Keep wishing.
I’m listening.
Your Friend,
Jack Masterson
P.S. Oh God, he’s loose again. SOMEONE BRING ME THE HOLY WATER AND THE CRUCIFIX!
“That’s a joke,” Lucy told Christopher. “He was joking that his monster editor was a vampire. You have to use holy water and crucifixes to keep vampires away.”
She thought Christopher would ask her about the monster or say something about how funny and weird Mr. Masterson’s letter to her was. Instead, he put his arms around her neck and rested his chin on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry your parents didn’t want you,” he said.
Lucy smiled. She wasn’t about to cry, not over them. They didn’t deserve it.
“I’m not,” she said, returning his hug with a squish.
“You aren’t?”
“If they’d wanted me, I wouldn’t be here with you,” she said. “Maybe I’d still be living in Maine. And…if they wanted me, I would never have run away. And because I did run away, I know the answer to the riddle.”
“What is it?” Christopher whispered.
“I’m getting there.”
After Lucy had read that letter from Mr. Masterson a few hundred times, she decided she liked his numbers better than hers. And didn’t he say he needed a new sidekick?
In her technology class at school, she’d learned how to use the internet to find places and how to get there. So Lucy packed her clothes and all the money she’d saved from babysitting and doing chores for her grandmother—$379. She would take a bus to Portland’s ferry terminal. Then she’d ask an adult which ferry went to Clock Island. Someone would probably tell her just to show off that they knew where a famous person lived and how to get there. In the Clock Island books, adults were constantly underestimating kids. Maybe someone would tell her.
And the funniest thing is…they did.
“They told you?” Christopher asked.
“I asked the ticket lady. She just told me,” Lucy said. “She said I couldn’t get off at Clock Island. It only stopped there for mail delivery, but I could take pictures. But when the ferry got to the dock, and the mailman got off, as soon as his back was turned, I got off too. Just like that.”
For all her planning and plotting and thinking of everything that could happen, everything that could go wrong, it was actually pretty easy to get to Clock Island. It was like Jack Masterson was just a regular person. You wanted to know where a normal person lived, you asked someone who knew. And if you wanted to go to their house, you just went there. Lucy puzzled over how easy it was as she walked up from the beach to a stone path sloping upward toward what felt like the peak of a hill. Where were the electric fences? Where were the bodyguards? Did people not know how famous and important Jack Masterson was?
And then there it was—the house on Clock Island. No doubt in her mind. It was enormous, spooky, white with black shutters, ivy climbing the sides…Yes, this was The House.
She knew nothing about houses as a kid except there were rich people houses and normal people houses. And this was undoubtedly a rich person’s house.
As an adult, she’d figured out that the house was a grand Victorian, the house of someone too rich and a little bit wacky. Turrets and towers and stained-glass windows, oh my.
She was scared as she approached the house. Her heart pounded as if it would break out of her chest and run away back home to her grandparents. The reality of what she’d done sank in when she stood behind the trunk of a pine tree, staring at the most beautiful house she’d ever seen. What had she done? And how would she get back home? What was she doing here?
Then she remembered…She remembered how, in every Clock Island book, the kids were always terrified to go up to the house, to ring the bell, to ask Master Mastermind for help. And he was scary, but that didn’t make him bad. Storms were scary. Wolves were scary. But Lucy loved storms and wolves.
Before she knew it, Lucy was at the front door. She rang the bell.
She waited.
A man opened the door.
She knew it was him immediately. Jack Masterson—an older white man, gray-brown hair gone a bit wild, brown eyes, and a permanently furrowed brow. Navy cardigan. Rumpled khakis. Rumpled face. That was him all right. She couldn’t believe he’d answered his own door. Didn’t he have a million servants?
“Mr. Masterson,” Lucy began before he could get a word out. “I’m Lucy Hart. You wrote me back. You said you needed a sidekick. So…here I am.”
He must have been the wisest man in the world. Any other man, any other writer, who had a fan with a backpack show up on their doorstep asking to be their sidekick would likely call the police, a psychiatric hospital, and the fire department just for backup. And if that had happened, Lucy would have been a broken girl. Broken so badly she would have never gotten unbroken, no matter how many Christophers she’d meet.
Instead of doing that, the sane thing, Mr. Masterson did the Jack Masterson thing. He said, “Ah, Lucy, I’ve been expecting you. Come in. There’s tea brewing up in my writing factory. Do you take it American or English style?”
It wasn’t a yes or no question, but she answered, “Um…no?” She was pretty sure she’d never had hot tea before.
“Then I’ll make it the way I like it—ninety percent sugar. Let’s go up and talk.”
She followed him inside and up the main staircase. She barely remembered what the interior looked like, she’d been so overwhelmed. But she did recall seeing weird paintings on the dark green walls. Weird but wonderful.
They walked down a long hall to his writing factory, where there was a teapot on a hot plate and bags hanging out of the lid and over the side.
Jack Masterson sat her in a big brown leather chair and gave her a cup of steaming hot tea full of sugar like he’d promised. And it was good. （To this day, she drank black tea with sugar, no milk.） She looked around the office in wonder and amazement. All the bookshelves. All the books. Masks. Model rockets. A glowing glass jack-o’-lantern in place of a desk lamp. Moths with eyes on their wings in glass boxes. A globe of the moon. A black bird on a driftwood perch by the open window looking out on the ocean.
A living bird.
“That’s a crow,” she said in shock when the bird moved.
Mr. Masterson raised his hand to his lips and shushed her.
“Raven,” he said softly. “Thurl is very sensitive. But he’s only a baby, so he’ll grow out of that. Come here, Thurl.”
He whistled and the raven flapped his wings, flew across the room to land on Jack’s wrist.
“Wow,” Lucy said. “What’s his name? Thurl?”
“Yes, Thurl Ravenscroft. No relation.”
“Relation to who?”
“Thurl Ravenscroft.”
She stared at him. He was weirder than she’d expected. She never ever wanted to leave.
“You have a pet raven?”
“‘Hope is the thing with feathers,’ the lovely Miss Emily Dickinson once wrote. Well, if that’s the case, then a wish is a thing with black feathers.” He smiled as he stroked Thurl Ravenscroft’s glossy black chest. “Black feathers, a sharp beak, and talons. Dangerous things, wishes. Sometimes they come to you when you call. Sometimes they fly away after biting you.” He put his finger up to Thurl’s beak, but the raven didn’t bite him. Jack whistled again and Thurl returned to his perch, a piece of carved driftwood.