Whoever had packed the bin had put the books inside carefully, arranging them in two layers with the heavier volumes on the bottom. All of the books were hard covers, although some were bound in leather and others in cloth-covered end boards. When I crouched down beside the bin, I could still read some of the titles and authors’ names where they had been embossed or stamped on the spines.
“Pagan Rituals of the Fourteenth Century,” I murmured. “Alchemists of France. Medieval Manifestations.” After I inspected the rest but found nothing about vampires, I sat back on my heels. “Of course How to Cure Vampirism wouldn’t be in the first one.”
“No one before you has ever wished to cure us.”
I swung around and nearly fell over, but Jesse caught me and helped me to my feet. “How did you get in here?”
His mouth curved as he tucked a stray piece of hair behind my ear. “I know I should have waited, but I couldn’t. Not knowing you were so close.”
I couldn’t help slipping my arms around him and resting my cheek against his heart. “Where did you tell your parents you were going?”
“Fishing on the lake. They believe it’s my newest hobby.” He kissed the top of my head before he drew me out of the storeroom. “Show me what you’re doing.”
I couldn’t take him out into the front of the shop, where anyone walking past would see us together, but I took him into the office, and turned on the computer as I described what I’d accomplished so far.
“I’ve got to enter some numbers into the inventory program, but after that we can start looking through Julian Hargraves’s books.” I frowned as he sat down in Mrs. Frost’s chair. “What are you doing?”
“If I help you, we’ll have more time to look through the collection.” He opened the inventory program, picked up the clipboard with my tally sheets and, after glancing over both, began entering numbers.
I almost protested, until I saw his fingers blur over the number pad on the keyboard. “Vampire show-off.”
“Jealous mortal.” A minute later he finished and handed the clipboard back to me as he stood. “Come and check, I know you want to.”
I came around the desk and compared the tally sheets to the figures he’d put into the program. They matched perfectly, of course. “The next time I get ten pages of calculus homework, I’m making you do it.”
“You’ll never learn anything that way,” he chided. His smile faded as he looked at me. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” I made a face. “It’s just … Trick always says the same thing.” I ducked my head. “He loves me, you know.”
Jesse nodded slowly.
“And I hate him,” I said flatly. “All this pretending, and scheming, and sneaking around behind his back, everything we have to go through just to have a little time together. It’s not right. You don’t do this to someone you love.”
Jesse held out his hand. “Take a walk with me. Only for a few minutes,” he added.
I scowled. “We can’t go anywhere. Someone might see us together.”
“Not if we go the way I came in.” His eyes gleamed. “Come and I’ll show you another of our secrets.”
Jesse led me to the shop’s back door, but instead of opening it he bent down and pressed his fingers against what looked a knot in the hardwood floor panel. The knot sank about an inch, and then he pressed two more, which did the same. As the third sank down, a four-foot square section of the floor popped up. He caught one side and pulled it up like a hatch, revealing a short ladder that led down into darkness.
“Get out of town.” I could hardly believe my eyes. “You have a secret tunnel under the bookstore?”
“The bookstore, and almost every other building in Lost Lake. My parents had our people install them for us after we settled here. We stopped using them after we moved to the island. Or, at least, my parents did.” He climbed halfway down the ladder, and then glanced up at me. “It’s all right, don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not.” As I climbed down onto the ladder, I felt as if I’d stepped into my favorite Nancy Drew novel, though. “How many more secrets do you have?”
“Only a few.”
Jesse waited at the bottom of the ladder, and helped me down as I reached it. We stood in what appeared to be an empty cellar made of brick, although there were no windows and only three old oak doors, one set in the center of each wall. When he climbed back up to close the hatch, the darkness swallowed us for a moment, and then eerie blue lights flickered on.
“The lights switch off when any entrance to the passages is opened,” he explained as he climbed back down. “James just installed them for me, in the event I was caught away from the island again before sunrise.”
Now the lack of windows made sense. “These are vaults to protect you from sunlight.”
“Vaults, storage rooms, tunnels.” He gestured toward the door across from us. “I use that one to go to James’s house. It leads up into his den.”
“I don’t want to go there,” I assured him.
“That would probably be best.” He took my arm to guide me through the door on the right, which opened into a tall, narrow brick passage.
The sound of dripping water and some puddles on the floor beneath our feet made me frown. “Is this place leaking?”
“The water table is high, but James runs pumps to keep most of it out,” he said, and then added, “The only time the passages have flooded was in 2004.”
“That was when the four hurricanes hit Florida, I remember.” At the time I’d only been eight years old, but my school had collected bottled water and canned goods to send to the victims. “What did you and your parents do?”
“We stayed on the island during the storms, and then came to town at night to help James clear the roads. Prince and I spent weeks herding cattle that had strayed through broken fences.” At the end of the passage he opened another old door, but stopped me from walking through it. “This may seem somewhat bizarre to you.”
I lifted my brows. “More bizarre than secret hatches, hidden passages and underground vaults?”
“Perhaps.”
He actually seemed worried. “Jesse, you don’t have to hide anything. You can trust me with any secret.”
He nodded, and then pushed the door open wider.
This vault was not empty like the one under the bookstore, but had been made into a real room. Shelves of books and magazines flanked an enormous antique roll-top desk, which held old-fashioned quill pens and an inkwell. On the top ledge of the desk two bronze bookends shaped like rearing horses held a long row of leather-bound books.
On the walls hung neatly framed photographs in different sizes, each showing different shots of Lost Lake, old houses and various spots around the town. All of them had been taken at night, I noticed, and were quite beautiful. Another, more modern desk took up another corner, and this one held a laptop and a small printer, and over that hung a curio cabinet filled with small birds hand-carved from different woods. Beside one of the bookcases stood a painter’s easel and a half dozen canvases faced toward the wall.
I walked over to the paintings, but stopped as I reached for one and looked back at him. “May I?” When he nodded, I turned it over.
The painting was a portrait of Sarah and Paul Raven riding two white horses. Jesse’s parents both wore what I recognized as nineteenth-century circus costumes. Behind them I saw a crowd of people in the same period clothing smiling and applauding.
There was only one person in town who could have seen Jesse’s parents performing as the Ravenovs. “You painted this.”
“I did, last summer.” He went to the laptop, booting it up as he said, “I’ve been searching through records from the Civil War to see if I could identify the soldier who built the lake cabin.” He opened a file, which displayed a page filled with the name Jacob along with different surnames. “These are all of the men named Jacob who fought for the Confederacy and survived the war. A total of one hundred twenty-two.”
I scanned the list. “Jacob was a popular name.” I thought for a minute. “Wouldn’t he have taken out a claim or a deed or something on the land before he built the cabin?”
“My parents filed the first recorded deeds when they bought the land,” Jesse said. “Before we came here, the area was regarded as unsettled wilderness, and property of the state.”
“Maybe he was a deserter, and was hiding out here.” It was a wild guess, but it also made sense. My gaze strayed back to the curio cabinet. “Where did you get these?”
“The birds? I carved them.” He walked over to the roll-top desk. “I wrote these journals.” He gestured at the photographs. “I took these as well.”
“You could open a one-guy art gallery,” I said, but he didn’t smile at the joke. “Why do you keep your art down here instead of on the island?”
“My father dislikes clutter.”
He sounded so uncomfortable I suspected there was a lot more to it than that. Maybe he’s shy about showing anyone what he does, I thought, and went to open the door next to the stack of canvases, but found it locked. “What’s in here?”
“It’s just a storage room.”
I was tempted to ask him to show me what was inside, but I’d been away from the shop long enough. “We’d better go back.”
Seven
As soon as we made it back to the book shop I heard the phone in Mrs. Frost’s office ringing, which meant she was probably calling to check on me.
Guilt made me fumble the receiver before I answered with a breathless, “Nibbles and Books, Catlyn speaking.”
“This is the second time I’ve called,” Trick said. “Where have you been?”
“I was, um, in the restroom.” As Jesse came in I held a finger to my lips. “What’s wrong?”