Jake Ransom and the Skull King's Shadow, Page 3

  Jake turned under the next archway into the main library. Shelves of books climbed two stories, accessible by a pair of tall ladders on wrought-iron rails. The far wall contained a fireplace tall enough to walk into without bending over. A small fire crackled cheerily, shedding a welcoming warmth into the room. His father’s massive oak desk occupied one corner. The remainder of the furniture was a collection of overstuffed chairs and sofas, encouraging someone to collapse into them and become lost in the worlds contained between the covers of one of the books.

  Uncle Edward stood beside the desk.

  “Ah, there you are, Master Jake,” his uncle said. He turned on a heel. His back was straight, his manner stiff, but his eyes were never cold, even now, when pinched with some slight concern. A pair of small reading glasses rested at the tip of his nose. He held a large yellow envelope in his hand. “This arrived today. Mailed from England. From London’s Blackfriars district.”

  “Blackfriars?”

  A nod answered him. “One of London’s oldest financial districts. Banks and whatnot.”

  Uncle Edward should know. He had grown up in London. In fact, Edward and Matilda were not truly Jake’s aunt and uncle. Their family name was Batchelder. They’d been friends of Jake’s grandfather and had managed Ravensgate Manor for three generations. It was whispered that Edward had once saved Jake’s grandfather’s life during World War II, somewhere in Africa. But no one would ever tell the whole story.

  With no surviving relatives to look after Jake and Kady, Uncle Edward and Aunt Matilda had become the children’s guardians, while continuing to oversee the estate. The pair were as doting as any parents and sometimes as stern. But mostly the entire household seemed to be waiting, holding its breath for the manor’s true masters to return.

  Uncle Edward crossed to Jake and held out the sealed envelope.

  Jake accepted it and stared down at the top name.

  Master Jacob Bartholomew Ransom.

  Below it was his sister’s full name.

  Jake felt a chill. The last time he had seen his name written in full, it had been on the package with his father’s handwriting, a parcel that still carried a tinge of doom about it.

  Now here the name was again, only typed neatly and coldly.

  Uncle Edward cleared his throat. “I didn’t know if you would like to wait until your sister returns to—”

  Jake ripped the tab and peeled open the envelope. No telling when Kady would return.

  Jake heard a low growl behind him. He turned and found Watson stalking into the room. The dog’s hackles were raised and his nose was in the air. Plainly Watson had been scolded out of the kitchen and had come to find Jake for consolation. But his keen nose must have caught wind of the mail, perhaps smelling something only the dog’s keen sense could pick up. Watson approached no closer. He circled slowly with a low growl of warning.

  “Hush, Watson…it’s all right.”

  Jake shook out the contents. A colorful brochure and a few other items slipped between his fingers and fluttered to the hardwood floor. Watson skittered back a step. Jake did manage to catch the largest sheet of stiff linen paper. It was yellowish and embossed deeply with the blackest ink.

  Uncle Edward had knelt down and gathered the loose papers, including a cover letter. He glanced through them as Jake read over the invitation twice.

  “There are airline tickets,” his uncle added. “Two. For you and your sister. First class. And what looks like room reservations at the Savoy. A very expensive hotel.”

  Jake scrunched his brows and read the most intriguing line. “‘Mayan Treasures of the New World.’”

  Uncle Edward unfolded the brochure. Photos of gold and jade objects adorned what appeared to be a museum advertisement for the exhibit. “It’s from the British Museum,” he said. “How very strange. The flight tickets are for the day after tomorrow. Monday. And according to the brochure, the first day of the exhibit is on that Tuesday.”

  * * *

  We kindly extend a Gracious and Grand

  Invitation to

  Master Jacob Bartholomew Ransom

  and

  Mistress Katherine Edwina Ransom

  To Attend the Auspicious Opening of an

  Exciting New Exhibit at

  The British Museum

  London, England

  Mayan Treasures of the New World

  Humbly and Sincerely sponsored by

  Bledsworth Sundries and Industries, Inc.

  * * *

  “Tuesday?” Jake said, noting another oddity. He remembered his talk at school yesterday about the Mayan calendar—and the Mayan prediction for that day. “That’s the day of the solar eclipse. In London, it will be a total eclipse.”

  He couldn’t keep the excitement from his voice.

  “I don’t like this,” Uncle Edward said, deepening the lines across his forehead. “Such short notice. Only two tickets. For you and your sister.”

  “Kady and I are old enough to travel by ourselves. And aren’t you always telling me I should see the British Museum one day?”

  Uncle Edward’s frown only grew larger. “Before we even consider it, I must make some calls. There are a thousand details to attend. We must address…”

  Jake grew deaf to his uncle’s words. Instead his eyes fixed on one of the pictures on the unfolded brochure. He reached and slipped it from his uncle’s fingers. In the center of the page was a photograph of a gold snake decorated with jade and rubies. It was bunched up into a figure-eight, but at each end was sculpted a head, one with its jaws open, bearing fangs, and a second that was closed with a small forked tongue protruding.

  Jake stared at the image. He felt the room tilt under his feet, and his breath grew shallow and fast.

  He recognized the two-headed snake.

  He had seen a drawing of it in his mother’s sketchbook, even read a detailed description of it in his father’s field notebook. Both books—two halves of their joint diary—had arrived with the broken gold coin. All were contained in the parcel addressed in his father’s handwriting. But the package had come with no note, no further explanation.

  Jake finally lifted the brochure and pointed. “This is one of the artifacts from Mom and Dad’s dig.” He glanced through the brochure. Other items also looked familiar, but he wanted to compare them to the sketches in his mother’s sketchbook.

  Uncle Edward moved closer. “I thought the artifacts were all locked up in some vault in Mexico City.”

  Jake nodded. Shortly after the bandits had attacked his parents’ camp, the Mexican military had flown in and locked down the site. It was unknown how many items were stolen or what became of the bodies of Jake’s mother and father. Another colleague had also gone missing. Dr. Henry Bethel.

  But the military did recover most of the Mayan artifacts. Due to their value as national treasures, they had never left Mexico.

  Until now.

  The London museum had them on loan for this exhibit.

  “Mayan Treasures of the New World.”

  “No wonder they invited you,” his uncle said at his side as he read over Jake’s shoulder. “The son and daughter of the team who discovered the artifacts.”

  Jake could not take his eyes off the brochure. A finger traced the curves of the two-headed snake. Surely his parents had also touched it, unearthed it with their hands.

  “I have to go,” Jake said with a fierce determination in his voice.

  Uncle Edward placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

  Who knew when he’d get another chance before the relics were all locked up again? Jake felt tears begin to well. To be that much closer to his parents.

  The crunch and squeal of tires sounded from the front of the house. Laughter and shouted good-byes echoed to them. A moment later, the door swung open and Kady swept inside. She turned and waved to her departing ride, using her whole arm.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, Randy!”

  She came in and discovered Jake and Uncl
e Edward staring at her. Seeing the expressions on their faces, a single line of worry etched her perfect forehead.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Well, I’m not going,” Kady declared.

  Jake watched her tick off her reasons on her fingers.

  “I have Jeffrey’s pool party on Sunday. Then there’s cheer practice on Monday…followed by another party. And that doesn’t even count the two parties on Tuesday.”

  She finished with a slight stamp of her heel. “And I’m certainly not giving up all that just to babysit Jake at some boring museum.”

  Jake felt his face growing hotter. She had hardly taken a breath to listen to them. His heart pounded. He knew that if Kady didn’t go he wouldn’t be going. Uncle Edward would not let him travel alone.

  “Kady! It’s Mom and Dad’s artifacts!”

  She swallowed. Her eyes darted to the brochure and away again. Kady was far better at drawing and art than Jake. She had studied their mother’s sketchbook at length. Or at least she had when the books first came in the mail. For the past two years, she hadn’t bothered to look at them again.

  But Jake had noticed the slight tremble to Kady’s hands when she’d first looked at the brochure. She also had recognized the double-headed snake.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I still have too much to do.”

  Jake turned to Uncle Edward with a pleading expression.

  His uncle only shrugged. He plainly still questioned whether they should go. Especially without Kady’s cooperation.

  “Are these first-class tickets?” Kady suddenly asked. She shifted the papers in her hands. “And a penthouse reserved at the Savoy?”

  Sensing a chink in her armor, Jake changed his approach. In all his excitement, he’d forgotten with whom he was dealing here.

  “It’s…I’m sure, a big deal,” Jake said cautiously. He waved to the tickets. “Look at the expense. And they even timed it to the solar eclipse. I guess it’s all just a stupid publicity stunt. Still…”

  He noted how her shoulders twitched at the word publicity.

  “I’m sure there will be cameras,” he pressed. “News crews, television stations, possibly celebrities.”

  Her eyes grew brighter. She took another look down at the invitation.

  As Kady took the bait, Jake set the hook. “Besides,” he said, “think of all the shopping…all the newest European fashions that haven’t reached the North Hampshire Mall. You’ll be the first to wear them.”

  Kady glanced down to her shoes. “Wellllll, maybe a short trip. It might not be that bad.”

  Jake glanced at Uncle Edward.

  The man shook his head. Uncle Edward knew when he was defeated. He might succeed in stopping Jake, but he’d never be able to come between Kady and a camera.

  “Then I guess I’ll have to check into the arrangements,” he said.

  Kady nodded, and Jake sighed with relief.

  There remained only one last holdout.

  Watson still sat near their father’s desk with his hackles raised. The basset hound’s eyes remained fixed on the discarded yellow envelope. From the old dog’s throat a low growl still flowed.

  3

  MR. BLEDSWORTH’S SHOW

  Jake had never been in a limousine before. He never imagined the sheer size inside. It felt like he was in the belly of a black jetliner, flying low over the ground.

  The limousine whipped through the narrow avenues and confusing roundabouts of London. Car horns blared and a few pedestrians shook fists at the massive vehicle. They were running late.

  Jake pressed his cheek against the darkly tinted window. He tried to get a peek at the sky.

  “Don’t worry,” Kady said next to him. With her iPod’s earbuds in place, she shouted a bit to be heard. “You won’t miss the eclipse.”

  Kady returned her attention to the tiny compact mirror in her hand. She was checking her face again after an entire morning in their suite’s bathroom, performing unfathomable experiments with lip gloss, moisturizers, hair gels, eye shadow, lash curler, and a blow dryer—and even something that left glittering dust on the bathroom’s marble counter. Still, like any good scientist, Kady was never done tinkering with her work.

  Jake ignored her and searched the blue sky. The sun shone like a yellow bruise through the tinted window. The moon waited, ready to begin its inevitable sweep across the sun’s face, turning day into night.

  Jake’s left knee jumped up and down with excitement.

  Also a little worry.

  There was another force just as unstoppable as his sister.

  Near the horizon, black clouds stacked high into the sky. Flashes of lightning sparked deep within the heart of an approaching thunderstorm. It was a race against time. If the storm blotted out the view of the eclipse, Jake would be crushed.

  The limousine bumped around an especially sharp turn. Tires squealed. Jake was thrown away from the window. Ice clinked in a crystal glass. A huge hand caught Jake and righted him in his seat.

  A rumbling voice scolded with a clipped English accent. “Young sir, if you’d like to see the sky, perhaps I can assist you before you break your neck.”

  Jake had almost forgotten Morgan Drummond shared their limousine, which was surprising considering the man’s size. His body filled the entire front half of the limousine’s passenger cabin. He was all muscle with craggy features. He wore a double-breasted black pinstripe suit, a veritable tent of a suit, but still his biceps strained the fabric with every motion. He looked more like a drill sergeant than the head of security for Bledsworth Sundries and Industries, Inc., the sole sponsor for the Mayan exhibit.

  Drummond tilted toward Jake. He reached a thick finger to a row of buttons near Jake’s elbow and pressed one. The limousine’s moonroof glided open. Through the glass, the sky appeared.

  As the limousine barreled past a double-decker bus, the passengers on the upper deck glanced down over the top rail and into the limousine below. Jake found himself staring up at the faces like a goldfish in a fishbowl. Hands pointed. Jake waved back, but there was no response.

  “Privacy glass,” Morgan Drummond explained. “They can’t see you.”

  The large man settled back into the shadows of his seat. For someone so mountainous, he had a strange ability to fade into the background. Jake did note a tiny flash out of the darkness as Drummond leaned back. It came from the man’s tie tack. It was a chunk of polished gunmetal steel fashioned into the symbol for Bledsworth Sundries and Industries Inc.

  A griffin.

  The mythological monster had the head, wings, and claws of an eagle with the body, hind legs, and tail of a lion. With a black jewel for an eye, it was shown reared up as if ready to tear into some cowering prey. Some said it also represented the corporation’s business practices: attacking the weak and devouring them whole.

  Jake had read up on the corporation during the flight from Connecticut to London. No one could quite say where or when the company had first started. It was hinted that its “sundries and industries” stretched back to medieval times. There were rumors that the Bledsworth family made their first fortune by selling false potions to protect against the Black Plague. They were also the ones who collected the dead bodies of the victims, piling them up on carts and selling off body parts for medical research. Truth or not, the Bledsworths came out of the Dark Ages with more gold than the king of England. Now considered fairly reputable, they owned an entire block in the financial center of Blackfriars.

  Jake sat straighter and cleared his throat. He asked the question that had been nagging him since he landed in London. “Mr. Drummond, sir, why is your company sponsoring the museum exhibit?”

  A heavy grumble answered him. It sounded little pleased with his question. But even Kady lowered her compact mirror and removed one of her iPod’s earbuds to hear his answer.

  Morgan Drummond sighed. “It’s very expensive to put on this show. The extra guards, the electronic security…it cost the corporation a fo
rtune just to convince the Mexican government to allow these national treasures to be taken out of the country.”

  From the tone of his voice, the man was not happy that his company was spending so much money on something so frivolous.

  “Then why is the corporation doing it?” Jake asked.

  Drummond leaned closer. “Mr. Bledsworth insisted. And no one goes against Mr. Bledsworth.”

  Jake frowned. He had read all about the reclusive head of the corporation: Sigismund Oliphant Bledsworth IX.

  In his nineties, the man represented the ninth generation to carry the Bledsworth family name—but unmarried with no children, he would be the last. Only a few photographs existed of Sigismund Oliphant Bledsworth IX. Jake could find only one on the computer, taken when Bledsworth was a much younger man: a stick of a man in a British military uniform. Like his medieval ancestors, his past was clouded with rumors of misdeeds—stories of stealing art treasures from France and Germany during the confusion of war. He had also been stationed in Egypt.

  But after World War II, all sightings of the head of Bledsworth Sundries and Industries dried up. He had become more ghost than man.

  Jake’s brows pinched. “But what’s Mr. Bledsworth’s interest in putting on this show?”

  “You truly don’t know?” Morgan Drummond asked.

  Jake shrugged, turned to his sister, then back to the large man. “No.”

  “Mr. Bledsworth felt obligated. A debt to be paid.”

  “A debt?”

  “To your parents.”

  The air suddenly grew heavier in the limousine. Jake found it harder to breathe.