“You’re living in it now, lady!” Hobart cackles.
“Again!” Zach adds.
Omar is glowing.
“Did she find what she was looking for?” Nora asks.
“No idea. She left empty-handed.” Omar opens his to demonstrate. “Something about the plant, I bet,” he ventures carefully.
There’s a pause.
“Different day, same shit,” Tom says finally, and they all crack up, even Nora eventually, even angry as she still is at these guys, even confused as this afternoon’s revelations have left us both, as if this is the truest, funniest, most original sentiment anyone has ever expressed.
I spend the evening trying to puzzle all this together, but I’m missing too many pieces to be able to see the picture. Duke Templeton is hiding papers. Apple Templeton is looking for papers. They can’t be the same papers. Can they? Is Duke hiding them from Apple as well? His email said deeds and contracts. Apple said letters, but she also said her father used them to conduct business, so maybe they are the same or in the same place or at least connected. Because whatever they are, if they aren’t in Omar’s filing cabinets, if they aren’t in the library somewhere, chances are good that Monday was, of all things, right: she doesn’t know what she’s looking for. Which—she would point out—is not the same as their not being there.
* * *
“Apple is also looking for papers,” my Voice blurts as soon as I’m alone with my sisters.
I’m expecting shock, maybe confusion, possibly incredulity. A smidge of veneration that I was able to make this potentially revelatory connection would not be out of line.
But Mab says, “That makes sense.”
And Monday says, “I already knew that.”
“You did?” My Voice cannot believe it.
“I did not know I knew it but now I know I knew.”
“Huh?” I say.
“Me too,” says Mab.
I make a hand motion that means “What the hell are you two talking about?” It’s not a complicated one.
“That day we were at the library”—Mab waves at Monday as if otherwise I’d forget I wasn’t part of the “we”—“Apple was up in the attic. She came down covered in cobwebs and dust. Nathan asked her if she found anything. She said no.”
“And when she came to my library to borrow a book,” Monday adds, “she did not come to my library to borrow a book.”
“Huh?” Mab can pronounce infinitely more words than I can, but that’s the one we both go with anyway.
“She did need books,” Monday explains. “However, that is not why she came. She came to look through boxes and files that used to be in her library and now are in my library.”
“Did she?” Mab demands.
“Obviously no. I told her not to touch anything. She touched some things anyway, but I found the books she needed quickly so she did not have a lot of time.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” my Voice demands of both of them.
Mab shrugs. “Didn’t know it was important.”
“To be more accurate,” Monday adds, “we still do not know it is important.”
“It is,” my Voice insists. “Look again in your library, Monday.”
“I do not know what I am looking for so it is impossible for me to—” she begins, but my Voice interrupts her.
“Look again in your library,” it repeats, then turns to the other sister. “You have to get into the plant.”
“Why?” Mab says, annoyed.
“Because I can’t,” my Voice answers, also annoyed, and her face softens.
“I meant why does anyone have to get into the plant.”
But I knew what she meant.
“Apple said the plant is dangerous,” I type. “Leaking, cracked, broken.”
Mab looks as nervous as I feel. “Then why would I want to go in it?”
I take a deep breath. “Good place to hide.”
“You just said it is not safe.” Monday sounds nervous too, more nervous than usual. “Therefore the plant is not a good place to hide. It is a bad place to hide.”
“Something,” my Voice appends. “It is a good place to hide something.”
One
“Do not tip your hat,” Monday warns.
Mirabel taps the folder that’s supposed to help you tell your doctor where it hurts, then the picture of a severed hand, emphatically and repeatedly, so the Voice sounds deranged in its affectless calm as it reiterates like a skipping record, “Hand. Hand. Hand. Hand,” but I knew what Monday meant.
“This isn’t something I can just casually work into conversation,” I tell her.
“Old books say to use your feminine wiles,” Monday advises.
“I don’t have any feminine wiles.”
Monday points to her chest with both index fingers.
I look to Mirabel for help, but she’s in the Body Parts folder already. “Breast,” her Voice intones, and then we can’t discuss anything anymore because we’re all laughing too hard.
Mirabel thinks the papers we’re looking for might be in Monday’s library, in which case the person to find them is Monday. But she also thinks they might be hidden in the plant, so we need someone who can sneak in and look around without being noticed, in which case the person is definitely not Monday and can’t be Mirabel. In which case the person is me.
The miracle comes from the unlikeliest of places: World History. Mrs. Shriver long-jumps us from the Atlantic slave trade to the industrial revolution. At first this cheers me up. At least the industrial revolution isn’t enslaving humans. At least it isn’t war. It’s human ingenuity and forward progress, inventions rising up from society, unpredictably, like hairstyles—at least, that’s Mrs. Shriver’s spin on it. But as the lecture goes on, I slowly realize the industrial revolution is a war. Mrs. Shriver wants it to be revolution like the Renaissance we left a couple months ago—great leaps forward made by humans being clever. But the more she talks, the clearer it becomes: the revolution in “industrial revolution” is like the revolution in “American Revolution,” revolution like war. It remapped small towns and big cities and nations, destroyed communities, willfully refused to consider the long term in favor of immediate blood and power, and demanded the sacrifice of scores upon scores of soldiers for the glory of the men getting rich. It was the industrial revolution that conscripted towns like mine and consigned their citizens—us—to the bottom of every pile yet to come.
So I am thinking of armor. I am thinking of arrows and muskets and cannons. I am thinking of the longbow and the M16, armadas of ten thousand ships, rows of white crosses repeating into infinity, which is why when Mrs. Shriver calls on me to catch me out for daydreaming by the window instead of paying attention in class—“Mab, something on your mind?”—I accidentally blurt out the answer to that question.
“Why aren’t factories like museums?”
She’s amused. Bored maybe. Gives me an indulgent smile and decides to play along. “I don’t know, Mab. Why aren’t factories like museums?”