I pulled the stool over to the center worktable where I set down the Jules Verne book. Then I had to go through every drawer in the cluttered room to find Abraham’s standing magnifying glass. After ten minutes, I finally found it jammed in a cupboard with his punches and brushes and a myriad of other tools. He’d always been kind of a slob, although he preferred to call himself an unfettered free spirit.
Under the magnifying glass, the Jules Verne book looked even worse than I’d originally thought. I could see every little flaw along its spine and knew I would have to reconstruct it. The six raised bands had become flattened from years of handling, and all the elaborate gilding had faded away. The crown of the spine was tattered and splitting away from the front hinge. The morocco leather was in decent condition overall, but the two leather corners on the front cover had begun to fray along the edges and would need to be replaced. I anticipated using all new leather on the spine and corners rather than trying to match what little was worth saving.
Opening the front cover, I could see that the marble endpapers were in remarkably good condition with no chips or tears. The pattern was a beautiful blend of dark blue and burgundy swirls and eddies. The flyleaf—those first few blank pages of a book—was another story. On the front flyleaf, a child had signed his name across the page in bold, blue ink.
Anton Benoit.
The back flyleaf had suffered much worse abuse. Here, Anton had scrawled a long message using rust-colored ink. At the end of the message there was a date, le 6 avril 1906, and a place, La Croix Saint-Just, France. And there were two childish signatures scrawled at the bottom, Anton Benoit and Jean Pierre Renaud.
Jean Pierre: The name of the dead man. He’d been a young boy when he signed his name to this page. What had brought him all the way from France to California? And what had he been doing here that got him killed? How did he know Guru Bob’s grandfather?
What the heck did it all mean?
The rust-colored ink was uneven and hard to read. Thick and blotched in some spots, scratchy and thin in others, and in a few places, it faded altogether. I stared at it through the magnifying glass for a long time, holding the book closer to the lens to figure out what it was about the ink that bothered me. Abruptly I figured it out and dropped the book in disgust.
??Blood,” I said. “Ew.”
Since I’d grown up with brothers, I knew it made perfect sense that two boys, probably nine or ten years old, would want to cut their skin open and draw their own blood to use as ink.
I shook my head. “Idiots.”
The date and the boys’ names were about the extent of my ability to translate the page of French. The scratchy handwriting didn’t help, but after staring at the immature penmanship for another minute, I thought I could make out the first phrase, Nous promettons solennellement.
“We promise . . . solemnly?” I shrugged. “Close enough.”
It sounded like the two boys were pledging an oath or something to each other.
I tried to recall my high school French, but it wasn’t coming back to me. Some years ago, I’d memorized a bunch of French phrases for a trip to Paris. Unfortunately, nowhere in the boys’ message did it say anything about where to find les toilettes, so that didn’t help, either.
Reminding myself of the book’s subject matter, I wondered if maybe Anton and Jean Pierre had pledged to make their own journey to the center of the earth. Since I had lived with two brothers, this sounded like something a couple of boys might vow to do after reading an enthralling adventure story.
But did they really have to destroy the value of this book by writing all over it? Yes, of course they did. Children were notoriously dangerous to the health of a fine book.
I made a mental note to ask Derek to translate the French words for me, and then moved on to study the inner pages. The paper was thick and white with some foxing throughout. The occasional instance of reddish brown spots was to be expected on a book this old. Fortunately, there were no more scrawled writings from Anton or Jean Pierre on any other pages.
I did a quick survey of the rest of the book and discovered an old piece of notepaper folded and wedged between two pages, marking the beginning of chapter forty-five. At first I thought it was a bookmark, but when I unfolded it, I found a diagram with a list of numbers and more words written in French. Again, my pitiful schoolgirl French didn’t help. I would have to show this to Derek, too. Naturally, he spoke flawless French among the other hundred or so languages he seemed to know.
The big school clock on the studio wall ticked off the time. That old thing had to be thirty years old, I thought fondly, realizing I’d spent over two hours here. I had to go home and get ready for dinner with Austin and Robin, so I found a short stack of soft cloths in one of Abraham’s drawers, used two of them to wrap around the book for protection, and slipped the book into my tote bag.