than willing to let him take point. The sooner they caught up with the misbehaving bird, the better.

  “So does the rhyme say anything about how to catch this goose?” she asked him as they hustled down long hallways lined with bookshelves and display cases. “Anything useful, I mean.”