In book three, a mission oak chair in the basement of an old state mental hospital leads Wally Winchester to take a job as a substitute voc ed teacher so he can snoop around for vintage Stickley furniture. After a rocky initiation to the world of defiant students and narrow-minded administrators, he invents an eBay class that opens a new world to the wayward youngsters but puts him at odds with the Secretary of Schools, a rigid ex-marine who has an eye for his wife. In the endpapers of an old leather-bound atlas he finds in the old estate library Wally finds a cryptic inscription that sends him to eastern Russia in search of the Kazanskaya, the Mother of God of Kazan, known as the protectress of Russia and believed lost in a turn-of-the-century fire. With the prize of a lifetime in his possession he faces a five-day train ride to Moscow that turns into a circus of danger and deception as he rides a rumor wave spreading across the Russian homeland that something wonderful is about to occur.