Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

One month earlier . . .

The Dawn Star Hotel stood proud, even in the rain. A muggy storm swelled above the city. Tim was sitting in the hotel’s huge, well-lit lobby, looking out at the flurry of rush-hour workers making their way home.

It was the first day of the first week of summer vacation. As usual, Tim was drawing. Hunched over a bird’s-eye view of the umbrellas outside, he scribbled away. As he was a bit of a messy artist, his picture didn’t really resemble the rainy street scene at all. But he knew what it was supposed to be, and surely that was what mattered.

“Don’t you touch that sofa!” Elisa shrieked, rushing across the lobby.

She barreled toward Tim, as if his getting marks on the cushions were an emergency of giant proportions. After wetting her cloth with the bottle of spray she was clutching, she began firmly scrubbing Tim’s hands. She huffed when she saw pencil smudges on his face. Tim frowned at the smell of the cloth as it scraped up and down his cheek. This wasn’t the first time she had cleaned him in the same manner she cleaned any other object. In wide-eyed horror he watched a huge drip of soapy water splash onto his masterpiece. He slammed his sketch pad shut.

“I have told you more than once about sitting here,” Elisa said.

“I was drawing the people outside.”

“The consultant is arriving shortly. The last thing he’ll want to see is you sitting in the lobby covered in pencil lead.”

“I doubt that’s the last thing he’ll want to see,” Tim muttered. Nonetheless, he gathered his pencils and stood to leave.

“And, Tim, don’t touch the cakes in the function room. They’re for the staff--Donald’s called a meeting.”

Tim headed out of the reception area, pushing his way through the broad oak doors into the long red-and-gold-carpeted hallway. Eyes fixed on the floor, he let his imagination get the better of him. In his mind, this wasn’t a carpet at all; this was a river of lava, and the spirals were his stepping-stones. Walking on the lighter parts would, therefore, result in a grizzly death. So he hopped from rock to rock, past the ground-floor rooms, each with the same door but a different, ascending bronze number.

Hang on, what’s this? Delicious smells from the function room at his side slowed his pace. Chocolate? Certainly. Strawberry sponge cake? Without a doubt. He stopped. Tasty, fresh, and, most appealing of all, forbidden cakes. How could he possibly resist such temptation?

But wait. Tim spotted Mary, the decidedly dumpling-shaped head chambermaid, at the supply closet, preparing to do her rounds, the slight whiff of bleach and fresh towels rising from her cart.

“Hello,” he said. She just gave a big smile in return.

Mary didn’t speak much English, but she could muster enough to rat him out to Elisa if the truth about this cakey mission ever came to light. So he waited patiently on his rock, like some kind of confectionary ninja, with glowing lava licking at his feet. Mary just trampled through the bubbling magma as if it weren’t even there, pushing her cart along and round the corner, out of sight.

Above him, mounted on the wall near the ceiling, was a security camera, one of hundreds recently installed at the hotel. It gently turned its lens up and down the hall. Tim waited a moment, until it was facing away, and then approached the function room door.

This kind of heist was a fairly typical pastime. Living where he did, at the Dawn Star, Tim had to make his own fun. After all, not really having any friends his own age (that being ten, as of last month), he spent the vast majority of his time either alone or with adults. But that was fine; he had decided a long time ago that he preferred his own company anyway. Paper, pencil, and escaping into his own imagination--this is what Tim thought made him happy. It had never crossed his mind that he might need more.

The hotel had been Tim’s home for nearly three years now, since his adoption. It sat in the center of Glassbridge, a quaint city full of history, complete with old buildings, wonky roofs, cobblestone streets, rusted iron railings, and statues of people on horseback. The place was to tourists what jam is to wasps, so the hotel was always full and the streets always busy.

Inside the function room, all the royal-red chairs were set out around a long, well-polished table. Still clutching his sketch pad under his arm and his pencils in his hand, Tim proceeded. There were some tables on the other side of the room, full of all kinds of food--platters of perfectly triangular sandwiches and, as expected, cake. There was also a display of the Dawn Star chocolate fudge puddings, individually presented in little glass bowls, complete with the hotel’s logo on the side. Sadly, the layout was symmetrical, meaning one missing would be noticed. But then he spotted a tray of large chocolate brownies. Like playing a game of Jenga, he picked one up from the back of the pyramid and carefully removed it without disturbing the others. Still warm, he noticed. Excellent.

It was time to leave. He turned on his heel but stopped dead in his tracks, dropping his pad. The path was blocked by an old man wearing a pair of thick glasses, a rough lab coat over a white shirt, and a tie. Some kind of scientist, Tim thought. The sketch pad had fallen open on the floor; the man looked down at the umbrella picture, crouching to retrieve it.

“Indeed, yes, I could have done with one of those,” he said, passing the pad back.

His lab coat was wet, his shoulders peppered with raindrops. He had curled wisps of gray hair bursting from the sides of his head, and his gold-framed glasses had those little half-moon magnifiers in the bottom for reading.

Tim took the pad with his free hand, without uttering a word.

“They are umbrellas, aren’t they?” the man asked. “In your drawing?”

“Yes, they are,” Tim replied.

As he rarely drew things he saw in the real world, he was surprised to hear that this picture was recognizable. In fact, the only other real thing he tended to sketch was his all-time favorite animal: the finger monkey. About the size of a mouse, finger monkeys are so small that they can wrap around your finger; hence the name. Generally, though, Tim did some of his best work entirely from the depths of his mind. Reality offered just a dash of inspiration. Tim would conjure up distant lands and animals that, to his knowledge, had never existed. His recent creations included a rather compelling bat-dolphin-scissor-pig and a fairly brilliant chalk and charcoal rendition of Bob the Mexican cow-snail. There was a fantastic world, endless and vibrant, enclosed inside the hard cover of his favorite sketch pad.

“Hmm, yes . . . Can you keep a secret?” the man whispered, bringing Tim’s attention back. He peered down through thick lenses. “I’ve come in here to steal a cake. Indeed.”

“Me too,” Tim said, showing the man his loot, pleased to have a partner in crime.

“I didn’t see you, and you didn’t see me, right? Promise?”

“Promise.” Before he turned to leave, Tim wondered what a person like this--clearly some kind of professor--was doing here. “So, why are you at the Dawn Star?” he asked.

“Ah, now”--the man shook his head--“let’s just say that, like our little theft, it’s top-secret. . . .”

Chapter 2

Tim’s bedroom, formally room twenty, had exactly the same layout as all the other guest suites in the building but looked more “lived-in,” with considerably more mess. Sitting cross-legged on the end of his bed, he put the final touches on his drawing, turning Elisa’s accidental watermark into a puddle on the pavement.

The phone on his bedside table rang. It was Elisa, calling him for dinner. She often contacted him on the hotel’s internal system. This made Tim feel even more like a guest and less like her son. Elisa and Chris Green, who ran the Dawn Star, had adopted him a week or two before they’d moved in. At the time it was a dream come true for them, as Elisa had wanted to run a hotel since she was little. This confused Tim because she never seemed to be happy here--in fact, just the opposite. She was constantly anxious, spending much of her time upset about money, about how hard things were, or about how she didn’t have time for any of Tim’s nonsense--“nonsense” being virtually anything Tim said or did. This worked out quite nicely, as he’d much rather have sat by himself in some corner somewhere than be forced to spend time with Elisa.

As for Chris, well, Tim liked him a lot, but they were very rarely together, as Chris spent most of his time away on business. Working for some Internet company, he was regularly jetting around the world, to sell or buy or look at or talk about . . . stuff. But when he was at the hotel, he was always asking what Tim was up to, and he always cared about the answer. It was funny to think that Chris would be the ideal parent if he were there more, and Elisa would be the ideal parent if she were there less.

And although Tim knew the adoption was a permanent arrangement, that they had indeed signed documents meaning they were his legal guardians in every sense, he still couldn’t help feeling as though they might not be his parents forever. Sooner or later, he suspected, he’d be thrown back into one of the countless institutions through which he’d passed.

More than anything, though, Tim found the hotel a rather dull place, despite the corridor of lava. Even a brother or sister might have brightened things up.

“I’m too busy for children,” Elisa had said, sighing, when he’d suggested that. She’d followed it with a guilty frown, as, of course, Tim knew this to be all too true.

Chris and Elisa occupied what used to be the biggest room in the hotel, which had been converted into living quarters when the Greens had taken over. There they’d meet as a “family” to enjoy a quiet and generally tense meal together.

That night was no different. Elisa moaned for a while about the fact that the hotel’s head chef was leaving, and complained about how expensive things were getting, particularly the new security cameras that she was having installed, and the added costs of the consultant she’d hired. She also told Tim that an important guest was staying in room nineteen, opposite his bedroom, so he should be quiet.

Chris had cooked, which meant the food was questionable. The sausages looked like coal, and the mash was . . . well, Tim couldn’t be sure if it even was potato. He much preferred it when Elisa cooked, even if it created extra tension.

After dinner Tim returned to his bedroom, and the moment he closed the door, he heard some commotion in the hallway. Using his swivel chair, which he knelt on after rolling it across his carpet, he looked through the peephole. He spotted a man outside room nineteen carrying a huge cardboard box. It was the scientist, his cake-thief friend, and clearly the person Elisa had mentioned. Tim was intrigued. The old man was fumbling with the lock while balancing the giant box in his other hand. It looked far too heavy for him, and he seemed all the more comical through the peephole--distorted and stretched.

“Come on, you slippery, wiggly little . . . ,” the old man mumbled. The key tumbled from his hand.

Tim clambered off his chair and opened his door.

“Would you like some help with that?” he asked.

The man turned slowly, straining his neck. He smiled as best he could, the weight of the box visible on his face.

“Ah, hello. Indeed, yes, if you could retrieve the key, there, on the floor.” He pointed with a tilt of his head and a madman’s wink. Tim crouched and picked it up.

“Now, yes,” he continued, “if you could throw it into my mouth, I think I might be able to unlock the door with my teeth. . . .” Leaning forward, he held his lips open and waited.

“Um, I could . . . just open the door for you?”

“Hmm, no . . . wait . . . Yes! Much better idea. Let’s do that.”

After Tim had let him in, the man carefully placed the cardboard box on the floor and stood up straight with a groan. “Oh, oh, that’s better. . . . Nice to get my back upright again. It’s you, isn’t it? It is.” He squinted through his glasses.

“It’s me?”

“You, yes, indeed, the boy. I hope you kept your promise and didn’t tell anyone about . . .”

“I didn’t. Although, Elisa saw chocolate on my face, so I was discovered.” All hell had broken loose over dinner. Elisa had said Tim never did as he was told and never listened to what she said . . . or something like that.

“Oh yes, of course . . . wait . . . Elisa?” He frowned.

“She’s the owner, the manager,” Tim said.

“The manager of the brownies? What a fine job.”

“No.” Tim laughed. “She’s the manager of the hotel. My adoptive mother. She takes care of me. Well, she feeds me and provides me with a room to sleep in.”

“Oh yes, yes. I know Elisa. I am glad you kept your promise. A promise between friends . . . oh my, it is not to be broken. I am George Eisenstone,” he said, extending his hand to Tim.

“Timothy Hart.”

They shook hands.

“Elisa said I shouldn’t disturb you,” Tim added, turning to leave.

“Ah, no, no.” He smiled. “This is my room. I have paid no small sum to stay here. Indeed. It is up to me who comes and goes. Besides, you, well, helped me with my box.”

“She told me not to annoy you.”

“No doubt she told you not to steal a cake too. You are not annoying me, young man. No, no.” Eisenstone sat on the bed, removed his glasses, and began cleaning them with a small yellow square of soft-looking material.

The only thing as deep as Tim’s imagination was his curiosity. “So, what’s in the box?” he asked.

Eisenstone glanced over his shoulder. “In there is my work. It is very important.”

The vague answers were simply making him more excited. “And what, exactly, is that?”

“Secrets.” The professor smiled. “At any rate, I fear it won’t be terribly interesting. My work isn’t . . . it isn’t finished. Now . . .” Eisenstone pulled a small silver watch from his top pocket to check the time. “I must go. I have arrangements.”

“Okay.”

“It was nice to meet you,” the professor said, standing.