“I hope your kid has disciplinary problems!” Naomi shouted back, now making her second lap around the roundabout.
“Nomi, you need to calm down.”
“This is calm,” she said as the VA hospital once again appeared in front of her. “I’m just saying: Why would Cal be here? They had full access to a hospital when they dropped me off last night.”
“Maybe something happened. Maybe one of them got hurt.”
“Yeah, but a VA hospital? Cal . . . Cal’s father . . . neither of them was military. Something’s not right.”
“Just head for the parking garage around back. Based on the records and their LoJack signal, you’re looking for a white Pontiac parked near the southeast corner stairwell.”
Eventually exiting the roundabout at East Boulevard, Naomi passed the VA hospital on her left and followed the signs for the parking garage around back. But just as she made the turn, she noticed, out of her passenger-side window, the wide set of short sandstone and taller red-brick buildings that overlooked the hospital’s parking garage . . . exactly at the southeast corner.
“Scotty, you looking at a map?”
“With a little blinking LoJack logo on it.”
“Fine. Tell me what those buildings are across the street from the VA.”
“Looks like . . . one’s an auto museum, there’s an Ohio historical society, plus a pretty big library.”
The car bucked and bumped as Naomi climbed over the speed bumps in the VA’s parking garage. “What kinda library?” she asked, peering in her rearview.
“You see something?” Scotty asked.
“Not yet. But it makes a damn lot more sense than a VA hospital.”
Half a block back, as Ellis drove past the hospital, he studied the taillights on Naomi’s car, then tapped his own brakes to make sure he stayed far enough away. To be safe, he kept a strong hand on Benoni in the passenger seat, scratching her neck just to ensure she kept her head down. Yesterday, he lost so much by listening to the Prophet . . . by not trusting himself. The bloody red spot in his right eye—the result of a broken blood vessel from the fall through the window—was a reminder of that. But as he’d realized when Naomi ran out of the hospital last night, there was no need for him to attack, or threaten, or do anything else to scare her away.
To be moving this early, Cal had cracked the Map. The Book was close. And since Naomi was so much faster than the Judge—as long as she was doing her job, as long as she had their LoJack signal, Ellis was about to get a whole lot closer.
64
According to their Web site, even when it was founded back in 1867, the Western Reserve Historical Society has never been just an Ohio library. It’s a storehouse and research center dedicated to documenting and preserving over twenty million items—from the very first area phone books, to old wills, telegrams, birth certificates, even naturalization papers—that trace the earliest days of the state. They also have a hell of a map collection.
Not that it’s doing us any good.
“We’re missing something,” my dad insists. “We have to be missing something.”
“What’s to miss?” asks the librarian with the pointy goatee, motioning at the wide mahogany reference table that’s now lost under the sea of maps, atlases, and original city plats. “I even pulled the guides from when Ohio was still owned by Connecticut. Trust me on this: King Avenue, King Court, Kings Highway, even King’s Cross back during the late 1800s. But near as I can tell, we’ve never had a King Street.”
“And this map here,” I say, leaning both elbows on the table and scanning a small yellowed foldout entitled Official Vest Pocket Street Guide of Cleveland. “This is from 1932, right?”
“Thirty-one or thirty-two,” the librarian says, nodding as Serena reads over my shoulder. She knows what I’m looking for: This is exactly what Jerry Siegel’s hometown looked like when his father was shot. But according to the map, still no 184 King Street.
“Maybe it’s not an address,” Serena says.
“What else would it be?” my father asks.
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s someone’s name. Martin Luther King. Larry King. A famous King.”
“King James,” the librarian blurts.
“Y’mean like the Bible?” I ask.
“Actually, I was talking about LeBron,” the librarian laughs. We all stare at him blankly. “Y’know, in basketball? The Cavs?” We still stare. “You’re not from Ohio, are you?” he asks.
“Wait . . . go back to the Bible,” my father says. “There’s a section called Kings, right? Maybe the numbers . . .”
“184 King Street,” Serena says, quickly hopping aboard. “Kings, chapter 18, verse 4.”
“Or chapter 1, verse 84,” my father says, his voice already quickening. He searches around, glancing at the rows of books. “You got a Bible handy?” he asks the librarian.
The librarian grins. “You kidding? We got three thousand of ’em.”
As Pointy Goatee goes to fish one from the reference desk, there’s a metal kuh-kuunk behind us. I jump at the sound. Through the turnstile, a young, petite woman with a round face unzips her long, dirty-white winter coat and reveals stylish pink reading glasses around her neck.
“Jacobs left the door open again?” she asks in a southern accent that’s well past annoyed.
“They’re with me,” Pointy Goatee calls out, approaching the woman and giving her a quick kiss. “My wife,” he explains, turning our way as she hands him one of the two coffees she’s carrying.
My dad and Serena force hello smiles. I don’t. It’s nearly nine a.m. If Naomi’s doing her job, our faces are minutes away from showing up on the local morning news. We’ve already been here too long.
“Take a breath,” Serena says, still standing behind me and scratching my shoulder. My father works hard pretending not to notice.
“Okay, so 1 Kings, chapter 18, verse 4,” the librarian announces as he puts his reading glasses to use. “Obadiah took a hundred prophets, and hid them fifty in a cave, and fed them with bread and water. That sound like anything familiar?”
I look at my father. He’s looking at Serena. The word Prophet, plus a cave, where Mitchell Siegel supposedly found the Book of Truth. There’s no ignoring the coincidence. But even with that, it still means nothing.
“I don’t think that’s it,” my father says, trying hard to keep it calm. But he’s right. Just another dead end.
“What y’all working on, anyway?” Pink Glasses asks as she approaches the table, warming her hands around her cup of coffee.
“184 King Street. Mean anything important to you?” her husband asks.
“I know King Avenue,” she says.
“Nope. King Street.”
She shakes her head. “It’s funny, though—almost sounds like the vault.”
We all turn toward her. “What vault?” I ask.
“Our vault—for our rare book collection,” she begins.
“Y’know, I never thought of those,” her husband interrupts. “That’s not a bad—”
“Just let her say it!” my father insists. I shoot him a look to cool down.
“It’s not— These days, we’re on the Library of Congress system,” she explains, “but in the early 1900s, back before Dewey decimal was widely accepted, we used to file rare book collections under the names of big donors.”