Sealed with a Secret by Lisa Schroeder

Author:Lisa Schroeder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2016-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

So where are we going?” Ned asked when I met up with him at the Tube station. His hair was messy and his windbreaker was buttoned up wrong.

“Are you all right?” I asked, pointing to his jacket.

“Tired,” he said, stifling a yawn. Then he looked up at the sky. “We might get wet today. Mum said it’s supposed to rain later.”

“Then we should hurry. Before the rain comes.”

“Where to first?” Ned asked as he redid his buttons.

“I’m not sure. There are probably quite a few churches with clocks and steeples.”

“But how many of them have crypts?” he asked.

“That I don’t know,” I replied. “And I’m not sure how we find out without visiting them all. We don’t have time to do that.”

“Maybe you should just pick one and hope it’s the right one.”

“And risk the magic not working because of that one wrong move?” I shook my head. “No. We have to get it right. If you’d seen Alice yesterday afternoon, the way I did, you’d understand why it’s more important than ever that we get this done properly.”

“Let’s work through the possibilities,” said Ned. “As if we’re detectives.”

“All right. Name a church.”

“Westminster Abbey.”

“Can’t be that one,” I replied. “It doesn’t have a steeple, really. More like … towers.”

“All right. How about the Strand in Westminster?”

“I’ve never been there. It has a clock?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” I said, recalling where we were yesterday, “I think it must be St. Martin-in-the-Fields.”

He looked at me curiously. “Why do you think that?”

“Because it’s in Trafalgar Square, the same place we were yesterday. Go to the empty pedestal—”

“Plinth.”

“Whatever, and then hop across the street to the church. It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“But Pheebs, if it’s a spell, how close or far apart the places are from one another doesn’t matter. It’s how they all work together to create the magic.” He scratched his head. “At least, I think so?”

Suddenly, I was worried. How could we know for sure which one was the right one? And it didn’t seem like we had time to go to both.

I pulled out my phone.

“What are you doing?”

“Texting Dad. I’m going to ask him if St. Martin has a crypt.”

Ned scowled. “Isn’t that using technology? Something we agreed we wouldn’t do?”

I looked around at the people who were nearby in the station. I could have asked one of them, but asking my dad would be so much quicker. One of the things he’d taught me about antiques shopping is that every situation is different, and a good shopper will size up the opportunity and do what’s best under the circumstances. Like, if you know a certain vendor is tough to deal with and doesn’t let things go for cheap, offering up a really low price is not going to be very smart. Of course, you can’t always know what might work best, but if you do, you have to make the most of it.

And right now, what I knew for sure was that we didn’t have any time to waste.

“Just this once. Please?” I pleaded with Ned.

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