Polly Shulman - The Grimm Legacy

“I would say that’s the most important lesson of the day,” said Ms. Callender, folding up the cloth and putting it back in the chest. “Not only are the objects here extremely dangerous, but so is the knowledge of them.”

“That’s right,” said Doc. “Remember, Elizabeth: tell no one about the magic here. At best they won’t believe you. At worst, they will.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell a soul. But lots of people must know about the magic. You do, and now I do. And I’ve seen people take objects out of the Grimm Collection when I was up in the Main Exam Room. Who are they? Do they know about the magic?”

“Yes,” said Doc. “There’s a far-flung, exclusive community of people like us—now, people like you. People who recognize magic and wield it.”

“Do they borrow things from the collection? Magical items?”

“Yes, members of the community can earn borrowing privileges.”

“Even the pages?” Maybe I would be allowed to borrow magical items myself!

“Some of them.”

“Wow!” Imagine having a magic cloth that could change things to silver in your own home! Or a cloak of invisibility. “Can I take things out too?”

“Eventually, I hope. But that’s another step for another day. Give yourself a chance to digest what you’ve learned first.”

“All right,” I said. Thinking about everything that could go wrong, I wasn’t sure I was ready for that kind of responsibility, anyway.

“Aren’t you going to tell her about . . . you know?” said Ms. Callender.

“The thefts. Yes.” Doc turned to me. “Elizabeth, unfortunately there have been some thefts of Grimm objects recently. And now we’ve been hearing about items that sound like ours turning up on the open market or in private collections.”

“Somebody’s robbing the collection?” I said. “That’s terrible!”

“It is,” said Doc. “And they seem to be replacing the stolen items with fakes—some of them, anyway.”

“Oh, no!” I said. Fakes, I thought, like the unmagical boots Marc had me trade the real ones for! Was Marc . . . ? I shuddered away from the thought. “But what can I do?”

“We need trustworthy eyes down here. We need to be able to rely on everyone who’s working here. If you see anything out of place, please let us know.”

“Of course I will,” I said. “And how do you decide which pages to give the test to?”

“It’s a combination of things. Watching how you do your work in the repository. Recommendations from former pages and other members of our community, like Stan Mauskopf.”

“Although the page we had to fire recently did have a recommendation from Wallace Stone, one of our patrons,” put in Ms. Callender.

“I don’t want to blame Wallace,” said Doc. “He was devastated when I told him we had to fire Zandra. He took it hard. He’s one of our most generous donors.”

“What did Zandra do?” I asked.

“Besides spreading chaos, we caught her substituting a new vase for a valuable old one,” said Doc.

“A magic vase?”

“No, just a Ming dynasty vase on Stack 7. But that’s quite bad enough,” said Ms. Callender.

“Wallace Stone felt so bad about the whole thing that he donated a group of related porcelain to the repository. He’s an art and antiques dealer, and he’s done a great job helping us round out our collections,” said Doc. “He was especially generous after the Zandra incident. I told him we didn’t blame him, but he still wanted to make amends.”

“So Zandra’s gone now and things are still disappearing,” I said. “She couldn’t still be stealing, could she?”

“No, I don’t think so. But it’s unlikely she was working alone. A kid like Zandra wouldn’t have the resources to dispose of a Ming vase. Whoever was behind it must have found some other way in—into the Grimm Collection, which is even worse.”

“Anjali said there was another page who vanished. What happened to her?” I asked.

“Mona Chen. She was one of our best workers,” Doc said. “She passed all the tests with flying colors, and she had some really good ideas about how to keep the Grimm Collection call slips safer. We’re trying to locate her.”

“Where do you think she went? Did she return the key?”

“Yes,” said Ms. Callender. “She dropped it off with Lucy Minnian. She said her family was moving, but she didn’t say where, and it’s surprising not to hear from her at all. Most of our alumni, especially Special Collection pages, keep in touch.”

“Do you think she’s okay?”

“I hope so,” said Ms. Callender. “We’re putting out the word and hoping someone in the community will hear from her soon.”

“What do you mean, ‘the community’?”

“We’re a close group,” explained Dr. Rust. “Most of us librarians are alumni—former pages—and other alumni end up working in related areas. In other repositories, or academia, or research. Most of us”—Doc waved a hand at the shelves—“most people don’t want to give up their connection to all this.”

I could certainly understand that. And I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize my chance of being part of it. But all this talk of disappearing objects in this unnerving room was freaking me out, given Marc’s—what to call it?— irregularity with those boots. Marc’s irregularity, and the way I’d helped him.

“Well, Elizabeth, we are happy to have you here,” Doc said. “And please remember to keep your eyes open and let me know if you notice anything suspicious. Can you do that?”

I swallowed. “I’ll try.”

“Thank you. And congratulations on your excellent test results.”

“Yes, congratulations again, Elizabeth,” echoed Ms. Callender. “Now let’s get you upstairs to give Marc a hand in Preservation.”

As we walked past the wall of pictures, I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look. It was my own reflection in the Snow White mirror.

I didn’t move my hands, but my reflection in the mirror lifted her finger to her lips, gave me a wicked smile, and shut her right eye in a wink.

The Preservation Room was a long, airy attic, lit by a northern skylight. It was bright and chilly; drafts seeped around the edges of the window, and high white clouds flew by above. Objects from the stacks lay in heaps and clusters, neatly labeled. It was the sort of place where you could imagine the thirteenth fairy with her poison spindle, lying in wait for Sleeping Beauty.

Marc looked up when I came in. “Thanks, Elizabeth,” he said seriously, meeting my eye. “You really had my back. Sorry you got stuck down there.”

“That’s okay,” I said—and it was. Being thanked by Marc Merritt was worth any number of conversations with rude mirrors and dismal thoughts about the sanitary uses of witches’ cauldrons. And being let in on the secret of this magical place was worth more than all of it combined. “If you’d only waited an hour or two,” I said proudly, “I could have gone in there on my own—Doc just gave me the key.”

“Really? That’s awesome! Congratulations, Elizabeth! Welcome to the inner circle.” He held out his hand.

He had a beautiful, firm handshake.

“Listen, though,” I began, then hesitated. Should I say something about how uncomfortable I felt helping him break the rules? I didn’t want to jeopardize my friendship with Marc Merritt, no less. It wasn’t like I had friends to spare. But even before I’d been given the key, I’d felt a kinship to this place. Mr. Mauskopf and Doc trusted me, and I felt like I owed them—not just them, but the repository. Now that I’d seen the magic in the Grimm Collection and been entrusted with the key, I felt I owed it to this magical place to take the best care I could of it.