Andre shook his head and looked up at the ceiling. “I miss the real world.”
“One O’Clock is the picnic spot,” Lucy said. “I guess we’ll meet there at two this afternoon?”
Jack stuck his head out of a door at the opposite end of the hallway.He whispered, “Yeeesssss,” in a spooky voice before disappearing again.
Well, they had their orders. Melanie, Andre, and Dustin left the hallway and went back downstairs.
“When I was a kid,” Melanie said as she walked away, “I never understood why Dorothy wanted to leave Oz and go home to Kansas. Now I get it.”
They all laughed. All of them but Lucy. She stayed behind, studying the painting, the boy on the horse fleeing the dark forest. A beautiful painting, one of Hugo’s best. No, she would have happily stayed in Oz forever. And on Clock Island too. If only she could.
* * *
—
On Clock Island, a girl with soft brown hair and a long wooden spoon fed freshly caught stars to the Man in the Moon.
These were the things that got Hugo out of bed in the morning. He liked where this painting was going—the strangeness of it, the wistfulness. Was this the cover for Jack’s new book? No way to tell, but Hugo was enjoying watching the image in his mind come to life on his canvas. It had the feel of a Remedios Varo painting. In Hugo’s opinion, it was never too soon for children to learn their ABCs and their female Spanish-Mexican surrealists.
Hugo had been up and painting for hours. At five o’clock that morning, he’d woken from a night of a thousand dreams about Davey, all demanding Hugo paint them.
In one dream, they were kids again. Hugo was sitting in a chair by Davey’s bed, reading him stories while sharks swam past the window and birds perched on the footboard. Somewhere in the dream, Lucy Hart came into the room, smiled, and said it was her turn to read to him. And the book she read Davey had this image on the cover—the Man in the Moon, the spoon, the stars, and the girl who looked a little like a young Lucy Hart.
Hugo never tried to analyze the strange images his brain threw at him. He left the symbology and theorizing to the art critics. He dreamed. He imagined. He painted. Don’t ask him what anything meant. None of his business. All that mattered was that his dream had been a good one, one he wanted to stay in when he woke up. Davey was alive again for a night, and the book that Lucy read to his lost brother was a book Hugo wanted to hold in his hands.
Davey…God, he missed that kid. Even now, so many years later, Hugo caught himself whispering into the silence, “Where are you, Davey? Where did you go?”
Back then, when Davey was alive, Hugo had been bored stiff reading those bloody kids’ books to his baby brother. Now he’d kill to read him one more story. For a long time, Mr. Popper’s Penguins was Davey’s favorite, and Hugo had to read a chapter every night for weeks and weeks, and when the book was over, he had to re-read it.
Desperate to find a new book his brother might like, Hugo had gone to a jumble sale in a local church to see if he could pick up any old children’s books for cheap. One table had a stack of Clock Island books. Hugo had never heard of them, but at only four for a pound, why not try them?
His whole life began that day for the bargain price of a quid.
Hugo piled moonlight-colored paint onto his fan brush. It had been a long, long time since he’d had a dream about Davey. Why last night? Because of Lucy, he thought, because he mentioned Davey to her. She hadn’t even asked. He just told her. And then, stupidly, he followed her into Second Hand City, telling himself he was worried she might hurt herself. Instead, he had hurt her.
With more force than necessary, Hugo cleaned his brush again. He needed coffee and a good strong punch in the face. Piper had told him more than once he should stick to talking about art and leave the important stuff to the grown-ups. He should have listened to her. As he was leaving the studio, he glanced out the window. Lucy Hart was strolling along the rocky spit of beach outside his guesthouse as seagulls swooped and soared over the water.
Hugo wanted to go to her and apologize for crapping all over her dreams last night, but he didn’t trust his motives. Did he want her forgiveness? Did he want to make it up to her? Or was he simply annoyingly attracted to her, and for the first time in years he actually cared if someone liked him as a person or not? Ah, misery.
No. He would leave her in peace. The end.
He started to step away, to let it go, to drink his coffee and behave himself, but he stopped when he saw one of the other players, that doctor from Boston…Dustin? Yes, him. He walked up to Lucy and caught her by the arm.
Hugo went to the window and cracked it open. He told himself he wasn’t eavesdropping, just letting in the breeze.
“Are you serious?” Dustin asked. His tone was demanding, intimidating. “Are you insane?” He put his fingers to his temples and lifted his hands as if she had just blown his mind.
“You heard the lawyers. We cheat, we get disqualified. I don’t want to cheat, and I don’t want to get disqualified. Do you?” Lucy sounded like a teacher trying to talk sense into a particularly dense child.
“I’m not talking about cheating. I’m talking about teamwork. Like we just did. Nothing else.”
“That wasn’t a real game, just one of Jack’s challenges.”
Dustin rolled his eyes to the sky. “Jesus, do you want the money or not?”
“I want to win the book, but I told you I’m not selling it to some collector who will never let it be published. Kids have been waiting forever for—”
“Who gives a shit? That lawyer said eight figures. That’s ten million dollars bare minimum split between the two of us.”
“I give a shit,” Lucy said. Hugo wanted to applaud her backbone.
“I’m not buying the angel act, Lucy. Markham told me you were flat broke. Well, so am I.”
“No.”
“Then you’re as stupid as you look.”
That was enough for Hugo. He left through the studio door and headed straight to the beach.
“Lucy,” Hugo called out. Lucy’s mouth fell open. Dustin turned and stared daggers at him. “You all right?”
“She’s fine, and we’re talking,” Dustin said. “Private conversation.”
“No, Lucy was talking,” Hugo said. “You were being an ass.”
Dustin scoffed. “We’re allowed to talk to each other.”
“You weren’t talking. You were trying to intimidate the one person in this game who has a chance of winning. Not that I blame you. Markham called me too. Tempting offer.”
“See?” Dustin said to Lucy. “He’s got a brain.”
“I do have a brain. So does Lucy. A better one than yours, otherwise you wouldn’t be trying to scare her into working with you.”
“I’m a doctor. I was top of my class. I don’t have to listen to this.” Dustin raised his hands and stormed off, saying, “Bye. I’m out of here.”
When he was gone, Hugo turned to Lucy. “What a prince.”
She looked a little dazed. “He seemed nice yesterday, this morning. Wow.”
“Some boys can’t handle losing. What do you call them in the teachers’ lounge? Poor sports? Sore losers?”