September bit her lip. “Ell … did you steal that book from the Great Grand Library?”
The Wyverary let his whisker-mustache drop instantly. His eyes filled up with hurt. “How can you ask me that? September! I would never steal a book! I wouldn’t even take a book from a cabinet marked Free Books unless I could track down the owner and make sure I was really allowed to. I would especially never steal a book from my Gigi!” Ell blushed. It went all the way up his cheeks and over the top of his head, turning him cantaloupe-colored as it went. “She said I could call her that,” he whispered. “It stands for Great Grandmother. I know I ought to have come as soon as I heard Greenwich Mean Time sounding off at you, but I couldn’t stop looking at the Human section. So many books I’d never heard of! So many titles I couldn’t understand? What’s a Wuthering? Why is it Important to Be Earnest? I am always earnest. Why would anyone not be? I tried to skim a few of them even though I know they’re Special Collections and I oughtn’t go grubbing them up without a librarian present, but I was so excited, and I was very careful, and claws aren’t nearly so grubby as fingers and I just wanted to find out about the House of Mirth so badly, because it sounds like a wonderful place. And just as I was about to find out what was so great about Mr. Gatsby, a great huge candlestick with no candles in it leaned over and rested itself against my shoulder in just the gentlest way. Like when you lean your head against my shin sometimes. And the Great Grand Library whispered to me, because that’s any library’s favorite way of talking. She said…” A-Through-L had to stop for a moment. Turquoise tears swam up in his eyes. “She said I was a good librarian. She said my father would be so proud of me if he could have seen my alphabetizing and my powerful shhh and the size of my tail. She said I could visit her anytime I wanted and call her Gigi and next time she would make me cookies and let me use the Old Stamp. That’s the first one Gigi ever had. Christopher Wren made it for her out of mushroom. It’s her way of saying she trusts me, you see. The Old Stamp is very delicate. And I am very big.” Blunderbuss sopped up his tears with her paw. She understood all about this sort of thing. She wanted the boy who made her to be proud of her, too. Ell made a sound between a laugh and a hiccup. “And then she said that as she’d missed all my birthdays, I could take one book to be my very own. My book. I’ve never owned a book before. A library’s books belong to the library, not the librarian. She said I could have any one I wanted except The Canterbury Tales, as that one’s her favorite.”
“Why on earth did you pick Agatha Christie?” asked September, who thought murder mysteries were a little ghastly, though whenever her mother finished one, she snatched it right up.
Ell toed the sand bashfully. “Well … it sounded very exciting. And it had a lot of exclamation points in it, which is one of the signs of an excellent book. And I didn’t like how Mr. Gatsby talked to people, when I was flipping through it. But mostly, mostly everything was blue on the front. And I like blue.”
The Wyverary looked fondly at Saturday, who smiled uncertainly back.
“Don’t even try to get it off him. You’d think it was his egg.” The scrap-yarn wombat munched resentfully on a fresh coconut.
Ell raced on. “But don’t you see? We know how to solve a mystery now. We know the method. We know the rules. We’ve taken the case, Buss and me, and we mean to solve it. We’ll find the Heart of Fairyland before you can say denouement! It’s all in here.” He tapped the cover of The Mystery of the Blue Train with one claw—but gently, so as not to damage the dust jacket. “I’ve got everything we need: the pince-nez, the mustache, the patent leather shoes—well, I don’t know what patent leather is, but my claws are black and shiny and at the ends of my feet so I think that’s good enough, and I managed to make up for it with the turnip pocket watch.” He displayed the purple turnip hanging from his belt, which he’d sliced so that it could open on a hinge and stuck a piece of coconut shell into the meat of the turnip as a sundial. “That part seemed odd to me, but I was very careful to do just as Monsieur Poirot does. When it comes to magical talismans, you can never tell which bit does the heavy lifting. You can never leave anything out.”
September had never had a watch of her own, so she couldn’t tell her friend that people used to call certain kinds of pocket watches turnips on account of their shapes, and because turnip is more fun to say than watch. But let’s keep that to ourselves, shall we? Ell did his best—and I couldn’t bear to break it to him. Could you?
“We take turns with the talismans,” Blunderbuss said pointedly. “One of us might catch something the other missed.”
September shook her head in disbelief. “All right, I give in. What have you deduced, Mr. P? Where is the Heart of Fairyland?”