“I shook my head. ‘Manfred,’ I said. ‘Manfred had some plan to be buried out here, and those whom he trusted never fulfilled his dream. And so we have an empty coffin and an empty mausoleum. We have gold plates and an inscription in Latin. Look up there, that’s Latin. I wrote that down. Manfred did all this. Manfred had this thing built when he built the Hermitage. Manfred did it all. And so we close it back up.’

“ ‘But what about all this solid gold!’ Clem said. ‘You can’t just leave all this gold here for people to steal.’

“ ‘Do people still kill each other for gold these days?’ I asked. ‘Are any of you going to come back out here to steal this gold? Are we going to have a shoot-out over this gold? Let’s go back where we came from. I can only take this place for so long. I don’t like that a trespasser came into the house. Let’s get out of here.’

“There was one more thing I wanted to check. I went back into the Hermitage.

“I was right!

“On the marble desk there were new books, books on philosophy and history, books on current events, novels. It was all new—a nice slap in the face. Even the candles were new, though the wicks were blackened. Oh, yes, the fearless one, my trespasser, had been here.

“ ‘So what are you going to do next, I wonder?’ I said aloud. I flew into a rage. I grabbed up as many of the books as I could and threw them down the front steps of the Hermitage. I went back for the rest and threw them after the first. Then I hurried down the steps and pulled and tossed and kicked them all together.

“I took out my lighter. I set a small paperback volume aflame, and then another and another. It was going on its own now, with all the men just watching as if I was crazy, which I was.

“ ‘His books!’ I said. ‘He has no right on this property, and he leaves these books for me to see that he’s been here again.’

“ ‘Lord God,’ Jasmine said, as the flames rose and the fire crackled. ‘We got a dead girl, a strange building, a bunch of weird books, and a regular tomb of gold with an empty iron coffin in it, and a crazy boy standing here!’

“ ‘Well put,’ I said in her ear, ‘and don’t forget your promise to me, Milk Chocolate. It’s you and me alone tonight.’

“ ‘I never made you any promise!’ she said.

“ ‘I told you, I’m unsure of my masculinity,’ I whispered. ‘You’ve got to sacrifice yourself.’ I kicked the fire to make it flare again. I hated burning books. I could hardly stand it to see a Merriam-Webster dictionary go up in smoke. But I had to do this.