Little Lion Read Online Free PDF

egg. Since we’re already in here, couldn’t we just poke around a little?”
    â€œWell,” Maisie said, considering.
    â€œFive minutes?” Felix offered.
    â€œI guess it would make her happy if we did find it,” Maisie said, remembering how Clara Barton had told them to be kinder to Great-Aunt Maisie. Maisie sighed. “Five minutes.”
    Maisie and Felix walked down the long hallway that led to what used to be the family’s bedrooms. First they passed Ariane Pickworth’s room. The walls were a Robin’s Egg Blue, and the ceiling was painted with white fluffy clouds. From each corner of the ceiling, a fat cherub smiled down at them.
    â€œSo creepy that she died in there,” Felix said in a hushed voice.
    He walked past the room quickly.
    Beside Ariane’s room was the nursery, a smaller room that still held two matching white cribs, two matching white rocking chairs, and two matching white chests of drawers. In fact, everything in that room was white.
    Next came Thorne’s bedroom.
    â€œShould we poke around in there?” Felix asked. “I mean, if he took it, maybe he left it here.”
    Maisie sighed.
Two
rooms? They would never get to The Treasure Chest. But then she pictured Great-Aunt Maisie and her delight at that egg and at sharing the anagram with them.
    â€œSure,” she said.
    Great-Uncle Thorne’s room had a jungle mural painted on the walls, the dark green leaves reaching upward onto the ceiling. A rug made out of a lion’s skin, with the head still attached and the mouth opened in a silent roar, took up most of the floor. The blanket on the bed was made of dark brown animal fur.
    â€œUgh,” Maisie said, wrinkling her nose. “Who would ever sleep with all this dead animal stuff around them?”
    Felix had already started to open drawers.
    â€œEmpty,” he said.
    Maisie opened the closet and peeked under the bed.
    â€œNo one’s been in these rooms in years,” she said. “Of course they’ve been emptied out.”
    â€œWe’ll still check Great-Aunt Maisie’s real fast?”
    â€œFine,” Maisie said impatiently.
    She opened the door in the room that led to a bathroom with a claw-foot tub and a toilet with a big chain that had to be pulled for flushing. The towel racks had thick white towels on them, with the letters
TPP
monogrammed on some in dark red and
MAP
on the others in Robin’s Egg Blue. Another door on the other side of the bathroom opened into Great-Aunt Maisie’s room.
    When Maisie and Felix walked in, they grew very quiet. It almost felt like being in church. Each item on the dresser—a heavy silver brush and comb and mirror—had the letters
MAP
engraved on them. One table held a dozen music boxes of different sizes and designs. Another had rows of dolls with real hair and creepy, realistic-looking faces staring back at them. The bed was so high that there was a little step stool to climb onto it. Under an elaborately embroidered canopy, the bed itself was stacked high with pillows.
    â€œIt looks like a little girl’s room,” Maisie said softly.
    Felix nodded.
    â€œI don’t know why I feel so sad all of a sudden,” Maisie said.
    The walls here were a midnight blue, and the ceiling had constellations painted on it. Felix could identify the Big Dipper and Orion the Hunter.
    â€œLook,” Maisie said. Her fingers traced white lines that ran along one wall. Above the lines were numbers.
    Felix studied them carefully. “They’re longitudes and latitudes,” he said finally.
    â€œFour of them,” Maisie said.
    â€œI wonder where they lead to?” Felix said, imagining the globe that sat in his classroom with lines of longitude and latitude circling it.
    Maisie pointed to another set of numbers.
    â€œDates,” Felix said. Two of the dates were the same, and two were different and years older.
    â€œBirthdays?” Maisie