Leonardo da Vinci: Renaissance Master (The Treasure Chest #9)
Ann Hood
CHAPTER 1
THE MISSING EGG
Standing in The Treasure Chest as the late-afternoon sun sent rays of colored light through the stained-glass window and across the parquet floor, Felix thought the room looked sad. All of the items seemed ordinary somehow. Maybe it had to do with that late-afternoon light, which was dim and fading. Felix had never noticed the fraying around the edges of the carpet from Ashgabat in Turkmenistan where, according to Great-Uncle Thorne, the most beautiful carpets were made. The desk and shelves, their wood probably once gleaming, looked dull. Or maybe it was the items themselves, the gold nugget and test tubes and all the things filling the room, dusty and neglected.
Felix tried to imagine Phinneas Pickworth filling this room, coming back to Elm Medona from Turkmenistan or Persia or the Amazon with his precious items. How excited he must have been to unpack his trunk and remove the carefully wrapped treasures! Felix narrowed his eyes, as if he could almost see his great-great-grandfather here, lifting an object close to his eyes to examine it. He would have smiled as he did. Satisfied. Delighted. Eager.
“Have you heard a word I’ve said?” Great-Uncle Thorne’s voice boomed.
Felix stared a moment longer at the spot where a trick of light beneath the stained-glass window seemed to reveal a vague figure.
Felix blinked.
No, he convinced himself, it was just a shadow cast from the high shelf against that wall.
A cold breeze blew through The Treasure Chest, rifling the papers on the desk and sending goose bumps up Felix’s arm.
Whatever was beneath the window—ghost or shadow—vanished. But near where it had appeared, something glistened gold. Felix felt that the object was beckoning him. Rubbing his arms to warm himself, he walked toward it.
But Great-Uncle Thorne reached out a gnarled and liver-spotted hand to stop him.
“Does the fact that the Ziff twins are missing have no impact on you at all?” he shouted, lowering his face to Felix’s eye level.
“It does,” Felix said, looking past Great-Uncle Thorne’s voluminous white eyebrows to the twinkling object across the room.
“It, uh, impacts me,” he managed.
And it did. Of course.
Maisie and Felix had left the Ziff twins in the Congo facing all sorts of danger: wild beasts, poisonous snakes, tropical diseases. While they had lived in homey comfort with Amelia Earhart in Iowa, fishing and riding rides at the state fair, the Ziff twins had been dodging calamity. At least Felix hoped they’d dodged calamity. He couldn’t let himself think the worst. And now Great-Uncle Thorne had insisted they accompany him here to The Treasure Chest, even though their father was downstairs, no longer engaged to Agatha the Great, sitting with their surprised mother.
But despite all of that, Felix could not stop staring at the object, which as he slipped out of Great-Uncle Thorne’s grip and inched toward it, appeared to be a highly decorated egg.
“What in tarnation are you staring at?” Great-Uncle Thorne said so loudly that the globe on a shelf vibrated.
“That,” Felix said, pointing.
Maisie, who had been quietly listening to Great-Uncle Thorne’s hypotheses about what might have happened to the Ziff twins, stepped forward and followed Felix’s pointing finger with her eyes.
“What?” she asked, unimpressed.
“Honestly, boy,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, shaking his head, “your friends . . . No! Your cousins! . . . are missing, and you suddenly become mesmerized by a gaggle of objects.”
“Not a gaggle of objects,” Felix said. “Just the egg. The one that’s . . .” He struggled for the right word. Twinkling sounded too light, glowing too strong. “Shining,” he said finally, though that wasn’t quite right, either.
“A shining egg?” Maisie repeated.
Great-Uncle Thorne tapped his walking stick on the floor three times, loud. It happened to be the walking stick Maisie liked least, with a crystal globe at the top, each continent etched in miniature on it, and along the length of the ivory stick itself the name of every country in the world had been carved. There were so many countries that their names carved there like that gave the impression of an intricate design. But up close you could make out the words—many of them, like Rhodesia, no longer even countries. I think it’s cool, Felix had said when Maisie told him the walking stick gave her the creeps. Countries that don’t even exist anymore? she’d said with a shudder. And a stick made out of some poor elephant’s tusk?
“Actually,” Great-Uncle Thorne said when he saw her staring at it now, “this walking stick was made by a witch doctor in Uganda for my father.”
“It’s illegal to kill elephants for their tusks, you know,” Maisie told him.