Chapter 13 - We Found Mike Before Celeste Returned
We sat inside the maintenance truck for ten minutes before going anywhere.
Mike needed water.
Food.
A few minutes where nobody demanded answers from him.
When he was ready, I asked him to tell me what happened from the beginning.
He had noticed the swapped books almost a month earlier.
Not because of their monetary value.
Because I had taught him to recognize them.
The first reproduction smelled too new.
The second had machine-cut edges.
The third had a title stamp positioned slightly too high.
Mike began checking.
Seven books were wrong.
Then one afternoon he followed Blaine through the service door and saw the authentic volumes being packed into Blue Heron crates.
Celeste caught him.
At first she tried to convince him the books were being restored.
Mike didn’t believe her.
So he did something no adult expected.
He took The Lantern Boy off the shelf before they could.
“Why that one?”
“Because Blaine said on the phone they couldn’t get paid without the lantern.”
There it was.
The anchor piece.
The final book needed to close the private sale.
“What did you do with it?”
Mike looked at me almost apologetically.
“I gave it to Hadley.”
I blinked.
“She had the book?”
“For about five minutes.”
“What happened next?”
“I told her we were playing shelf game. I told her where to put it without saying why.”
He made Hadley carry The Lantern Boy somewhere in the study while Celeste was downstairs.
Then Mike asked her to draw the route back in symbols.
Hadley thought it was a game.
That protected her.
If Celeste questioned her, Hadley could honestly say she didn’t know where the book was.
Because she didn’t know what the symbols meant.
“And the desk?” I asked.
Mike smiled faintly.
“Fake clue.”
“You knew Celeste might see the drawing.”
“Yes.”
“So you told Hadley to draw the lantern under my desk.”
“She searches obvious places first.”
Eight years old.
Terrified.
And thinking three moves ahead because adults had failed him.
I felt proud and ashamed at the same time.
“Where is it really?”
Mike shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
“You just said you told Hadley where to put it.”
“I told her with the shelf game.”
He looked at me.
“She remembers pictures better than words.”
Of course.
Hadley had physically hidden the book.
But only the drawing could tell us where.
And Celeste had shredded almost all of it.
Then Mike said one more thing.
“Grandpa, she wasn’t just selling the books.”
I stared at him.
“What else?”
“She said after tonight there wouldn’t be anything left for you to compare the copies to.”
That mattered.
The seven originals were not simply being sold one by one.
They were being moved together.
Once gone, proving which replacements were fake became much harder.
Celeste wasn’t just completing a sale.
She was erasing the reference set.
May you like
And The Lantern Boy was the last piece holding the whole deception open.
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