The Wishing Game(55)
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The three contestants read the list over and over again.
A crying wolf
An assortment of octopi
A ray of darkness
Lucy wanted to laugh, but the stakes were too high. The first two games had seemed so easy that a small part of her believed she had a shot at winning. Now her stomach sank. She had no idea what to do.
“There has to be a trick here,” Melanie said. “Right?”
Ms. Hyde cleared her throat before turning on her heel and following Jack back to the house.
“Right,” Melanie said. “No colluding. I’ll go figure this out somewhere else.”
Lucy watched her head off down a random path. Andre, looking too sure of himself for her liking, took a separate trail. Although the day was bright and breezy, the ocean gentle, and the sky filled with birds floating on the air currents, they had eyes only for the list.
Lucy stayed at the picnic table, re-reading the clues. Melanie was right, of course. There had to be a trick, a double meaning, something obvious she was missing. Her first instinct was to get on her phone and google some of these phrases, see if they meant anything. But that would be cheating.
Also, Lucy highly doubted the internet would be much help. This game seemed like something Jack had invented all on his own, like something from one of his books. And if it was like something from one of his books, it meant it was a game even a child could figure out.
So what was it? What was the secret of the list?
A scavenger hunt was like a treasure hunt, wasn’t it? Lucy decided a visit to the City of Second Hand was in order. Redd Rover’s Treasure Hunt Supply Store was housed in what looked like a cartoonish version of an old miner’s shack from California’s Gold Rush days, complete with a slanting roof, mismatched boards, and hand-painted signs. But when she peeked into the windows, she saw that all the shelves were empty. No help for her here.
She kept walking, following the train tracks to Samhain Station until they ended abruptly in the middle of a clearing in the woods. There was nothing there but an overgrown meadow of wildflowers. Pretty but not the Samhain Station from the books. No tower. No pumpkin thrones. No Lord and Lady of October. Just train tracks that went nowhere.
Lucy sat on the ground in the middle of the wildflowers, careful of the ants and the bees. She studied the list again, but nothing came to her.
A chicken-fried Kentuckian?
A slice of Pi?
“Jack, what are you doing to us?” Lucy whispered to herself.
The answer had to be staring her in the face. She wasn’t going to be able to figure it out and someone else would win this round and put an end to her lucky streak. What if Hugo was wrong about her having a shot, and she lost—not just this round, but the game? Then it would be back to Redwood, back to knitting scarves to sell on Etsy until she gave herself arthritis, back to carbo-loading on cheap spaghetti so she could sell her plasma twice a week without fainting, back to waiting for her life to start and knowing it wouldn’t until Christopher was her son.
And if he was never her son, did that mean her life would never start?
No, it meant his life would never start. The life they’d dreamed of together anyway, the life she’d promised him. Their stupid simple life. No castles. No towers. No magic islands. Just a two-bedroom apartment and a half-decent used car. And all that was keeping her from it was her brain, which couldn’t seem to figure out what the hell a “doll condo” and a “loaf of cat” were supposed to mean.
The ground was cold and hard, and Lucy’s feet started to go to sleep. She stood up and dusted off the seat of her pants. Fighting back tears, she trekked on through the woods, unsure of what she was looking for but unable to sit still. Nobody had ever won a scavenger hunt sitting in one place. Soon the forest thinned, and tall seagrasses took their place. The stone path ended at a wooden plank bridge. She crossed it and followed it around a bend, and there, about fifty yards ahead, stood the lighthouse.
It wasn’t big, but it was charming. White, maybe twenty-five feet tall and with a bright red dome on top, jaunty as a red cap. Lucy stood in the bright sun with a brisk wind blowing her hair and chapping her face. She remembered the clock in Jack’s living room with the lighthouse at the top.
The Noon & Midnight Lighthouse had an exterior ladder that led to a viewing platform. Lucy dried her hands on her jeans and gripped the rungs. She climbed to the top and found that it felt a lot higher than it looked from the ground. Her head swam at first, but she held tight to the railing and gazed out at the water.
It was dazzling, or it should have been—the blues and the grays and the golds and the silvers. The sun was playing hide-and-seek behind the silver clouds. But it might have been a blank brick wall in front of her for all the pleasure she could take in it. The minutes were ticking past—tick-tock, tick-tock—and her time was running out. She’d seen that look in Andre’s eyes. He could be halfway through the list by now, while she was stuck at the starting line.
Jack had told them on their first night here that they would be playing the Clock Island game. If only. The kids in those books always got their wishes granted by the end. Except…not always, now that she thought of it. Often the kids wanted one thing and got something else, something better, by the end. Something they didn’t even know they wanted. In the first book, The House on Clock Island, Astrid and her brother, Max, wanted their dad to move back home. In the end, that wasn’t the wish that he granted.