Book of Days_ A Novel - James L. Rubart [104]
Cameron nodded. "Exactly."
There was no point in waiting. He curled his fingers around the doorknob, let its coolness seep into his damp palm, and pushed. It didn't budge. A little harder and it creaked open.
He stepped through and shone his flashlight around the room. It was large, maybe twenty by twenty feet. The room was thick with the smell of old musty papers. In one corner stood a small lamp that looked like it was made in the 1930s. A broken stool lay in the middle of the room. Two old oak desks rested next to the stool.
Nothing else was in the room.
Cameron leaned up against the wall and slid down to the floor like sap oozing down a pine tree. Why did Stone do it? Why the clues? Why would he put this whole charade together only to have the end of the puzzle result in nothing?
Cameron slammed his fist into the wall behind him.
He'd believed in the book because he had to believe; in his dad's and Jessie's God, in sometime beyond this life. If he didn't, what kind of future was left for him?
He'd had to believe he could answer his dad's final request, find his memories of Jessie, and be cured of this insidious disease.
Cameron glanced around the room. So what would he do now? He banished the question from his mind. "Are you going to say I told you so?"
"I'm sorry." Ann sat beside him.
"At least I know, and it won't haunt me the rest of my life, wondering what I might have found."
They sat in silence for three or four minutes. Then Ann patted his leg. "Are you ready to go, or do you want to sit here a little longer? I doubt we're in any danger of being caught if we haven't been already, but still, I wouldn't want to be found down here."
"You're right; we should go."
But Cameron didn't want to go. He wanted to stay and watch God's Book of Days magically appear before his eyes. He wanted to remember every moment he'd spent with Jessie and relive days with his dad—to bathe in the glory moments they'd had together.
He wanted to remember the important things Jessie had told him before she died that pounded at the back of his mind but refused to take shape any longer.
He needed to remember them. They were tied into the things going on in Three Peaks right now. Things somehow he knew he needed to know but couldn't dredge up no matter how hard he willed himself to do so.
Suddenly Ann stood. "I can't believe I almost missed it."
"Missed what?"
"I don't know what I was thinking." She paced and pressed her fingers against her temples. "Yes, yes, of course." She closed her eyes. "I can see it."
"Talk to me."
She whirled to face him. "This is the outer room, not the inner."
"I'm not following."
"There's another room in this basement. A big room."
"There's a slight problem with that." Cameron swung his flashlight around the room in a slow arc. "There's no door. No opening. No curtain for the wizard to emerge from behind."
"There has to be."
"There isn't."
Ann pulled a folder from her backpack. "Take a look at this." She knelt down and spread a two-by-one-foot piece of paper on the floor. "Did I tell you I have a photographic memory?"
Cameron hesitated. Did she? "I don't think so."
"It doesn't always work for remembering conversations or places I've been or people I've met, but with photos and papers I've seen and things I've read, I retain 90 to 95 percent of what I see."
"So?"
"Look." She pointed to the paper she'd smoothed out on the dust-choked floor.
"After we got kicked out of the courthouse, I sketched out the blueprints of this building." Ann tapped the paper. "This is where we are now. If I'm right, there has to be another room on the other side of that wall."
"You didn't think to mention your photographic memory till now?"
"Did we need it till now?"
He leaned forward and shined his flashlight inches from Ann's paper. Her simple line drawing definitely showed a room on the opposite side of where they knelt.
Moving slowly along the north wall, Ann rapped her knuckles against the wall every few feet. After Cameron figured out what she was doing,