"Assume your worst. I assume these three open bookcases are it."
"Indeed. I'll skim the top shelves; you do the lower ones."
"Thanks. My knees needed that."
Max suddenly sank to the floor beside her, his joints collapsing like hinges. "We'll start at the bottom and work up, sharing all the way."
"Why does that sound like an indecent proposal?"
"Because it is," he whispered, opening the first book and setting it on her lap. "I suggest we check the indices under H."
"Elementary, my dear Datsun."
Gandolph's books were indeed a fascinating stew of offbeat and even eerie subjects.
Rasputin. Judge Crater. Alistair Crowley. Numerology. ESR Psychics. Freak shows. Graphology.
Spirit knockings.
Temple and Max sped-read indexes by the dozen. "Hy" words were at a premium.
"Hypatia," Temple caroled out once.
"Early Christian woman mathematician and martyr," Max mumbled back, absorbed in his own search.
"I wish all mathematicians would be martyred," Temple muttered.
"Then who would do your taxes?"
"Jimmy the Greek?"
"I think he died."
"Doesn't matter, according to this book on revenants. He could come back, better than ever."
"I think he died politically incorrect."
"Oh. Then he's beyond any human help."
"Hyperbole," Max suggested hopefully.
"A literary term. It means exaggerated overstatement."
"Like 'you are absolutely too delicious to resist with meatloaf on your breath.' "
"Oh, ick, Max! That sounds like one of those awful mispronounced foreign language sentences that's supposed to say, 'Where is the meat market, onion breath?' "
They laughed so hard that the third shelf of books fell into their laps.
"Oh, this is interesting."
"What?" Max asked.
"Just a book of gemstone lore. I'll look up opal."
"Don't. I can tell you that they're considered unlucky."
"And that's the ring you gave me?"
"I'm not superstitious."
"But I might be! Especially after I read this book."
Max's big, bony hand covered the open pages like a shroud over the face of the dead. "Then don't look."
"Call me Pandora. I have an aggravating need to know."
Temple bent her head over the small-print index entries. A check of the copyright page revealed the book to be a 1913 first edition.
She found a string of entries under "Opal," and flipped to the major section.
"Maybe that's why I can finally wear contact lenses," she announced after a couple minutes of silent reading.
Max looked up from his reference book.
"Your opal ring," she explained, waggling the finger it decorated. "According to this book, in the middle ages wearing an opal was regarded as beneficial to the sight. Some even said wearing opals conferred invisibility."
"I could use that."
"Maybe that's why it's the patron stone of thieves."
Temple nodded, already paging through the old volume. She was a sucker for any book title that began Curious Lore of . .. and this one, with its frequent footnotes, engraved illustrations and lists of gemstone attributes was a particularly addictive example.
Under "Planetary and Astral Influences" she stumbled across (appropriately) acrostics formed with stones. Acrostics were linked concepts whose first letters spelled out a meaning.
Thus,
Feldspar Amethyst Idocrase (Huh?) Topaz Heliotrope
. . . spelled out F-AT-T-H with their first letters. Eighteenth-century French and English women would wear rings, bracelets and brooches set with these gems in order to give the secret message. However, change one gem and you had quite a different saying. Temple's larcenous mind invented a new quintet:
Topaz
Heliotrope
Idocrase
Emerald
Feldspar
Thief. Or a slightly twisted Feith.
Hope looked a little harder to come by than Faith. She smiled at the obscure or antique-named gems listed:
Hematite Olivine Pyrope Essonite
Luckily, more common alternate gems were given for each motto: Hyacinth Opal Pearl Emerald
Hyacinth was a gemstone? Be still her beating .. .
Hyacinth
Emerald
Amethyst
Ruby
Topaz!
. . . HEART!
Max looked up from the massive tome table topping his knees. "Something you ate?"
"Heartburn. You're right. Did you know there was a gemstone called hyacinth?"
"Never in a million years."
Temple was fumbling through the index for citations on the gem called "hyacinth."
Max watched her with amusement. "You'll excuse me if I rather doubt that Effinger was carrying the name of a rare precious stone in his pocket."
But Temple was immersed in the long description of jewels in the High Priest's breastplate from the book of Exodus.
There it was, hyacinthus, listed among the twelve foundation stones of the New Jerusalem in Revelations as well as on the High Priest's ritual body armor. Granted, various translations from the Hebrew, Greek and Latin through the centuries varied on just what the stones were: sapphire seemed a popular substitute for the more obscure hyacinth or its apparent twin, jacinth.
And lists of birthstones for the various months included hyacinth as a second choice on more than one month.
And in the Sanskrit of India, the hyacinth was a jewel dedicated to a mysterious "dragon,"
the cause of the periodic eclipses of sun and moon. As such--the embodiment of the evil genius of a great, unseen power--it was a potent talisman against misfortune.
Temple devoured these arcane info-bits and finally spat them out undigested to Max.
"Fascinating," he said in his best Mr. Spock manner. "But I just can't see any of this falderal having anything to do with that animated piece of pond scum called Cliff Effinger."
"No, I can't either. Yet. I'm just happy to find out that the word has some other history than as the name of a boring and innocuous flower."
Max had neglected to drop his eyes to the book he was studying. Instead he was staring into the distance as if much enamored of it.
"On the other hand," he murmured.
Then he was up, so smooth and fast that the abandoned book eased itself shut with a whisper of slick pages.
"What?" Temple sprang up like a raspberry-topped Pop-Tart.
"On the other hand," Max repeated in a more energetic tone, taking hers, "maybe that's where I ran across the word on Gan-dolph's files. Not in the general folders, but in the directory he labeled " 'Shan.' "
"Na-na?"
He dragged her back to the computer room, scooted a wheeled steno chair under her, then sat down in the computer chair to play the keyboard like piano.
"I didn't think to check the files involving that magician league hocus-pocus."
Temple refrained from offering Matt's definition of the origin of the phrase "hocus-pocus"
from the Latin of the Roman Catholic mass: body and blood.
Some info-bits were unwelcome, even in an information age.
"Hmmph." Max sounded grouchy.
"Couldn't and it?"
"Oh, it's here all right. But as vaguely mentioned as the mysterious 'Synth.' "
"What's really bothering you?"
"Heartburn?" he asked wryly. "Meatloaf? Really, Temple."
She shrugged.
Max shook his head, his dark hair as sleek and glossy as Midnight Louie's--Max's long, back-gathered hair serving as the tail to finish off the comparison.
Won't you come home, Midnight Louie? Temple sang inside her head. She already did the cooking, such as it was, and she paid the rent.
"I don't like it." Max pushed back, making the chair squeak for mercy. "What does this mumbo jumbo of Gandolph's have to do with what lowlife Cliff Effinger was carrying around in a note in his pocket?"
"I was also mentioned in that note, somehow."
"How do you know?"
"I forgot to mention it. Molina paid me a surprise interrogation today. Unfortunately, Electra thought she was there to follow up on Effinger's assault on me, so Molina now knows that I have plenty of motive to wish him ill."