"Sweet Christmas,” Orlando mutters.
“I don’t get it. What is it?” Clementine asks, squeezing in next to me, though careful not to touch anything.
I have no such concern. From the pockets of my coffee-stained lab coat, I pull out the pair of cotton gloves all archivists carry, put them on, pick up the folder like it’s live dynamite, and open it. Inside, it’s not a top-secret memo, or the whereabouts of bin Laden, or a target list for our spy satellites.
“It’s a book,” Clementine says.
She’s partly right. It has the cover of a book-cracked and mottled black leather with faded red triangles in each of the top and bottom corners. But the guts of it-almost all the interior pages-are ripped out. It’s the same with the spine: torn away, revealing exposed, ancient glue and torn stitching. Without its insides, the whole book barely has the thickness of a clipboard.
I rub two gloved fingers across the cover. From the red rot (the aged, powdery residue that rubs off on my gloves), I’m guessing it dates back to at least the Civil War.
“Entick’s New Spelling Dictionary,” Orlando reads from the cover.
I check my watch. If we’re lucky, Wallace still hasn’t left the White House.
“Why would someone hide an old, torn-up dictionary for the President?” Clementine asks.
“Maybe the President’s hiding it for someone else,” Orlando offers. “Maybe when he’s alone in the room, he puts it in the chair for someone to pick up later, and they still haven’t picked it up yet.”
“Or for all we know, this has nothing to do with the President, and this book has been hidden in that chair for years,” I point out.
I swear, I can hear Orlando roll his eyes.
“What, like that’s so crazy?” I ask.
“Beecher, y’remember when that sweaty researcher with the pug nose and the buggy eyes was coming in here and stealing our old maps?”
“Yeah.”
“And when that looney-toon woman was nabbed for swiping those old Teddy Roosevelt letters because she thought she’d take better care of them than we were?”
“What’s your point?”
“The point is, y’know how they both got away with their crimes for so long? They took a tiny penknife and sliced each page out of the bound collection, page by page so no one would notice, until almost nothing was left,” he says, motioning with a thick finger at the old dictionary like he’s Sherlock Holmes himself.
“And that’s your grand theory? That Orson Wallace-the President of the United States, a man who can have any document brought right to him at any moment-is not only stealing from us, but stealing worthless dictionary pages?”
For the first time in the past five minutes, the office loudmouth is silent.
But not for long.
“The real point,” Orlando finally says, “is that this book-this dictionary, whatever it is-is property of the Archives.”
“We don’t even know that! The spine’s ripped off, so there’s no record group number. And if you look for…” Flipping the front cover open, I search for the circular blue National Archives stamp that’s in some of the older books in our collection. “Even the stamp’s not-” I stop abruptly.
“What?” Orlando asks as I stare down at the inside cover. “You find something?”
Leaning both palms on the desk, I read the handwritten inscription for the second and third time.
Exitus
Acta
Probat
“Exitus acta probat?” Clementine reads aloud over my shoulder.
I nod, feeling the bad pain at the bridge of my nose. “Exitus acta probat. The outcome justifies the deed.”
“You know Latin?” Clementine asks.
“I didn’t play Little League,” I tell her.
“I don’t understand,” Orlando says. “ ‘The outcome justifies the deed.’ Is that good or bad?”
“Moses is in transit,” Orlando’s walkie-talkie screams through the room. They’ll notify us again when he reaches the building.
I study the book as the pain gets worse. “I could be wrong,” I begin, “but if I’m reading this right… I think this book belonged to George Washington.”