Jillian growled softly in the stall. “We’ve missed something if he’s here. We’ve never been fingerprinted, so they couldn’t have found us that way. We never showed up on the museum security system while the chest was at the museum. We erased everything at Dad’s work, so no one should even be able to link us to Esme or Dufae. Even if they did, they couldn’t know that we know anything about unlocking magical boxes.”
“April knows,” Louise said.
“She knows that Esme left us something, but we haven’t told her about being elves, or Dufae, or any of that, so she couldn’t have known we were going to take anything from the museum. And why would anyone suspect two nine-year-old girls of robbing a museum with magic?”
“But the Flying Monkey is here,” Louise pointed out since it was undeniable.
“The only reason he’d be here is. .” Jillian trailed off.
“Why?” Louise asked.
“I don’t know!” Jillian stood and zipped up her pants. “I was hoping you’d answer the question.”
Jillian came out of the stall and washed her hands.
Nikola glanced back and forth between them. “We’re confused. Who is the Flying Monkey? Is he one of the men with the guns?”
They hadn’t stopped to consider that Ming the Merciless might have robbed their house. It was a frightening thought. “Maybe.”
Because of the robbery, they had decided to bring everything irreplaceable with them to school, and that included the photographs. Louise dug them out of her backpack and flipped through six pictures. The third photo made her stop with a gasp.
“What is it?” Jillian asked.
Louise held out the photograph of the blindfolded woman. “Is this who I think it is?”
Jillian frowned in concentration. “It might be her. I’m not sure.” She swore. “Our stupid genetic donor! Why give us a photo of a woman and then draw a blindfold on the picture so we can’t recognize her?”
“Who?” Nikola moved so he could see the photo. “Oh, Anna Desmarais.”
“How do you know?” Jillian growled.
“Facial recognition is at ninety-six point three percent. The blindfold doesn’t cover all of the bone structure of the eyes, so the match is positive. We could be a hundred percent sure if we could see the eye fold and retina.”
Jillian snatched the photograph out of Louise’s hand and read the words off the back. “Why did Esme write ‘Queen Gertrude of Denmark’ on this? Why not Anna Desmarais? And why did she use so many literary references? What does
“Maybe Anna isn’t her real name,” Louise guessed. “Maybe Esme didn’t know anyone’s real names, only that they were using fake names, and guessed that they would change their names again before we would ever meet them.”
“But why then call her father the king of Denmark? Is Edmond Desmarais Neil’s brother? Why would either one of them be king? Wouldn’t this be like Prince Albert and Prince Philip? If you married the queen, you don’t become the king! You stay a prince; your son is the one that becomes the next king.”
Louise had no idea how to answer any of those questions.
The bell rang, and they were now officially late.
“What are we going to do?” Jillian cried.
Louise fanned the photographs so she could see all of them at once. Other than the old vintage photographs and Esme’s cryptic labels, they had no idea who the people were or why Esme considered them dangerous. “We need to find out who they really are. Either we go back home or we go to class.”
“He’s in class,” Jillian pointed out. “If we cut class, the school will call Mom and Dad.”
Louise shook her head against that possibility. They needed to keep their parents safe.
“We could do it,” Nikola said.
“Do what?” Jillian said.
“I don’t know. .” Louise didn’t want Nikola to use his taser. She’d actually considered it for one second when Jillian asked what they were going to do. That would end badly. They were in deep enough trouble without adding assault and battery.
“We can search databases for pattern matches,” Nikola said. “It’s part of Tesla’s programming.”
“These are old photos. You might have to search back in some old archives to find matches.”
Nikola nodded. “We will. It’s a little distracting. We’ll have to focus on it.”
“It will be better if you stay in our locker. You’ll have Joy with you. The two of you together should be safe.”
Once they had Nikola hidden, they walked slowly to the classroom, hand in hand.
Louise listed out the reasons they had nothing to fear but fear itself. “They can’t know about the babies. They can’t know about the codex. They can’t know about Joy. So they can’t suspect us of being anything but normal fifth-graders.”
“What about Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo?” Jillian whispered. “Nigel could have ratted us out.”
