The Oak Hotel - Watty Awards 2013 Finalist

Chapter One - Five Notebooks

Chapter One

Five Notebooks

The soft ring of a brass bell from the front desk below filled the still air. In one hour, the Autumn Harbor library would close. Lincoln Torres sighed. He had been up and down the aisles all afternoon, but still could not find what he was searching for. He had even used a special pass (signed by both his parents and his fifth grade teacher) to explore the areas of the library restricted to those under the age of twelve. Not that he was looking for anything inappropriate. There just wasn’t much about the history of Autumn Harbor in the children’s literature section.

He’d been tempted to ask Ms. Ruttier, the librarian, for help, but decided against it for now. Lea Ruttier would have been the ideal person to aid in this quest, but he would have to talk to Kayleigh about it first.

Tucking himself into the most distant corner of the upper stacks, Lincoln shrugged off his backpack and pulled down the front zipper to retrieve a compact walkie-talkie. A birthday gift, this small yet powerful device had a range of almost five miles. Setting it to channel 3, he pressed the SEND button and said softly, “Kayleigh, are you there?”

After a brief pause and a snap of static, a soft voice replied.

“Of course I’m here. Did you find anything?”

The voice on the other end belonged to his best friend, Kayleigh Lambert. She would have been right there by his side, aiding in the search, but was instead at home with a fever.

“I looked everywhere in the local history section. I spent an hour on the computer and found over twenty books in other areas, but nothing feels right. No mention of another town just like Autumn Harbor. If we only had a title…”

Of course, it always came down to this. They did not know the book’s title.

About a month ago, Kayleigh had passed a note to Lincoln during school. The actual passing of the folded paper did not occur during class (which would have caused undue gossip among the other students) but instead in the hallway just before the bell rang. While their math teacher, Mr. Tegeyo, chalked an assortment of shapes and equations on the front board, Lincoln pulled the note from his backpack and opened it inside chapter five of his text book.

Lincoln,

Mom and Dad need to sell my Grandparents’ old house by Christmas. All the big stuff has to go, but Mom says I can look around and keep anything else I find. She even gave me an extra key to the back door this morning. Are you up for an adventure?

Kayleigh

Smiling, Lincoln refolded the note and tucked it away. Looking across the classroom to his right, he found Kayleigh smiling at him from her desk. She knew he couldn’t resist an offer like this and he smiled back.

When school let out that afternoon, their adventure began. The old house on Oak Drive had been boarded up for years. Kayleigh had never met her Grandmother and was too young to remember her Grandfather. The few mental snapshots she did have of them were based on a blurry handful of crumpled photographs.

Upon entering the sleeping house, Kayleigh and Lincoln breathed in the dusty scent of discovery. Every corner promised something new and interesting. Each room was an uncharted land. By the end of the week, having gone to the house every day after school, they finally unearthed the treasure that would lead Lincoln to the library.

Hidden in a wooden soda crate was a stained, baker’s box containing five notebooks, the personal journals of Kayleigh’s Grandmother, Laura Corwin. They had spent the entire weekend reading through them. It was an amazing time, especially for Kayleigh. Here was a part of her past she knew nothing about—stories about her family that had been completely forgotten or never passed down.