{ BOOK 1 of the SANITY SERIES }
Secrets are made to stay hidden, and people will take any means necessary to keep it that way.
But to April Levesque and Derek Matthews, silence has no place in their worlds.
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D e r e k
M a t t h e w s
Duke is roused. We hear him mounting the crude stairs, scampering inside and I meticulously shut the attic door, cringing at the grating grouching. April is gobsmacked, motionless at the tens and tens of books in all directions, bound in curved and linear shelves.
Ladders slope on the stacks — to glide and ride across, to climb and grab the highest records. Cobwebs embellish the flat ceiling, spiders in the shadowed, angled corners. A gyrating staircase leads to the bottom floor — the whole library consumes the right-end of the building, from the top to the ground. A recently-installed electric stove cackles to life, heat steadily conflicting the fall chilliness, and the single, bow window is a panorama of Florence Lake, its flowers like heads poking through the water level.
"These books—" I plucked out one of the original, ancient copies of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. "—are extremely old. Lived through the Victorian and Elizabethan Era. They're worth millions." The entire lake house and its components approximately cost fifty million pounds. I flick through the pages. "Knowledge that was touched by my forefathers and mothers."
"Like the ones who owned this lake house?"
"Yes." I perceive blotches of grime and dirt — accidental fingerprints of Carlyle or his wife, or of the rescued slaves, or of ancient Everstons. "We have more lake houses across the globe, full of hidden histories. My house has one. I'll show it to you, if you want."
The largest library was in Wilfred Everston's Estate.
His house was burned with fifty rescued children. It was decades ago, and yet I hear the screams, blubbers and agony that haunted the black-ashen walls, as if it is a flashback of a past life. There are stories that my great-uncle had his fences crucially high — not to keep people in, but to protect. To keep the enemies out.
I pull out a burgundy-red hardback opus, the cover blank. "This is one of my great-uncles remnants."
Pages of his artwork: himself, his friends, his male and female lovers, his rescued and his beloved sceneries.
I showed Florence's handmade logbook. Sixty, crammed pages, a hundred other vacant, longing for words. A registration of all the freedoms: the names, the signatures, the dates—
