Page 80 of No Escape

“Well, if that’s correct, it should make it much easier to calculate the weights we need on each post to balance them,” I said.

“True, but if we must have four weights on the left post, there must be some additional weights somewhere in the library,” Winston pointed out. “There are no weights on the right side.”

Good point. I tried to remember what Romeo had told me Lexi’s father did for a living. Doctor? Lawyer? Something impressive like that.

“I think that’s a good assumption,” I said. “We have to assume there are additional weights hidden somewhere in this room.” I looked around at the thousands of books on the shelves and sighed. “Unfortunately, they could be hidden anywhere.”

“Well, we obviously don’t have time to check every book, so there must be clues that will direct us to weights,” Lexi’s mother, Clarissa, said. “I think we should start going over the room, looking for any clues that might help get us started.”

That sounded like as good a plan as any to me, so we split up the room into sections and started to investigate. Winston and I ended up exploring adjacent areas in the back of the room. I hadn’t been looking long when he called out to me.

“Gio, come look at this,” he said, waving a hand.

I obliged and saw a beautifully finished wooden cone about two feet high with a wide base and a narrow top sitting on an end table between two stuffed chairs. The cone had a small hole in the center.

“What is it?” I asked, touching the cone. The sides contained a spiraling ridge that ran from the top of the cone to the bottom, looping around multiple times. To me it looked like a small road without guardrails spiraling down a steep mountain.

A single marble sat next to the cone in a small indentation in the table. I picked up the marble and studied it. “Do you think this goes down the ridge?”

Winston had been trying to open the end table’s drawer, but it was locked. He looked at the marble and shrugged. “It’s worth a try.”

I carefully placed the marble on the spiral ridge at the top, but it quickly fell off the track as it spiraled down, picking up speed. I leaned over and picked up the marble off the floor. “We need a guardrail or another way to make the marble stay on the road.”

Winston studied the cone. “What would be the point? Even if the marble rode the ridges, once it gets to the bottom, it would just roll off across the table and onto the floor again.”

He had a point. “Would the marble fit in the hole at the top?”

“I think it would. But do we risk inserting it without knowing it is the right time? It is the obvious move. If we are wrong, we would lose the marble and perhaps the challenge.”

He was right again. We couldn’t risk it just yet.

I walked around to the back side of the table to get a better look at the other side of the cone. “Hey, there’s something written on this side.”

Winston joined me, peering at the inscription. “It looks like two words. The word near the bottom readslibidine. Over here is the wordhaeresis. Is that Italian?”

“It is not,” I confirmed.

“Latin?” Winston mused. “I can’t be certain, as my Latin language skills are limited to legal terms.”

Lawyer. That was it. Lexi’s father was a lawyer.

I straightened and looked across the room at Father Armando. “Emilio, can you come here for a moment? We have need of your expertise.”

The priest walked across the room, joining Winston and me. “Can you tell me what these two words say? We think they are in Latin.”

Father Armando studied the inscriptions. “The bottom word is Latin forlustand the top one is Latin forheresy.”

“Now we’re talking my language,” I joked, and I heard Vittoria laugh from across the room.

“Save the exciting commentary for the honeymoon, love,” Vittoria teased.

Winston grinned and studied the words again. “These are two strange words to write in Latin on the back of a cone. What do you think it means?”

“It sounds like a religious reference,” I offered. “Like the seven deadly sins.”

“Heresy wasn’t a deadly sin, Gio,” Stefan called out.

“I bet Father Armando thinks it should be,” I replied. “Right, Father?”

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