Chapter 1

The technical term for the twinkling of stars is scintillation or, more properly, astronomical scintillation. It is caused by air currents shifting the density of the earth’s atmosphere and refracting the light of the stars in different directions. Thus, they seem to the naked eye to move slightly. It is a phenomenon to which the human eye is drawn. Any little twinkle will cause a head to turn.

Take the diamond on the hand of a newly-engaged woman. That sparkle, or gemological scintillation, will catch the eye and draw it to the third finger on the left hand. Diamond cutters spend years learning to shape and polish stones to maximize the refraction of light. The result is mesmerizing.

The twinkling objects that Keith Drucker saw in the late afternoon sunlight as he lay flat on his back on the pavement, ears ringing, were not stars, though they seemed as numerous; nor were they precious stones cut to refractive perfection. What he saw were thousands of tiny bits of glass falling from the sky—glass that moments ago had been part of the soaring atrium entrance of the Kane Memorial Library. This awareness struck him an instant before the glass did.

The day had started so well.

He watched the alarm clock display 5:59 and turned it off before it could ring at 6:00. He’d been awake already for 20 minutes, though this morning he couldn’t imagine why he thought 6:00 was a good time to get out of bed. Normally, he was well into his day by 6:30, but his normal day didn’t include waking up next to the softly sleeping redhead beside him.

At 43, he didn’t think of himself as the type to have a whirlwind romance with a colleague. He didn’t consider his bookish appearance and personality sufficient to attract such an incredible woman as Madeline Zayne. They’d known each other for only eight weeks, had been lovers for four, but this was the first time to awaken in the morning in the same bed. He wasn’t sure how he had earned such good karma, but he vowed to keep doing whatever it was.

It wasn’t that he’d never dated in his years as a scholar, but no one had taken his heart by storm the way Maddie had. He lifted a stray lock of hair from her face and let it fall among the tangled tresses on her pillow. Freckles covered even her eyelids. He wondered for the hundredth time if there was any part of her body that did not have freckles and decided to check at the first opportunity. He was fascinated by the random chaos of color against impossibly fair skin, so translucent he was sure it had never seen sunlight. Well, “outdoorsy librarian” is an oxymoron, he supposed.

His fascination got the better of him and he softly touched her cheek, pinpointing one single freckle. She stirred and her eyelids fluttered open. She smiled at him with one side of her mouth. That was the expression that first drew him to her. How can you smile with just one side of your mouth?

“What are you doing?” Maddie asked, rolling slightly toward him. The sheet slipped down off her shoulders, exposing yet another uninterrupted field of freckles. “What?” she asked again.

“I was just thinking that I should count your freckles.”

“What?”

“Kind of an inventory,” he continued. “How else will I ever know if one goes missing? I think maybe I should name them as well.”

“You’re crazy!” she laughed. She reached up to give him a light kiss on the lips. “Charming, but crazy.”

“One, two, three,” he said, touching three random freckles just below her collarbone and pushing aside the ever present locket that held photos of her parents.

“You’ll never do it that way,” she laughed.

“Why not?” he asked. “Four. Five,” he continued, pushing the sheet farther down as he did so.

“It’s not organized,” Maddie said. “You need a system if you’re going to catalog such a large body of work.”

“Spoken like a true librarian. Wait a minute. Drat! You made me lose count. Now I’ll have to start all over. One. Two.”

“This will take forever,” she laughed.

“That’s a good thing.” Keith smiled and kissed her.

“Mmmm,” she breathed as they moved together.

Waking at 6:00 wasn’t so bad if you didn’t get out of bed.

Keith took the long way to work, walking south along the river to the First Avenue Bridge before crossing over and returning north along the East Bank to the library. His apartment was only 15 minutes from the library on foot, but in academia it was better not to show up for work at the same time as the colleague you were sleeping with. Maddie left his apartment 15 minutes before he did and drove directly to her nine o’clock staff meeting.

It had been a wet week, but this morning the sun was shining—a good omen for spring break. It looked like half the students had left early. He usually lectured on Friday morning, but he had cancelled his “History of the Printed Word” class two days ago. In return for the extra day off, his students were to bring a sample of contemporary printing when they returned from break. The sample had to be a piece they considered extraordinary according to the six principles he outlined for them in class. It would be amusing to see how many of his students returned after a week with nothing more than the morning’s newspaper.

His cellphone buzzed while he was still on the bridge and he answered it cheerily.

“Granddad! You’re up early.”

“I’m always up early,” the old man said into the phone. “Thought I’d catch you before you were in the library.”

“I’m just walking to work now,” Keith answered.

“I just wanted to make sure you were taking a break this week,” his granddad said. “The last time there was a school vacation and you were working on a project, you got locked in the library for a week.”

“It was only overnight, Granddad. I promise I’m taking a break. Umm...” Keith hesitated, then plunged in. “Maddie and I are going to Jamaica for spring break.” If his grandfather was surprised it didn’t show in his voice.

“I suppose you’ll come back with dreadlocks.”

“I would if I had enough hair,” he laughed. “I’m just hoping not to get sunburned. I don’t think Maddie has ever been in the sun.”

“Hm. You should probably spend most of your time in your room.”

“Granddad!” Keith wasn’t as shocked as he sounded on the phone, but he hurried on to change the subject. “I’m looking at an interesting manuscript today. A record of the books in a Carthusian monastery from the 12th to the 19th century. It has some real possibilities.”

“What kind of possibilities?”

“The monastery was located near Wurtemburg Mountain in Germany. You know how I like to investigate things from there.”

“Don’t get your hopes up, son,” his grandfather said. “The chance that you’ll find what you are looking for is remote. But keep me informed, all the same.”

Keith and his grandfather wished each other well and cut the connection as he entered the courtyard surrounding the library.

He and Maddie had had too little time to learn about each other in any way but the professional and the romantic. They shared a deep passion for books, but Keith wondered how she would respond to the rest of his story when he told her.

He had studied typesetting under some of the finest masters of traditional book arts and was a second degree master alchemist. The title always made Keith smile. It was a figurative nod to the alchemical experimentation of Johannes Gutenberg that led to his formula for lead type. The practical study of Gutenberg’s experiments in alchemy—preserved by the highly secretive guild Gutenberg founded—had led Keith to the use of spectrographic analysis applied to inks. The five-and-a-half century old guild still preserved the formulae and techniques used to make ink and lead type, something that was almost unknown to the rest of the world now that electronic typesetting dominated the industry.

There were a lot of things they needed to talk about. In spite of the chemistry between the two of them being akin to magic, he didn’t know how she would respond to his being involved in an ancient artform that some considered sorcerous. Maybe alchemy is something she wants to dabble in, too, Keith thought. Maybe she belongs to a secret society. Maybe she’d like to get married. He let himself drift in his fantasy world as he walked through the commons. He wouldn’t rush things. When he suggested a week ago that they go away over spring break together, he thought he might have been pushing it a little. She did hesitate for a minute with a near-panic expression on her face, but then she seemed to shake it off with a firm resolution and suggested that maybe Jamaica would be a nice place. They sat up half the night surfing the Web to find a place to stay and making travel arrangements. The idea of proposing to her on the beach had entered his mind almost immediately and he’d firmly kept pushing it back.

Some students still on campus sat with their feet in the reflecting pool in front of the library, waiting for their last classes. A part of the architect’s sense of whimsy, the pool was dotted with concrete pads, inviting visitors to relax in the water. By May the commons surrounding the pool would be awash with chests of beer, frat house barbecues, and sprawled-out students studying to the beat in their personal ear buds. The massive glass panels that fronted the library’s atrium would be slid aside, blurring the line between outdoors and indoors, study and leisure.

The library design was homage to the Biblioteka Alexandrina in Egypt. The non-glass surfaces of the atrium entrance were covered in mosaic scenes of Egypt, including an image of the ancient Library of Alexandria on the inner wall. He stepped across mosaic Egyptian gods, pyramids, and the Great Sphinx of Giza on the floor of the atrium as he crossed to the coffee kiosk on the far side.

Maddie stepped up from behind a statue of Isis as he got in line to order. To Keith it was as if the goddess had come to life.

“Dr. Drucker, how nice to meet you here this morning,” she beamed at him.

“And you, Dr. Zayne,” he responded. “May I get you a coffee?”

“Only if I can buy croissants,” said Maddie. Keith turned to the barista and began to order.

“I know,” nodded the barista, “a vanilla latte and doppio espresso with two almond croissants.” He nodded and thought he saw Maddie turn slightly pink. Had they been meeting here that often? They sat companionably in two soft chairs that partially obscured an image of jackal-headed Anubis on the floor as they savored their drinks.

“Short staff meeting this morning?” Keith asked. Maddie sighed.

“Short staff, actually,” she said. “Two student assistants decided to start spring break a day early and no one else really wants to be here.”

“Can’t say I blame them,” he said quietly. “Want to slip out early?”

“I wish I could,” Maddie said wistfully. “The burden of management, you know.” She smiled. “I hope you won’t mind working without an assistant today.”

“Well, I do have a degree in page-turning,” Keith laughed. Researchers were seldom given direct access to materials unless a librarian was assigned to assist them. The high-tech workstations in the Whitfield Rare Books Room—fondly referred to as The Whit—generally assured that researchers never actually touched documents nor were left alone with one. It was a policy that he had embraced with good humor, even though in his capacity as consultant it was not strictly required. He found it much easier to record his electronic notes if he was actually talking to a person instead of just to the digital recorder that hung above the examination tables in the lab. He recorded his impressions of each book and made high-resolution photographs of each page.

When they had finished their coffee, they took the elevator up to The Whit. No one else was in the elevator and Keith felt Maddie graze the back of his hand with hers as they stood silently side-by-side.

The Whit was a secure facility perched atop two dozen massive pillars that jutted up through the floors of the main library. It was connected to the rest of the university library only by way of the stairwells and elevator shafts. It had its own power, plumbing, and environmental controls. They passed the sealed case containing a page of the Mainz Psalter—a pristine example of historic book art. Repro, Keith thought automatically as he walked past. Maddie disappeared into the security vault while Keith checked his computer case in a locker. A few moments later, Maddie returned with a large volume encased in acid-free archival cardboard. The label showed the name of the collection, work, and acquisition date. He had been looking forward to examining this volume all week, and even though he was anxious to be leaving for a tropical paradise with Maddie in the evening, he was excited about spending the day with his other love.

In the study of incunabula—printed works of the 15th century—Keith was a big fish in a very small pond. His thesis and post-doctoral research helped establish the use of spectrographic analysis to accurately date and regionalize early books. Each printer mixed his own inks and the composition was as individual as a fingerprint. The in situ spectrographic process was non-destructive, unlike other forms of dating that required a sample scraped from the substrate and dissolved in chemicals. Much of his career had been spent compiling a database of ink-prints from the printers of the 15th century. Other researchers had added profiles of manuscript inks with some samples as old as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The collection the Whit recently acquired was mostly collector-grade volumes of the 17th century with a few older specimens that would fetch a decent price if offered at auction. Keith was acutely aware that his real reason for being at The Whit was to establish the value of a University asset so the Board could determine what to sell and what to keep. So far, only two museum-grade documents had been discovered. It was sad that so many incunabula had been destroyed during the 19th and early 20th centuries and the pages sold individually to collectors, but one page in the collection could be worth as much as the rest of the collection combined.

He placed the box on the work table, put a memory card in the digital camera above the table, and positioned the microphone where he wouldn’t bump into it as he was working. He put on a new pair of white cotton gloves and opened the box.

“Specimen SOR187,” he spoke into the voice-activated microphone, “listed as the catalog of books in the Monastery of St. Luke of the Mountain near Württemberg Mountain in Germany from the founding of the monastery in 1115 A.D. until its dissolution in 1846.” With that, he made the first photographs of the book. “The volume is just 20 millimeters thick, but measures 480 millimeters tall and 330 millimeters wide,” Keith continued as he measured the book.