Books.

"Your dad collected quite a library. He must have stored it up there," Uncle Hugh explained at dinner. "He loved books. Your mom, too. Where did the key come from?"

"It just showed up in my room."

Uncle Hugh looked at Aunt Bessie, who shrugged. He went back to stirring the salmon-cream-sauce noodles on his plate. If one of them was leaving the keys, the other didn't seem to know about it.

"Did Dad spend a lot of time reading?" I asked.

"He always had a book, wherever he went."

"That was nice, later, when he was sick. He didn't have to give up his favorite thing," Aunt Bessie added.

"And Mom?"

"She was more of a sit-in-her-pink-chair than a read-on-the-go kind of girl."

"What did they like to read?"

"Hmm a Lots of things, I'd guess. I didn't ask much. Walking up to someone and saying *Whatchya readin'?' is obnoxious."

"No one's ever asked me that," I said.

"You're not often caught reading."

"So a why would Dad leave me a library?"

"Maybe it was something special to him that he could give you," Annie chimed in.

"But why would he lock it up?" I asked. "Why couldn't the library just have been open all those years?"

"What's a three-year-old going to do with all those books?" Uncle Hugh pointed out. "Color in them? Maybe he wanted you to be old enough to appreciate them. It's not like we don't have plenty of books already."

"Can I finish my homework out there? There's a big desk."

"That's okay with me," Aunt Bessie said.

"We'll stop by to visit," Uncle Hugh said.

"Okay." Double okay: the barn could be creepy in the dark.

Uncle Hugh walked up with me, carrying a standing lamp. I had my backpack and all my work, which I spread out on the old desk.

"It's nice to know that I'll never run out of things to read," Uncle Hugh said. He started looking through the shelves, and suddenly he was laughing!

"What?" I asked.

He picked up a battered paperback. "Your dad's joke book. He used to carry this around all the time, when he was about ten. Could never get him to stop telling them."

He handed it to me. It felt very worn, but I liked it. I flipped through, found a whole page of "Why did the chicken cross the road?" Dad had even written in some of his own: "Because on the other side it was Thanksgiving, so only turkeys had to worry." I wasn't sure if that was funny, but it made me smile anyway.

"I've been looking for this one." Uncle Hugh slid a thin book off the shelf. "The town library didn't have it. Can I borrow it?"

"Sure. Take whatever you want."

Uncle Hugh had already put on his gla.s.ses, reading as he walked out.

I opened all the desk drawers. There were some old ballpoint pens, a couple paper clips, and a yellow lined notepad. Plenty of room for my own things, if I wanted. If I liked working in the library.

It felt very good and official to open my science book flat on the desk and flip through the pages while I answered the questions using the Caroline Method. After I finished but before I started math, I looked at Dad's books.

All the books were for grown-ups. There was no sense to how they were arrangeda"not by topic or author. Maybe it made sense to Dad.

"What's up?" a voice asked.

I jumped about a mile. Then I realized it was just Franklin. "Jerk. You don't just sneak up on somebody."

"Sorry. How'd you get in here?"

"I should ask you the same question."

"Annie told me you were out here. Soa"you opened another room."

I told him how the key had appeared.

"There are so many books in here!"

"Like a thousand," I agreed.

"More like three thousand."

"Three thousand?"

"Well, twenty bookcases, each with about six shelves." He pointed. "Twenty-four books on this shelf, which rounds to about twenty-five books on each. So there are about three thousand books in this room."

We stared around at the bookshelves.

"Feel like reading?" I asked.

"I feel like having hot cocoa. And doing the s.p.a.ce puzzle."

"Yeah." I followed him, leaving my homework. The puzzle seemed more important.

Caroline was sitting with her usual group at lunch when I spotted her the next day, but the others left eventually. She started reading in the middle of the noisy lunchroom. She really could fall into her own world.

When Franklin finished eating and left to check on the mold he was growing for extra credit in science, I went to sit with Caroline.

She looked up from her book without marking the place. I remembered what Aunt Bessie had said about it being annoying to ask someone what she's reading, so I skipped that question.

"Would you be interested in a room full of books?" Maybe that was an odd thing to ask.

"I guess so," Caroline said. "Where is it?"

"In my barn."

"You have a room full of books in your barn?"

"Well, I do now. I mean, it's been there, I just didn't know about it."

"You didn't?"

I filled her in on the details. I have to admit, they sounded pretty crazy. But she was curious about the rooms and keys.

She was busy that afternoon, but the next day she got a pa.s.s to come home with me on the bus.

Which really seemed to annoy Franklin. When we got off the bus, he headed toward his own house.

"This is a lot of books." Caroline walked into the room and turned slowly. "Lucky! You have your own library!"

"That's one way to look at it. It was my dad's. All the books are for grown-ups."

Caroline walked over to a shelf and picked up a book. She opened it and smelled the pages. When I gave her a funny look, she said, "Books smell really good."

"You can borrow some."

Caroline ran her fingers along the spines. She seemed to judge books as much by their covers as by the way they smelled and the way the paper felt under her fingertips.

"They're not all grown-up books," she said.

"I think they are."

"Nope." She pulled one off a shelf. "Winnie-the-Pooh. They're just disguised. Hardcovers without jackets."

She handed me Winnie-the-Pooh. I opened it, flipped through.

"Someone read this to me," I said. "I think a teacher."

I sniffed the book like Caroline had. I closed my eyes.

It wasn't a teacher. It was a man's voice reading. And I wasn't sitting in a desk or a circle of other kids a I was in bed, with pillows and Bunny-Rabbit and a sleepy feeling. The memory was so shadowy I could hardly catch it.

"Dad read this to me."

"Well, here, this whole section has kids' books."

I pulled several books from their places. Then I heard the smallest noise of metal moving.

When I looked at the shelf, there was a key!

"Caroline, look!" I said. "Another key! Just here on the shelf!"

She took it from me. "It's dusty. I bet it's been here the whole time."

The dust on the shelf showed the outline of a key. The key probably had been locked in this room the whole time, in plain sight on the shelf.

"Come on!" I said.

I ran into the hallway with Caroline behind me. I jammed the key into doork.n.o.bs until it fit. When I pushed the door open a An empty room. Not even a note!

I stood there, panting. Caroline peered over my shoulder, just as confused.

"Why would he lock an empty room?" I asked eventually.

"Another mystery."

"More like a dead end." We were both quiet for a long time.

"Maybe I should go," Caroline said gently.

"No, stay. You haven't picked out any books yet. Are you hungry? We're having sloppy joes tonight. Come on."

Caroline followed me outside. "You have so many leaves! I used to love to go to Amanda's and make a big leaf pile. We'd jump in it for hours. She doesn't like to do that anymore."

"Don't you have your own trees?"

Caroline shook her head. "We don't even have a yard. We live above the deli in town."

"We could play in the leaves."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Hang on." I slipped back into the barn and got two rakes.

"Here." Caroline ran and stood under a tree near the driveway with branches that hung low around our shoulders. "We can make the pile here and then jump out of the tree."

We scrambled around trying to make the leaf pile as quickly as possible. Caroline made neat sweeps with the rake, but every time I looked over at her, she swung her rake fast and threw the leaves up high in the air with a goofy smile. It made me think of a clown doing something in a hurry. I couldn't help laughing.

It took a long time, maybe an hour, to get the pile deep enough for us. We were both sweating even though it was getting kind of cold out. The sun had almost set.

"You first," I said. "It was your idea."

"Okay." Caroline climbed onto the lowest branch and flopped backward into the pile. "Ah! That was great! But, ouch a"a"she stood up and rubbed her b.u.ma""my tailbone."

I had never before seen anyone play in leaves in tights and a skirt. She didn't seem to mind, though.

I climbed onto the low branch. I wouldn't hurt my tailbone.