The Secret Keepers Read online

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself, ladybug,” said Jack. “Start with the telling.”

  Reuben shrugged. “You’re the storyteller, Penny.”

  “Oh, goody, a story,” Jack said. “I hope it’s scary.”

  By the time Penny had told Jack everything, he was up and pacing, his eyes intent on her face. Every now and then he would shoot a fierce glance at Reuben, who would have been utterly unnerved by the intensity of these glances if he hadn’t detected behind them a grudging respect. Reuben sensed that Jack’s opinion of him had risen considerably when he’d insisted Jack make his promise to Penny. That an unknown little boy could so quickly figure out the key to his heart had surely impressed him. And the tale Penny told (which made Reuben sound far braver than he actually felt) could only have reinforced Jack’s opinion of him.

  Reuben and Penny were sitting on the car’s bumper now. Jack had switched off the headlights, and there was just enough light from the station house and from a streetlamp beyond the hedge for them to make out one another’s faces in the gloom. All their expressions were serious. It was still raining softly, but the children in their raincoats and Jack in his intensity paid no attention. They might have been gathered around a fireplace, for all they seemed to care.

  “So this guy—what did you call him?”

  “The Smoke.”

  “The Smoke. He’s used a watch like yours to make the city into his own private kingdom.”

  “Right. The Counselor handles all his business for him, and the Directions bring him money from every neighborhood. And he has them always searching for any sign of the other watch.”

  Jack scowled. “But is this guy a hundred years old or what? How long has this been going on?”

  “As long as anyone can remember. At least that’s what my mom told me once.”

  “He wouldn’t have to be that old,” Penny pointed out. “There could have been someone before him, and The Smoke knocked him out of power.”

  “You mean knocked him out of life,” Jack said.

  Penny shuddered. “Maybe.”

  Jack looked down at Reuben, his hands on his hips. “This is a dangerous guy, kid. You’re really going after his watch? You’re going to waltz right into the dragon’s lair?”

  Reuben felt a shiver at Jack’s words. “I don’t like it,” he said quietly. “But yes.”

  Jack nodded. His lips were drawn tight. He squinted up into the sky. The rain had softened to a fine drizzle. There was a break now in the clouds to the north, revealing a patch of stars. To the south, where the city lay, all was darkness.

  “Fine,” Jack said, and cuffed Reuben’s head so hard it made his ears ring. “I’ll take you.” He moved toward the rear of the car.

  “Jack!” Penny cried reproachfully.

  “That hurt!” Reuben said, his eyes stinging.

  “Sorry,” Jack said, opening the trunk. “I meant it in a good way. Now turn your heads, little ones, because I’m very delicate and shy.” He began peeling off his wet clothes.

  Penny looked apologetically at Reuben, who was clutching his head. “Jack,” she said uncertainly, “did you just say you’re going to take us?”

  “Why not? Let’s get this all over with—that’s my thinking.”

  “Are you going to be naked?” said Reuben coldly. He felt resentful and confused about the cuff and wondered if they were being toyed with. “Because if so I think I’d rather walk.”

  “Lucky for you I keep extra clothes in the car,” said Jack, leaning out from behind the trunk. Sure enough, he was already pulling on a dry T-shirt, tugging it down over his muscular torso. “Also some money.”

  “You do?” Penny asked, sounding extremely puzzled. “First I find out you have a car, and now you’re telling me you keep supplies in it?” She let out an uneasy chuckle. “What, were you planning a getaway?”

  Jack gave her a long look and then a somewhat rueful smile. “Only every day, redbird. Only every single day.” He withdrew again, digging around in his trunk.

  “Oh,” Penny said in a small voice. And then, her voice faltering: “Oh, Jack. I should’ve realized. You’ve always wanted so badly to leave, but you never did. You could have, but you didn’t. You stayed because… because…”

  “Now, don’t go ascribing intentions,” Jack interrupted, slamming the trunk closed. He stepped into full view, now wearing dry blue jeans and combat boots, and jingled his keys. “Point is, we’re leaving. So get in the car, you two. Backseat.”

  He tossed Penny a towel, then climbed behind the steering wheel and started the engine. Its rumble was like the sound of earthquakes in movies. Deep, palpable vibrations you could feel in your feet. The sound was surprising. The car looked unremarkable from the outside, just a plain old black sedan in seemingly poor repair—but it clearly had a souped-up engine.

  “Penny,” Reuben murmured, catching her by the arm. “Is he telling the truth? You’re sure?”

  Penny wiped at her eyes. She nodded. “It’s good, right?”

  “I don’t know what to think. You’re upset.”

  “Oh, never mind that. That’s about something else. We’ll be much safer with Jack along.”

  Her brother gunned the engine, its seismic rumble revving to a lion’s roar.

  “Much safer,” Reuben muttered. “Right.” But Jack was revving the engine so loudly now that Penny didn’t hear him.

  They took off their backpacks and got into the backseat, stuffing the bags into the floorboard space. Pulling the door closed felt to Reuben like making some sort of final decision, and he sat for a moment gripping the handle. Then he slammed the door shut.

  Jack looked at him in the rearview mirror. “Hey,” he said, speaking up to be heard over the engine, “how did you manage to get the hatch open, anyway? That was one beast of a padlock on the chain.”

  Reuben started to reply. “I broke through one of the—wait, how did you know about that?” He hadn’t mentioned the lock and chain at all, only that there had been a hatch.

  “Jack Meyer!” Penny exclaimed. She lowered the towel she’d been using to dry her face. “You’ve been into the tunnels?”

  Her brother glanced back at her with raised eyebrows, as if to express amazement that she might ever have thought otherwise.

  Penny rolled her eyes. “Right. Of course you have. I’m surprised you didn’t go ahead and break through the hatch yourself.”

  “Don’t think I wasn’t tempted. But I do have my limits, you know.”

  “You could have fooled me,” Penny remarked.

  “Well, it’s true I don’t always know what they are,” Jack admitted. He switched on the headlights and glanced back again. “You both buckled in?”

  Penny and Reuben hurriedly fastened their seat belts. “Okay,” Penny said, “we’re—”

  The tires squealed like maniacal pigs, there was a smell of burned rubber, and the car bolted forward with a surge that slammed their heads back against the seat. Jack wrenched the wheel, throwing Penny up against Reuben—his mouth was suddenly full of her hair—and then they were out on the road, and this time it was Reuben being thrown up against Penny, who was trying to protest to her brother but whose words kept getting cut off with little involuntary shrieks of alarm. Then the car straightened out, and Reuben, clutching at the back of the seat in front of him, craned his neck to see out the windshield. Before he could figure out where in town they were, they were out of town altogether.

  Jack let out a bark of laughter, and Reuben wonderingly studied his expression in the rearview mirror. He was smiling—the first truly joyful smile Reuben had seen on his face—and despite the noise of the engine, Reuben could just hear him muttering to himself.

  “Invisible? The kid can turn invisible? Well, no wonder, Aunt Penelope! No wonder you thought it was such a big deal!” Jack shifted gears, and the car, already flying, lurched forward even faster. He banged the steering wheel with his fist.

  “Finally!” he cried, and Penny and Reuben jum
ped in their seats and looked at each other. The relief in Jack’s voice seemed somehow bigger than him, as if he’d been waiting for something to happen not only for his whole life but for the duration of all the generations that had come before it.

  “Finally,” Jack cried, “here we go!”

  Jack Meyer’s black sedan—the decrepit-looking little car whose engine and driver were not at all what Reuben had at first supposed—ripped like a rocket through the night. Reuben had stopped counting the seconds between mile markers; the results were too alarming. In fact, for the same reason, he had stopped trying to look out the rain-streaked windows altogether. It seemed as if they were driving through a storm, but whenever Jack slowed to take a hairpin curve in the road, the rain softened, only to batter the windshield again as he accelerated. It was the speed of the car making the raindrops hit so hard.

  “So the man on the phone,” Jack was saying, speaking up to be heard over the noise of the engine and the rain. “You’re sure he was the same man you saw on the train? You’re an expert on voices?”

  “I don’t have to be,” Reuben replied. “If it had happened to you, you’d know.”

  “It didn’t ‘happen to you.’ You called the number, right? The guy didn’t call you.”

  Penny said, “That isn’t what he meant, Jack, and you know it.”

  “So you wouldn’t have called the number?” Reuben challenged. “If it had been you?”

  Jack glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “Oh, I would have called the number. And in fact, I think we should call it again and find out what this guy knows. How does he know about the watch? Does he have any idea there are two of them? Does he know that The Smoke has one? We need some information here.”

  “I don’t think that man would tell us anything,” Reuben said. “Even if he did, I wouldn’t trust a word of it. He seemed—unstable. Not quite right. Everything about him scared me.”

  “He scares me, too, and I didn’t even see him,” Penny said. “Just your description of him is going to give me nightmares, I can tell.”

  “You two realize that it’s all scary people from here on out, right?” Jack downshifted to take a curve. “We don’t deal with the scary people, we don’t get anywhere.”

  The children were quiet for a minute, thinking about scary people. The windshield wipers rocked back and forth. To Reuben they seemed to be saying Don’t. Go. Don’t. Go. Don’t. Go.

  Penny broke the silence. “If The Smoke knows everything about everything, as you say, then he surely knows about this man on the phone. How could he not? After all these years, all those newspaper advertisements? So why does he leave the man alone? Why doesn’t The Smoke consider him a threat?”

  “Maybe because he isn’t a threat,” Jack said. “The Smoke isn’t worried about some crazy little guy in an old suit, spending all his money on classifieds. Come to think of it, The Smoke probably uses him. Keeps tabs on him. If the guy ever gets on the trail of the other watch, The Smoke will find out about it.”

  “So we definitely shouldn’t contact him,” Penny reflected. “It might tip off The Smoke.”

  “Or maybe we should contact him, give him false information, use it to our advantage. We can’t sit around waiting for The Smoke to figure things out. The kid says we have to act fast, right?”

  “His name is Reuben,” Penny reminded her brother. “And he’s sitting right here.”

  Reuben gave her an appreciative look. “Jack’s right, though. We need to find The Smoke right away. That means going to the man closest to him.”

  “You mean Cassius Faug,” Penny said. “The one they call the Counselor.”

  Reuben nodded.

  “And what do we say to this Counselor?” Jack wanted to know.

  “That’s the part we need to work on,” Reuben said.

  “Better work away, then,” Jack said. “We’ll be hitting New Umbra by dawn.”

  They tore on through the rainy night, their velocity rendering farm fields into backyard gardens, towns into villages. They had the road almost entirely to themselves. The few vehicles they encountered streaked past like shooting stars, nothing more than the headlights themselves, no time to discern the hurtling forms behind them. Only as they approached the outskirts of the city and traffic increased did Jack slow down at all, though if he was aware of the speed limit he gave no sign, swerving around the early-morning delivery trucks and work vehicles with subtle twitches of the wheel. He weaved through them with such alarming swiftness that they seemed not to be moving—just a scattering of vehicles parked at random on the highway leading into the city.

  One expects, with a large city, to be dazzled by its galaxies of artificial lights. The thousands upon thousands of lit windows in the skyscrapers, of traffic lights and streetlamps, of neon signs glowing in street after street. New Umbra, however, did not dazzle. It loomed. A mountainous darkness whose meager sprinkling of streetlights and illuminated office windows seemed only to emphasize the darkness itself. A deeply unnerving darkness.

  Reuben, who for most of the drive had hardly given a thought to his damp clothes, suddenly found them exceedingly uncomfortable. His seat made loud squeaking sounds when he shifted around in it, though, and he forced himself to be still.

  They rolled past a sign announcing the city limits. Jack eased up on the accelerator, and at a less conspicuous speed they entered a district of warehouses, train tracks, factories. Smokestacks sent up dark clouds of vapor and smoke. The sky was turning gray. The rain had stopped. By the loading docks of a warehouse, Reuben saw a security guard folding up a tattered umbrella.

  “Here we are, kid,” Jack said. “Home, sweet home.”

  Seeing the city like this for the first time, from the backseat of a car in the early-morning darkness, approaching it from an unfamiliar direction, Reuben was struck by how alien it seemed to him. Was New Umbra really his home? It didn’t feel like it. The city was just the place he’d been living his life. Home for him wasn’t so much a place as a person. His mom. The two of them thinking up dream houses, sharing a doughnut in a bakery, making each other laugh. The city was just a grim backdrop to that.

  “Are you okay?” Penny asked him.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” He must have looked pained, thinking about his mom, unaware that Penny was watching him. “I’d better be, hadn’t I?”

  “Maybe since you’re fine, you can tell me where I’m headed,” Jack said.

  “Not home,” Reuben said.

  They stopped to refuel at a gas station, where Penny and Reuben changed into dry clothes in the restrooms and Jack purchased a map. They all studied it together in the privacy of the car. Outside of the Lower Downs, Reuben didn’t know his way around the city except by subway. Jack, it turned out, knew the streets much better than he did. This came as a great surprise to Penny, who didn’t know that her brother had ever been there.

  “Oh, a few times,” Jack said, waving off her questions. “Not exactly happy ones. It isn’t my favorite place in the world.”

  “It isn’t anybody’s favorite place in the world,” Reuben said.

  “Except The Smoke,” said Jack. “That guy probably loves it to death.”

  Penny looked out the car window at the bleak city skyline. “I think that’s just what he’s done.”

  At dawn the streets and sidewalks of Middleton’s retail district were mostly empty. Water still trickled in the street gutters from the night’s rain. Here and there a lamp clicked on behind an upper-story apartment window, early risers getting their bleary start to the day. Like most of the street-level shop windows, Mrs. Genevieve’s was dark.

  At dawn the streets and sidewalks of Middleton’s retail district were mostly empty.

  Jack and Penny studied it from across the street. They looked in both directions. A couple of blocks away, a woman in a nurse’s uniform was climbing into a noisy old car that had just pulled up to the curb.

  “Bad spark plug,” Jack muttered.

  The car drove away. T
here was no one else in sight. Walking slowly, they crossed the street and rang the bell. After a few seconds they rang it again, then again.

  “You still with us, kid?” Jack said quietly.

  “I’m here,” Reuben said.

  “She isn’t answering.”

  “Give her a minute. She was probably in bed.”

  “Here she is,” Penny said with relief in her voice.

  Reuben felt relieved, too. Not only because they had nowhere else to go but also because he’d been having terrible misgivings about Mrs. Genevieve, worrying that The Smoke had discovered their connection. He actually smiled now to hear her irritated voice from behind the glass, telling Jack and Penny that the shop was closed.

  “Please, Mrs. Genevieve,” pleaded Penny. “It’s an emergency.”

  “What? What did you say?”

  “We have a rush job on a watch,” Jack said dryly.

  Mrs. Genevieve was already opening the door. She stepped aside to let them enter, then uttered a faint, confused sound as Reuben swept in behind them. Her mind must have produced some mundane explanation for the odd feeling she’d just experienced (which was only natural, for no one ever thinks an invisible person has just walked by), and she closed the door and locked it, saying, “What is this that you said? An emergency? Who are you? How is it that you know my name?”

  “Are you alone, Mrs. Genevieve?” Penny asked. “No one else is here?”

  “Why do you ask? What’s wrong, child?”

  “Please just answer that question,” Jack said, but his voice was polite for a change. He sounded entirely different. “If you’ll answer our question, we’ll answer yours.”

  “Please, Mrs. Genevieve,” said Penny.

  “You keep saying my name, but I’m certain that I have never seen you before,” said Mrs. Genevieve. There was a pause, and then: “Yes, I’m alone. And I think that you must be friends of Reuben.”

  “We are!” Penny said.