“Here’s another,” Kaylin said. “It looks like some sort of weird hat, or something.”
“It’s a sinking ship,” Dane corrected. He pointed to the wavy line that she had apparently taken to be the brim of the hat. “This is the water.”
“Now I see it,” she said, gazing at it a bit longer. “I wonder if the Dourado weighed on his mind.” She suddenly cocked her head to the side, like a dog hearing a strange noise. “Wait a minute. Isn’t the captain supposed to go down with his ship?”
“Not this captain,” Dane said. “It’s kind of strange. Usually, the captain would make certain that everyone else is safe before he abandoned ship. Sometimes, if the ship went down too fast, he really did go down with the ship.”
“If you believe Rienzi’s story, he was the last one off the ship, and Covilha would have left more people aboard if Rienzi hadn’t saved them.” Kaylin looked thoughtfully up at the ceiling.
Dane caught himself admiring the slender blonde’s profile, and had to shake his head to clear the haze.
“Covilha didn’t exactly act ethically in stealing Rienzi’s loot, either. If he had any sort of conscience, I wouldn’t be surprised if the memory of the Dourado shadowed him all the way to the grave.” Dane understood how one day could darken the rest of one’s life. “Guilt is a terrible thing.”
Kaylin nodded but did not answer. She seemed lost in her own thoughts. Obviously, she was haunted by her own demons, apparently relating to her father.
Dane pulled three more books off the shelf, and sat cross-legged on the floor. He was not optimistic about finding anything meaningful in these volumes, though some of them had obviously belonged to the captain. The first book on the stack he flipped over and went through it backward, just for a change of pace. His optimism, which had not been high to begin with, continued to wane as he looked at every page, and again found only a doodle.
“This is getting weird,” Kaylin said. She held a slim book in her hands. The front cover, old and worn, simply read Poems.
Dane looked up at her, waiting for her to elaborate.
“Do all of your books have a drawing in them?” she asked, frowning and pursing her lips.
“So far,” he replied, uncertain of her train of thought.
“Do all of them only have a single drawing on the bottom left hand of the page?” She held up her book to illustrate.
He nodded, thinking. It was a little odd. If the man were a doodler, one would think he would draw in various places in each book. Another thought occurred to him.
“Come to think of it, books were usually treated with respect back then, weren’t they?” He did not wait for her to reply. “It’s strange that a grown man, even one who absent-mindedly draws pictures, would sketch childish cartoons in his books.”
Kaylin stared at him, an odd expression on her face.
“Now what?”
“Isn’t it even stranger,” she said slowly, as if thinking her way through the problem as she spoke, “that he always drew on page one hundred twenty-five?”
Dane picked up the stack of books he had already gone through, and added them to the pile in his lap. He checked them. Each of them had a small sketch drawn in the bottom left corner of page one hundred twenty-five. Obviously there was some significance, but it escaped him at the moment.
“I think we should copy these down,” Kaylin said. She checked her watch. “I’ll do it. You go through the rest of these books and see what you can find.”
“I love it when you boss me around,” Dane teased, hoping to melt the icy wall that had risen between them. She responded with a smile that, though tired, seemed sincere enough.
Dane searched through the remainder of the books on the shelf while Kaylin set herself to the task of copying the sketches onto a notepad she had brought along. As he flipped through the last book, this one with no drawing in it, a piece of paper, folded in half and yellowed with age, fell onto the floor. He picked it up and opened it, being careful not to tear it.
The ink was badly faded. The words, barely discernable, were written in a tight, choppy script. The letter was in Portuguese; he had now looked at enough books written in that language to recognize it easily. He could not translate the writing, but one word instantly leapt out at him: Dourado.
He was about to share his discovery with Kaylin when the sound of footsteps rang hollow from the nearby stairwell. The librarian appeared in the doorway, a look of apprehension on her pallid face. Dane hastily turned his back to the woman and slipped the paper inside his jacket pocket as he re-shelved the book.
“I’m sorry to interrupt you,” the librarian said, sounding anything but sorry, “but the library will be closing soon.”
“We were just finishing,” Kaylin said, her voice syrupy. “Thank you so much for your help today, Mrs. Meyers.”
She was really laying it on thick, Dane mused. He would have to ask her why she was never that sweet to him. Then again, he had upset her enough for one day.
“I also thought you might like to know that a man is upstairs looking for you,” Mrs. Meyers added. Her voice carried a tone of suspicion, bordering on judgment.
Dane and Kaylin exchanged glances. This was an unexpected and unpleasant surprise.
“What does he look like?” Dane asked, trying to keep his tone conversational.
“Short brown hair, average height, expensive sunglasses that he is too rude to take off.” As the woman rattled off the details, Dane could see why she made a good librarian. “Blue oxford cloth shirt, navy pants, fair skin, sort of thin.”
He sounded to Dane like one of the guys that had pursued them in Charleston.
“Thank you,” Kaylin interrupted. “So, you didn’t tell him we were down here?”
“No,” the woman replied, blushing a bit. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t care for his manner. He was rather abrupt. I told him that I was certain you had left. He asked where I had seen you last. I told him you had been checking the census records up on the second floor. He went up there looking for you. Did not even thank me.” She folded her hands across her chest and frowned at Dane, as if the man’s behavior were somehow Dane’s fault.
“I’m sorry about that, Ma’am,” Dane said. He racked his brain for a good story, but he couldn’t think of anything.
“It’s my ex-boyfriend.” Kaylin entered the conversation smoothly. “It’s embarrassing, but he’s been stalking me. I can’t seem to go anywhere without him finding me. I have a restraining order against him.”
That was all the librarian needed to hear. Her eyes flared and she stood up ramrod-straight.
“That is just terrible. One of our regular patrons was stalking me just last summer,” she shook her head and tapped her foot on the concrete floor. “I thought I was going to have to turn him over to the proper authorities.”
Dane struggled not to smile at the thought of anyone stalking this dowdy old woman.
“Is that so?” he asked, keeping his facial muscles in firm check.
“I shall go back to my desk and call the police,” the woman said firmly. “There is a utility entrance in the back. I will let the two of you out there.”
They thanked her profusely, and began picking up the books they had been looking through.
“Don’t you mind those. I will reshelve them later.” The librarian shooed them out of the room, down a narrow hallway, and up a small flight of stairs to a metal door. She unlocked it and ushered them out.
“Are you going to be all right?” Kaylin asked the woman. They certainly did not want the woman’s kind aid to cause trouble for her later. She was a bystander in all this.