"It all goes back to a death in upstate New York," Bredon says. The five of you—you, Carson, Bredon, Joe and Frank—are at the gate to Blackwell's villa; the professor, inside Bredon's car, is fuming and glaring. Bredon leads you into the yard. "An old lady died. No one special, but somehow the details of her pitiful little estate dribbled out and into obscure channels. That would have been the end of it, but one man who had his ear dipped in those channels was our cuddlesome Professor Blackwell, who is an amateur—a very amateur—warlock."
"Those are the worst kind," Joe confides in your ear. "Usually they're so incompetent they only manage to blow other people up."
"There was only one really valuable item in her estate," Bredon is saying, "an old book called the Libra Personae, and the long and the short of it is that the professor managed to lay hands on it."
"The book that makes masks," Carson says.
"You've been paying attention. Good. Well, the professor got it back here, and he started experimenting with it, managed to make a few things. And then—the details how aren't relevant—he lost it. It landed at a used bookstore, which is where Prescott picked it up."
"Do me a favor, Will," Carson mutters. "Stop hanging around bookstores. You don't improve them, and I doubt they improve you."
"You know what happened after that," Bredon says. "But to tell that same story from the professor's point of view—"
"Uh, Rick, do we really want to be going in here?" Joe points to the lintel above the door.
"Good eye, kid. But I took care of the bad stuff yesterday."
"Is this where you were?" you ask as you all enter the foyer.
"Uh huh. You see, our little company also heard about the Libra, but we got there too late. We picked up the trail, though, and followed it back here. Frank and Joe took up station; meanwhile, I'd figured out that Blackwell had a hand in the Libra's hijacking." He gestures at Frank and Joe. "But then these two doorknobs got distracted."
"Hey!"
"Not that it would have done much good if they had followed up with the professor, since as I say he'd lost the Libra by then. He was frantic at first, but then became resigned to it. Resigned, that is, until you two idiots visited him and started prattling about doppelgangers at your school. Let's go upstairs."
The stairs are dark and quiet, and only a little light filters into the upstairs passage. Rick opens the door to one of the rooms and motions you all in. It looks like a spare bedroom, unfurnished except for a bed—covered only with a blanket—and a wardrobe. Against the far wall, lying on the floor, are three white things that look like marble statues: two of them look finished, but the third is just a rough, formless heap.
Rick opens the wardrobe, and from it he takes a mask. "I said Blackwell managed to play around with the Libra before he lost it. He made a mask of himself. Aubrey Blackwell," he says, reading the inside of the mask, and tosses it onto the bed. "He also got himself a second identity." He takes out a second mask. "Lucille Vredenburg. Name mean anything to anyone?"
"Lucy Vredenburg? That's Cindy's sister," says Carson before you can speak. "Cindy goes to our school, Lucy's her older sister."
"Was her older sister," Rick corrects him. "The mask is all that's left of her." He tosses it onto the bed. "He was very thorough about getting rid of the body."
You and Carson exchange saucer-eyed looks of horror.
"As for Cindy herself," Rick continues, and takes out a third mask. "After he heard from you two geniuses, he used his mask of Lucy to get to the little sister. Lured her out here, made her a prisoner, and made a mask of her." He tosses it onto the bed. "He then used Cindy's mask to get close to Cindy's ex-boyfriend, a strapping lad by the name of Seth Javits." He draws out a fourth mask. "Which is where he wanted to get. He'd heard from Ioeger and Prescott that Javits was an imposter. He knew how to get masks off people, so he lured Javits's double out here, stripped him of the disguise, and made the man underneath another prisoner. He then returned to Westside as a double of a double, by pretending to be the man who had taken over Seth Javits's existence. Rather like you four were doing yesterday."
"That's how Blackwell got hold of the Libra again!" Joe exclaims. "I mean, that's what you're going to say, right?"
Frank glares at him. "Do you always have to blurt out spoilers?"
"Yes, that's how Blackwell got the Libra back," says Rick. "Meanwhile the Westside imposters got inside some masks of Ioeger and Prescott and learned about the visit they'd made to Blackwell." He turns to Joe. "And since they also had the memories of this bright-eyed chimp to draw on, they also knew that Blackwell had been involved early on and would certainly get involved again. That's the main reason they jumped so fast from one high school to the other. They were less worried that I'd show up and more worried that Blackwell would. But he got inside their group first, and he even helped them make the move, selflessly insisting that he be one of the last to escape to the other school. When it was only him and Walberg, though, he snuck back into that loft and made off with the Libra."
"How do you know all this?" Carson asks. "If it's not a spoiler," he adds, edging away from Frank.
"I know it because I made Blackwell my priority," says Rick. "He was the main threat. You two kept babbling about doppelgangers, but I knew you weren't in any danger from them. Think about it. They were onto you, but they made no moves against you. They set some spies on you, they tried framing you, but they just couldn't bring themselves to hurt you, even to the extent of burying you under masks like they did their other victims." He shrugs. "Not that that makes them virtuous. It just means that not one of them looked at either of you and said, 'Yeah, I'd like to be him'."
"Well, you don't have to put it that way," Carson murmurs.
"But Blackwell is an adder. Once you told me you'd been to see him, I came out here. Couldn't get in that first night, so I rounded up Black and Patterson and put some hard questions to them, tested them for authenticity, tried bringing them in as deputies—they're bigger and smarter than you two—but I couldn't close the deal. So I had to let you act as bait," he says to Carson. "I knew I could put a watch on you, and I did, because I wanted to see how to get a mask off someone. Once I saw how—when they pulled Frank's mask off you—I hustled over here and put the screws to Blackwell. I found out he was a fake, and got the mask off the thing underneath. Then I took a huge gamble by putting it on. It might have buried me. But it didn't. And once I was inside, I knew his whole history and plan, and what he'd been doing since getting the Libra back.
"He'd been hiding out at Cindy Vredenburg's house, but then last Friday, the day I showed up, and the day Ioeger paid a second visit out here, he got a call from his robo-replacement. See, that was his placeholder that you saw that day, and it listened with rapt interest when you told it about Frank and Joe. It called up its master after you left. He came back and got the full story out of the mask, same way I was to do later. Blackwell wondered who Frank and Joe were, since they obviously knew something of this business. It worried him, so he decided to get find out what they knew.
"He had many of the teachers' old supplies with him, which he'd also stolen. Some blank masks, and two very special masks that he'd stolen along with the Libra. See, he wanted to keep a close eye on Ioeger and Prescott, and once he had Cindy Vredenburg's memories he knew how to do that. So he stole two masks the teachers had made, masks of Jennifer Ashton and Lisa Yarborough. As them, he knew he could get close to you two. Very close."
You shiver hard, and freeze when he turns to you.
"Blackwell immediately trapped and changed places with your girl, and called your double. That was the riverside date you interrupted. He was trying to get your mask off the kid here, so that he could get a copy of the kid's brain to see what he could learn about him. But you got in the way. I don't know when he would have tried again, but I talked the kid here into laying a trap for him this afternoon. And now here we are."
There's a lot to digest, but you've only one question for now: "Where's Lisa?"
"I don't know for sure, but I suspect she's hidden under a mask of Cindy Vredenburg."
"So where's Cindy? The real one?" asks Carson. "And Seth?"
"Javits is back out there as himself. The teachers pulled one of their colleague's faces off him after the fake Javits disappeared. As for Cindy, and that teacher who was playing Javits—" Rick nods at those statues.
You all crowd around. One of them is a formless lump. But the other two are perfect realizations in stone of Cindy Vredenburg and Mr. Leavey, your old French and Latin teacher.
"Can we fix them?" asks Frank in a hollow voice.
"I don't know. We won't know until we get the Libra out of Lisa Yarborough's house. Anyone have any ideas on how to do that?" he adds with studied insolence.
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