A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,66

concrete staircase. It led to a thick metal door, which slid to the side rather than swinging in or out. Beyond it was a closet. A carpeted household closet. I slid open its slatted door and we walked out into a suburban bedroom. There was a bed with a bare mattress, a nightstand, and a dresser. Nothing on the walls. The windows were shuttered, the only light in the room filtering through cracks between the nailed-on boards.

We were in another house in Abe’s cul-de-sac.

“What is this place?” said Emma, tracing a finger-trail on the dusty dresser.

“It could be a safe house,” I said, peeking into the attached bathroom, empty but for a single pink hand towel hung by the sink.

“Think anyone’s here?” Emma whispered.

“Probably not. But keep your guard up anyway.”

We crept down a short hallway, looking into other rooms as we passed them. It was sparsely furnished in the style of a model home or a chain motel—anonymous, but enough to create the illusion that someone actually lived here. I went to the end of the hall and took a left turn into what I knew would be the living room. The layout was identical to my grandfather’s house, and it gave me a strange feeling of déjà vu to know every inch of a place I’d never set foot in. The living room windows were boarded, too, so I walked to the front door and put my eye to the peephole.

There was Abe’s house, a few hundred feet away, across the street.

Then we came to the garage, and it was clear the moment we stepped inside that the house’s only real purpose was this room. The walls were covered with pegs and shelves and all manner of tools and spare parts. In the center of it all, surrounded by floodlights, two cars were parked side by side.

“I’ll be damned,” I said. “He did have cars.”

One was a white Caprice Classic. It looked like a bar of soap on wheels, and was unfailingly popular with Florida’s elderly drivers. I recognized it as my grandfather’s car, the one he used before my parents made him stop driving. (I thought he’d gotten rid of it, but here it was.) The other was a muscular black coupe that looked like a sixties-era Mustang, but with wider hips and swoopier lines. I wasn’t sure what it was, exactly, because there was no badging on the car to identify it.

The Caprice was for traveling incognito, I guessed. The other was for traveling fast, and in a bit of style.

“You really didn’t know he had these?” Emma said.

“None. I knew he used to drive, but my dad made him give it up when he failed a vision test at the DMV. He used to go on these solo trips. Days at time, sometimes weeks. Just like when my dad was a kid, only less frequent. To go from that to needing me and my parents to drive him to the grocery store and the doctor—that must have been hard.”

Though it occurred to me, even as I was saying it, that Abe may never have stopped driving at all; he just started keeping it a secret.

“And yet he kept the cars,” said Emma.

“And maintained them,” I said. The cars, unlike everything else in the house, were a little dusty, but immaculately clean otherwise. “He must’ve snuck out here every so often to work on them. Shine them, change the oil. So they’d be easily accessible but hidden from my family.”

“It makes you wonder why he bothered,” Emma said.

“Fighting hollows?” I asked.

“Having a family,” she replied.

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. I opened the Caprice and ducked inside, popped the glove box, and found the registration card. It was still current, renewed just a few weeks before Abe died. But it wasn’t in his name.

“Ever heard of Andrew Gandy?” I said, handing the card to Emma through the open door.

“Must have been a false name he used.” She handed the card back. “God.”

I shut the glove box and got out of the car. Emma had a funny look on her face. “What?”

“I wonder if Abe was even his real name,” she said.

It wasn’t a crazy question, but for some reason it stung me.

“It was.”

She looked at me. “You sure about that?”

In her eyes was an unasked question. If Abe was capable of such deceit, was I?

“I’m sure,” I said, and turned away. “It’s almost nine. Let’s pick a car and