“The others are going to kill us,” said Olive. “We’ve been gone all afternoon, and we still haven’t got new clothes!”
Then I remembered Miss Peregrine’s promise. She’d have something to show me at nightfall, she said, which was in just an hour or two. Truth be told, I didn’t much care about whatever it was she had to show me anymore. All I could think about was getting home to my bedroom, closing the door, and reading my grandfather’s logbook from cover to cover.
When we got home, the sun was just starting to dip below the trees. The friends we’d left behind complained loudly about our having been gone so long, but when we told them why—and what we’d found—they forgot their anger and hung on Millard’s every word as he recounted the story.
My parents were gone. They had packed their bags and left for a trip to Asia. I found a note in my mom’s handwriting on the kitchen counter. They would miss me lots, the note read, were available by phone or email anytime, and would I please remember to pay the gardeners. I could tell from the breezy and casual tone of the note—Love you, Jakey!—that Miss Peregrine had done a great job erasing the last few months of worrying about me from their minds. They didn’t seem concerned that I might have a breakdown or run away again while they were gone. In fact, they didn’t seem to care very much at all. And that was fine. Good riddance, I thought. At least we had the place to ourselves.
Miss Peregrine wasn’t around, either. She’d left the house just after we had and had been gone all day, Horace reported.
“Did she say where she was going?” I asked.
“She only said that we were to meet her at precisely seven fifteen at the potting shed in your backyard.”
“The potting shed.”
“At seven fifteen, precisely.”
That gave me just over an hour of free time.
I snuck up to my room. I put IV by Led Zeppelin on the record player, which is what I listened to whenever I was doing something that required serious concentration. I climbed onto my bed with my grandfather’s logbook, laid it out in front of me, and began to read.
I hadn’t read more than a page when Emma poked her head into the room. I invited her to join me.
“No, thanks,” she said. “I’ve had quite enough of Abe Portman for one day.” And she went out.
There were many hundreds of pages in the logbook, spanning a period of decades. Most of the entries followed the format of the one I’d read down in the bunker: light on detail, free from emotion, and often accompanied by a photo or some other piece of visual evidence. It would’ve taken me a week to read every word, so even with an hour on my hands, I could only skim. But it was enough to form a sketchy outline of Abe’s work in America.
He usually worked alone, but not always. Some entries referenced other “operatives,” named only with single letters—F, P, V. But most often, H.
H was the man my father had met, if his partially wiped memory could be trusted. If Abe had trusted H enough to introduce his son to him, he must’ve been important. So who was he? What was the structure of their organization? Who assigned their missions? Every new piece of information spawned a dozen more questions.
In the early days, their work was focused almost exclusively on hunting and killing hollows. But as the years progressed, more and more of the missions involved finding and rescuing peculiar children. Which was admirable, no doubt, but Bronwyn’s question stayed with me: Wasn’t that the ymbrynes’ job? Was there something stopping American ymbrynes from doing it?
Was something wrong with them?
The entries began in 1953 and stopped abruptly in 1985. Why did they stop? Was there another logbook I hadn’t found yet? Had Abe retired in 1985? Or had something changed?
After an hour of reading, I had a few more answers and a lot more new questions. First among them: Was there more work like this to be done? Was there still a group of hollow-hunters out there somewhere, fighting monsters and rescuing peculiars? If so, I wanted very much to find them. I wanted to be part of it, to use my gift to carry on my grandfather’s work here in America. After all, maybe that’s what he wanted! Yes, he’d locked away his secrets, but he’d done it using the name he’d given me as the key. But he’d died too soon to tell me.
First things first. To get answers to my questions, I’d have to find the only person in the world likely to know Abe’s secrets.
I had to find H.