Innocence: A Novel by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online

nine-foot-by-five-foot painting of the library’s main entrance as it had looked when decorated for its first Christmas in 1905. The painting seemed to be fixed in place. But a series of small steel levers, cunningly recessed in the frame’s ornate moldings, would release a latch if pressed one at a time in the correct order, thereafter allowing the painting to swing outward on a hidden piano hinge.
    The second concealed chamber, likewise beautifully finished with the highest quality woodwork, featured another oil painting, this one of two children: a boy of seven, a girl of nine, each holding a book. The plaque on the frame named them— KATHERINE ANNE LEBOW / JAMES ALLEN LEBOW —and revealed that they died on the same day as their mother.
    Through research, I had learned that Mary Margaret Lebow had been a librarian when the architect met and married her. Years later, on a visit to New York City, while her husband remained here to continue overseeing the building of the library, she and the children joined a few of her relatives—and more than thirteen hundred other passengers—for a day trip on the steamboat
General Slocum
. They intended to cruise leisurely from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, along the East River to Long Island Sound. They had not gone far before a fast-moving blaze broke out aboard the vessel. Hundreds of terrified passengers leaped into the water. Few could swim. Those who did not die by fire died by drowning—more than a thousand. June 15, 1904, was the date of the greatest tragedy in the history of New York, until September 11, 2001.
    Most of those who perished that day had been members of St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, at 623 East Sixth Street, towhich Mary Margaret’s relatives belonged. In their grief, other men might have judged God unspeakably cruel and might have turned away from Him forever, but apparently not John Lebow. In each of those two secret spaces, flanking each oil painting, inlaid in the woodwork were gilded crosses. These painstakingly created shrines to his wife, the librarian, and to their children were also testaments to the architect’s enduring hope.
    I switched on the flashlight, shone it upon the large painting that also served as a door, and spoke loud enough to be heard by the girl if she sat in the haven behind it. “My name is Addison, although no one in the world knows it—except now you. If you’re in there with John Lebow’s lost children, I want you to know that in a different sense, I was a lost child, too, and I am still lost, although not a child anymore.”
    No response was forthcoming.
    “I don’t mean you any harm. If I intended to hurt you, I would press the three concealed levers in the proper order and pull you out of there right now. I want only to help you if I can. Maybe you think you don’t need help. Sometimes, I think I don’t need it, either. But we all do. We all need help.”
    In the painting, evergreen boughs were wound around the columns that flanked the entrance to the library, and wreaths with huge red bows hung on each of the four tall bronze doors. Snow fell into a white-blanketed street, and the world looked more right than perhaps it had ever been since 1905.
    “If you don’t want to talk with me, I’ll never bother you again. I love the library too much to give it up, so I’ll visit some nights, but I won’t look for you. Take a little time to think about it. If you
do
want to talk, for the next half an hour, I’ll be in the main reading room, among the stacks, where the bad man couldn’t catch you,where you ran just like a dancer dancing. I’ll be in the aisle with Charles Dickens.”
    I knew her to be bold and quick and not a mouse. But a mouse behind the wainscot, smelling a cat and being smelled by it, just a thin width of cherrywood away, could not have been more quiet than this girl.

11
    IN THE MAIN STACKS, EACH AISLE HAD ITS OWN light switch, and I clicked on only the one. The high-mounted sconces