Oh, because someone might get hurt on the broken glass, and the cans don’t matter, Finn told himself. And the food in the cans won’t start rotting and stinking up the basement, like the food from the broken jars would.
He liked that it made sense, what the cops had done.
Then he saw a rod made of metal—or maybe stone—propped against the broken shelves.
“Wait—isn’t that the lever?” he asked Chess and Emma, pointing toward the back wall and the rod. “It’s not missing. The cops just moved it! Maybe because they thought they needed to hold up the shelves?”
“You’re right!” Emma hugged Finn, then raced toward the lever. She picked her way through the piles of upended cans as though they were an obstacle course in gym class. She grabbed the lever. Then, instantly, she dropped it back on the floor. She clutched her face in her hands.
“No, we’re wrong!” she moaned. “That wasn’t propping up anything, and the cops wouldn’t have moved it. So why is it here instead of there?” She pointed to the outline in dust on the floor. “What if it was somebody who knows about the other world who moved it?”
The color drained from her face. She dropped to her knees in the mess of overturned cans. Finn hoped that whoever cleaned up the broken glass had done a really, really good job.
“Oh no, oh no,” Emma groaned. “What if the person who moved it . . . was from the other world?”
Eight
Emma
Sometimes ideas came to Emma so fast that they crashed into each other, like cars whose drivers weren’t paying attention.
“We could have looked for fingerprints—or the cops could, if we wanted their help—but I probably just messed that up!” she wailed. “I touched it!”
Chess and Finn stared at her as if they couldn’t catch up.
“How do you know it wasn’t the cops who moved that?” Finn asked.
“Logic,” Emma said. “Why would they pick up the lever but leave all the fallen cans in place? Remember how the security guard said they’re treating this like a crime scene? The cops didn’t move anything they didn’t have to move. And . . . you can tell the lever lay right there on the floor until just recently. Nobody moved that lever for at least a week. Because there’s the outline of dust around the place where we left it.”
“The dust could give us other clues,” Chess said. “Whoever moved the lever might have left footprints. We should look for footprints.”
But Chess, Finn, and Emma—mostly Emma—had already walked around too much in the secret room. If there’d been footprints left behind by whoever moved the lever, the kids had destroyed those, too.
“Hey, kids! Hurry up and let’s go get dinner! Aren’t you starving?” Emma heard Mr. Mayhew yell from above.
“Quick, Finn,” Emma said, spinning back toward her little brother. “Take off your shirt.”
“What?” Finn protested.
“So we have something to wrap the lever in, so we don’t mess up any fingerprints that are still on it,” Emma said. “And so Mr. Mayhew doesn’t see what we carry out of here. We can say you got that shirt dirty, and you need another one from your room.”
“Fine,” Finn said. He yanked his shirt over his head and tossed it to Emma. Then he tugged Chess’s arm. “Come on, Chess. Come with me to get a shirt upstairs.”
You shouldn’t need Chess’s help getting a shirt from your own room, Emma wanted to complain to Finn. But she caught a glimpse of his pale, pinched face, the usual dimples in his cheeks totally gone. He was scared just of walking upstairs to his own room.
Finn and Chess ducked back through the secret door, Chess calling politely up the stairs to Mr. Mayhew, “We’re almost ready! We just need one more thing. . . .”
And then Emma was alone. Alone in the secret room that had once been capable of turning into a secret tunnel—alone in the room where they’d lost Ms. Morales. Emma shivered.
“Stop that,” she said aloud. “Focus.”
She picked up Finn’s bright yellow T-shirt from the pile of cans where it had landed. She shook out the wrinkles, and pulled the shirt over her hand like a glove. Then she picked up the lever. She started to fold Finn’s shirt around the lever, but then she stopped.
What if I try the lever in a different room of our house? she wondered. Not to actually go to the other world, not right now. But just to see if my theory’s correct, to see if it can open anything in another place. . . .
Carrying the partially wrapped lever in one hand, she ducked out of the secret room, then retreated from the Boring Room as well. She stepped over the pile of dropped Hot Wheels cars and came to a halt beside Rocket’s kitty litter pan. No one had bothered cleaning the litter two weeks ago, the last time they were in the house, so it was still clumpy and nasty. Kitty litter was the most ordinary thing in the world; in a weird way, Emma felt safer standing next to Rocket’s kitty litter than anywhere else in the basement.
I could try this wall, see if the lever can connect here and turn in either direction, Emma told herself. Maybe this is far enough away from the ruined spot. If it works, I’d have such good news to tell the others. . . .
Emma stood staring at the wall, gripping the lever. She thought about how scared she’d been, each trip she’d made from the secret room to the other world. She thought about how terrified she’d been just moments earlier, when the security guard slammed her and Chess to the ground.
Emma made no move to touch the lever to the wall. She couldn’t. Not while she was alone.
I’m a coward, too, she thought sadly. I’m just as frightened as Finn.
Nine
Chess
Dinner lasted forever. Chess tried to pay attention to Mr. Mayhew’s fake happy chatter at the Rusty Barrel; he tried not to leave it entirely to Finn and Natalie to hold up the conversation. But the Rusty Barrel was one of those restaurants with loud music and flashing lights and people screaming constantly. Just about every time Chess tried to say something, his voice was drowned out by the roving band of waitstaff clapping and shouting in another part of the restaurant, “Happy, happy birthday! It’s your special day. . . .”
Even when his life was normal, Chess had hated places like the Rusty Barrel.
Tonight was so much worse. Chess felt like he had to cover for Emma sitting in almost trance-like silence, her dark eyes unfocused, her jittery fingers tapping the table. For all Chess knew, she might be spelling Morse code versions of secrets she was figuring out—what was Morse code for The sequined pillow revealed all? But none of her brilliant deductions would do any good if Mr. Mayhew decided Emma was so far gone she needed medical attention and whisked her away.
So in addition to having to remember to eat his own chicken sandwich, carrots, and fruit, he had to keep nudging Emma to remind her to dip her spoon into her macaroni-and-cheese-and-broccoli mix and bring the spoon up to her mouth. Sometimes he even had to nudge her to remind her to chew and swallow.
But finally, after an eternity, dinner ended and Mr. Mayhew paid the bill and they all piled back into his car. Chess, Emma, and Finn had to keep their feet up off the floor of the car to avoid stepping on the lever wrapped in Finn’s T-shirt. So on top of everything else, Chess’s legs ached from being curled up like a pretzel all the way back.