The Secret Cellar by Michael D. Beil Read Free Book Online

street—grrrrr. Makes me want to go over there and pull the stupid thing down.”
    “Back to the worthies,” Margaret says. “Malcolm, the books you saw, were they in one of the boxes that Marcus Klinger bought?”
    “Klinger? Yes, I’m pretty sure he bought all the books. And overpaid for them, I’d have to say. He seemed determined to buy them. Same thing with that blasted walking stick. Had to have it, too. Just who is this Marcus Klinger character, anyway?”
    “He’s a jerk, that’s who he is,” I say. “He owns this cruddy little used-book store up on Eighty-First.”
    “My goodness, Sophie,” says Malcolm. “You are not having a good week, are you?”
    “Tell me about it,” I grumble.
    Margaret tells him the story of our experience in Sturm & Drang Books, and then I bring him up to date on the paper hidden away in Dad’s fountain pen.
    “And now we have to go back for more Sturm and Drang,” says Margaret.
    “What? Why?” cries Leigh Ann.
    “Because he has
Nine Worthy Men
,” Margaret says. “We don’t have to buy it, we just need to look at it for a minute—if he’ll let us.”
    “Well, this time please make sure your hands are clean,” Becca teases.
    “Have you tried the library?” Malcolm asks.
    Margaret nods. “I checked online. Believe it or not, they don’t have it. Maybe they used to have one, but someone lost it, and they couldn’t replace it. It’s been out of print for a long time.”
    “Okay, then. How about the Strand?” Malcolm asks. “What do their ads say they have, eighteen miles of books? If they don’t have it, I’ll eat my hat.”
    “You’d better be careful, Malcolm,” I say. “I think you already owe us one good hat-eating. Those tweed caps of yours must taste really good.”
    “That’s a great idea,” Margaret says. “Why don’t you come with us?”
    Malcolm glances toward the kitchen, shrugs, and pulls his filthy apron over his head. “I was going to bake some bread, but it can wait. And Elizabeth called to say she’s going out to dinner with her friend Alessandra, so I’m on my own for dinner, anyway.”
    On the way to the Strand Book Store at Broadway and Twelfth, we decide to turn the search for
Nine Worthy Men
into a competition, with the losers treating the winners to ice cream. It’s Margaret and Malcolm versus Becca, Leigh Ann, and me as we hit the doors running.
    There’s a good reason Margaret picked Malcolm instead of me to be her teammate: she knows that when I walk into the Strand, I’m like a moth in a room filledwith flashing lights, flitting from aisle to aisle and table to table. Self-control? HA! It’s a bookstore with eighteen miles of books! Within thirty seconds, I have completely forgotten what I’m looking for. Nine … something, I try to remind myself, but, really, who cares, because I just stumbled into a whole section that should be called “Sophie’s Choices”—so many books by my favorite authors, mingling with a kajillion others that I simply must have. Right now.
    Leigh Ann is about to zoom past me, but she puts on the brakes when she sees me with my nose in an old hardcover. “Did you find it already?” she asks.
    “What? Oh, um, no. I was just … This is a classic,” I say, showing her the cover of Walter Farley’s
The Black Stallion
.
    “Sophie! Come on!”
    “Okay, okay,” I say, carefully reshelving the book and running after her.
    I make it about thirty feet before I spot something out of the corner of my eye—one of those red notebooks, which I just love. This one is jammed in between a couple of worn copies of
The Catcher in the Rye
. When I’m sure that no one is watching me, I take the notebook from the shelf and glance at the cover. There’s a piece of masking tape with “ DO YOU DARE ?” written across it in black marker.
    Do I dare? Well, of course I dare. I flip it open to thefirst page, where I find the following message, done in neat cursive:
    I’ve left some clues for