Chapter 12

CHAPTER 12 It's a small room, Ian thought, but ugly. He smiled. An old Kabra family joke. The Cahill brother— Dan— was gazing about the musty, wood-paneled room as if he were about to cry. "For this, you have a murderous, man-eating, killer beast?" he cried out. "To guard a library?" Amy was looking about the sanctum in awe. "It's… beautiful!" The girl was modest and thoughtful. How bizarre. So rarely did Ian see these qualities in others— especially during the quest for the 39 Clues. Naturally, he had been taught to avoid these behaviors at all costs and never to consort with anyone who possessed them. They were distasteful— FLO, as Papa would say. For Losers

Only. And Kabras never lost. Yet she fascinated him. Her joy in running up Alistair's tiny lawn, her awe at this piddling cubbyhole— it didn't seem possible to gain so much happiness from so little. This gave him a curious feeling he'd never quite experienced. Something like indigestion but quite a bit more pleasant. Ah, well. Blame it on the ripped trousers, he thought. Humiliation softened the soul. He glanced at the cramped shelves, the mildewed oak walls, the cracked leather armchair, the hideous fluorescent lights, the mouse droppings in the corners, the scuffed moldings, and the artwork that seemed to have been bought at a tag sale for the color-blind. Beautiful? "It's books," Dan groaned. "Beam me up, Scotty— please!" For once, Ian rather agreed with him. "Rare books," Alistair said, gesturing grandly to a section of four glassed-in shelves, "not to mention one of the world's finest collections of secret material about the Cahill family. A lifelong

passion for me, as few items were ever duplicated. Here is our best hope of decoding the parchment!" Ian began to sit, but he thought of how that would make his posterior feel. Standing up wasn't pleasant, either, with the polyester trousers that felt like sandpaper on his legs. And Dan's whining just made the experience unbearable. He would have to avoid the brother. The sister, at least, was interesting. He wondered if her lack of cynicism would be contagious. How distasteful. Still… "Perhaps we should form teams," Ian suggested. "A race. Amy and I will scour the material on the top two shelves, Natalie and Dan take the bottom two." "Excellent," Alistair said. "Do you agree, Amy?" "Um…" Amy said, her eyes darting away from him. "Uh…" A pity, Ian thought. So many females had this reaction to him. It really did limit conversation. "I've never been on an extra-Kabricular team before," Natalie said, smiling at her own wittiness. "But I'll try, I suppose."

Dan was staring at an expensive but unfortunate painting of a couple quite familiar to Ian. The man's hair was piled in mangled gray wisps, his eyebrows bushy and his eyes wild. The woman had a strong face, the way a horse was strong— long-jawed and big-eared. Above them floated all kinds of strange-looking symbols. "Who's the lucky couple?" Dan asked. "Ah, yes, the ever-glamorous Gideon and Olivia, the original Cahills, painted in the early 1500s," Ian said. "Your ancestors." "The Kabras improved the bloodline," Natalie said. "Ready?" Alistair spread out the parchment on a table, then grabbed a book off the shelf. "I will help the younger team, Natalie and Dan. Set… go!" Ian ran his fingers along the line of books, some with handwritten titles along the spines: Historicus Cahilliensis: Ekaterina, Vols. I and II… Ekat Architectural Renderings… A Review of Eighteenth-Century Cahill Literature.… Some of them seemed like pamphlets, notes torn from

three-ring binders. It would be difficult to find anything helpful here. Amy was pulling down a thick book titled Origins of the Cahills: A Compendium of Contemporary Studies. "We're supposed to find a clue, not study history," Dan snapped. "But we know so little about the Cahill family," Amy said. Natalie looked up from a book she was skimming. "I don't know why your parents never told you which branch you were in. We knew the whole story before we were walking." Ian watched Amy as her face sank. He felt a flutter inside. Sympathy, he realized—an emotion he often felt for the Kabra banker on days when the stock market performed badly. This feeling, however, was somehow a bit more… vivid. He gave his sister a kick. "Natalie, have you lost your sense of… grace?" She glared at him for a moment, until the joke clicked in.

"'The Cahill family traces back to early 1500s Dublin, with the brilliant, eccentric Gideon Cahill and his wife, Olivia,'" Amy read aloud. Alistair nodded encouragingly. His niece was so excited she could barely get the words out. "'Some say Cahill had indeed made a discovery to change the course of humankind,'" Amy continued. "'But the nature of this discovery was never known. In 1507, a sudden fire swept through the Cahill home. All escaped but one. Gideon, desperate to save his life's work, was found burned to death at his desk.'" "What is it with Cahills and fire?" Dan whispered. Alistair felt a little clutch in his chest. The children had been through so much tragedy—the fire that had trapped their parents, the one that had burned Grace's house. It occurred to him why he'd never wanted children of his own. You risked caring for them. And that kind of feeling could be dangerous in the hunt for the 39 Clues. "'According to contemporary sources, at his