The Grimm Legacy Read Free

you would be calling. I’m glad to hear from you.”
    Stan? So Mr. Mauskopf had a first name?
    “Can you come in for an interview next Thursday after school?”
    “All right. Where do I go?” I asked.
    Dr. Rust gave me an address not far from my school, east of Central Park. “Ask for me at the front desk; they’ll send you up.”

    The discreet brass plaque beside the door said The New-York Circulating Material Repository. From the outside, it looked like a standard Manhattan brownstone, the last in a long row. Next door was a big old mansion, the kind that are now mostly consulates or museums. That place would have made an impressive library, I thought as I walked up the steps to the repository and pulled open the heavy doors. It was just the sort of place I used to go to with my father, before he met Cathy. We used to spend every rainy weekend in museums and libraries. Especially the less f amous ones, like the Museum of the City of New York and the New-York Historical Society, with their odd collections of things—old china and tinsmiths’ tools and models of what the city looked like before the Revolution. We would play a game: pick out which painting (or clock, or chair, or photograph, or whatever) would have been Mom’s favorite.
    I hadn’t been to a museum with my dad in years, but when I opened the doors, the slightly dusty smell brought it all flooding back. I felt as if I’d stepped back through time into a place that was once my home.
    Through some trick of geometry, the entrance opened out into a large rectangular room apparently wider than the building that held it. At the far end was a massive desk, elaborately carved in dark wood.
    A guy my age was sitting behind it.
    But not just any guy—Marc Merritt, the tallest, coolest, best forward our basketball team had ever known. I had once seen him sink an apple core into the wastebasket in the teachers’ lounge from his seat across the corridor in study hall, with both doors partly closed. He looked like a taller, African American version of Jet Li, and he moved like him too, with the same acrobatic quickness. He was in Mr. Mauskopf’s other social studies section, and we had health ed together. Most of the girls at Fisher had crushes on him. I would too, if I didn’t think it would be presumptuous . . . Well, to be honest, I did anyway. I was pretty sure he had no idea who I was.
    “Hi, I’m here to see Dr. Rust?” I said.
    “All right. Who should I say is here?”
    “Elizabeth Rew.”
    Marc Merritt picked up the receiver of an old-fashioned telephone, the kind with a dial. “Elizabeth Rew here to see you, Doc. . . . Sure. . . . No, till six today. . . . All right.” He pointed a long arm—longer than Mr. Mauskopf’s, even—toward a fancy brass elevator door. “Fifth floor, take a left, through the arch. You’ll see it.”
    When I stepped out of the elevator, corridors branched away in three directions. I couldn’t imagine how they fit it all in one narrow brownstone. I went down three steps through an arch to a small, book-lined room.
    Dr. Rust was slight and wiry, with thick, shaggy hair just on the brown side of red and a billion freckles.
    “Elizabeth. I’m glad to meet you.” We shook hands. “Please, have a seat. How is Stan?”
    Strict but fair. Stern-looking, but with an underlying twinkle in his eye. Oddly dressed. “Fine,” I said.
    “Still keeping that great beast in that tiny apartment, is he?”
    “I guess? I’ve never been to his apartment.”
    “Well. Let’s see, you’re in Stan’s European history class, yes?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Good, good. Stan’s never sent us a bad page. He says you’re hardworking and warmhearted, with an independent mind—which is high praise from Stan, believe me. So this is really a formality, but just to be thorough, do you do the dishes at home?”
    What kind of a question was that? “Yes, most of the time.” One more bad thing about my stepsisters going away to