Ripped From the Pages by Kate Carlisle Read Free Book Online

eight
     years old at the time. To this day, I thought of Abraham’s muscular arms whenever
     I struggled to press a book.
    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 andblotched 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.