Enchanted Ivy by Sarah Beth Durst Read Free Book Online

none of the books in this section had a publisher's logo on the spine. Maybe this was some sort of odd, self-published fan fiction stash? Or, ooh, maybe these were instruction manuals for some kind of elaborate homegrown Dungeons & Dragons game. Or fake dissertations. She bet the authors were the Old Boys themselves. If her grandfather (who read only literary fiction by either semidepressed writers or authors who eschewed all adverbs) had written one of these, she was going to tease him mercilessly.
    Lily scanned the section. Cane ... Card ... Carr ... aha!
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    She pulled a book off the shelf and read the title: Dryads, a History by William Carter.
    She felt as if the world froze as she stared at the author's name. Grandpa's name was Richard. This book was written by a William Carter.
    It was written by her father.
    For an instant, she thought she must be hallucinating. But that was impossible. She'd taken the medicine. It was only that the book had surprised her, that was all. She hadn't expected to encounter anything that her father had done or touched. Her fingers traced lightly over his name, embossed in gold print on the soft black leather. Her hands trembled.
    She shouldn't be so surprised. She knew that her father had been a student here. That was one of the few facts she did know about him. She didn't know what he'd looked like. (Mom had destroyed the photos years ago, though she had no memory of doing it or why.) Lily didn't even know his real name. (He'd changed his last name to Mom's when they married. Grandpa said her father had had "issues" with his own family.) He'd died in a car accident a few months after Lily was born.
    Hands still shaking, Lily opened the book. She flipped through sketches of trees--everything from bonsai to evergreens, each with a figure beside it. The figures were clearly fantastical. Some had leaves for hair. Others had twigs for arms. She skimmed a chapter entitled "Powers of a Tree
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    Spirit, Mastery of Plants" and decided her father had been a creative man. Also, kind of a dork.
    She didn't see what any of this had to do with a key. Setting her father's book down on the card catalog, she pulled out the W drawer. She rifled through the cards, looking for an author whose last name began with "Wil" and call numbers that matched the ones on the Unseeing Reader's clue. One minute later, she had it:
    Author: Wilson, Woodrow.
    Title: The Gargoyles of Princeton: Lessons from the Literate Ape.
    "You guys think you're hilarious, don't you?" she muttered. There was no way that Woodrow Wilson, former president of the United States, had written an entire dissertation-length book on gargoyles ... unless he'd been a member of Vineyard Club? Could these books be part of a hundred-plus-year-old in-joke?
    She studied the subtitle: Lessons from the Literate Ape. She chewed on her lower lip, thinking. She'd heard that name before. Hadn't the tour guide mentioned a gargoyle called the Literate Ape?
    This had to be her next clue.
    She couldn't wait to tell Tye.
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    CHAPTER Three
    Lily fled Firestone Library into bright, beautiful, and not-at-all-creepy sunlight. As she emerged, she heard ringing in her ears again--she hadn't realized that it had stopped inside the library. She shook her head as if she could shake out the sound and scanned the plaza for Tye.
    She scolded herself for being so eager to find him. He'd joked about rogue book carts, but he hadn't warned her about the bookshelves. She had to remember that, as cute as he might be, he wasn't necessarily on her side.
    She spotted him across the plaza. One foot on the chapel steps, he was looking up, talking to someone she couldn't see. He was probably talking about the pathetic high school girl who'd had to be practically hit over the head with the Orange Key Tour clue and who'd nearly had heart failure over a few remote-controlled bookshelves.
    Approaching him, she caught a few words: "... old worm ...
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    I don't know why I even try ...