“Why don’t we move this to my brother’s place?” Dana suggested. “It’s right around the corner. He’s at work, so he won’t be in the way. We can spread out a little, and you can give me the highlights.”

“Fine with me.” Stiff from sitting, Malory got to her feet.

“I can only stay for about an hour. I like to be there when Simon gets home from school, when I can.”

“Then let’s get started. These books are on me,” Dana said as she began gathering some up. “Anybody takes one home for personal research, I need it back in a timely fashion and in the same condition it was in when you took it.”

“She really is a librarian.” Malory tucked books under her arm.

“Bet your ass.” Dana led the way out. “I’m going to see what I can get off the Net, and through interlibrary loan.”

“I don’t know how much we’re going to get out of books.”

Dana slipped on her sunglasses, then tipped them down and peered at Malory over the tops. “Anything worth anything can be found in books.”

“Okay, now you’re heading toward Scary Library Lady. What we need to do is figure out the clue.”

“Without information on the story, the characters in it, we’ve got no base.”

“We’ve got four whole weeks,” Zoe put in, and dragged sunglasses out of her shoulder bag. “That’s enough time to find out a lot of stuff, look in a lot of places. Pitte said the keys were around here. So it’s not like we have the whole world to worry about.”

“Around here could mean the Valley, or the highlands. It could mean the entire state of Pennsylvania.” Malory shook her head at the sheer scope and disorder. “Pitte and pal left it pretty wide open. Even if it’s close by, it could be in someone’s dusty drawer, on the bottom of the river, in a bank vault, or buried under a rock.”

“If it was easy, somebody else would have found it by now,” Zoe pointed out. “And the grand prize wouldn’t be three million dollars.”

“Don’t be sensible while I’m crabbing.”

“Sorry, but there’s one other thing I was wondering. I couldn’t sleep last night, going over and over the whole evening in my head. It’s all so unreal. But even if you set all that aside for a minute, even if we’re optimistic and say you find the key, how do we know it’s your key, and not one of the other two?”

“Interesting.” Malory shifted her load of books as they turned the corner. “How come the Weird Twins didn’t think of that?”

“I figure they did. See, first you have to say it’s all real.”

Dana shrugged. “We’ve all got money in the bank, and we’re walking along with a load of books on Celtic myths. That’s real enough for me.”

“If it’s all real, then Malory can only find the first key. Even if the other two were right in front of her, she wouldn’t find them. And we wouldn’t either, not before it’s our turn to look.”