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.
Instead, Astrid and her brother went to live with their dad again in the city where he’d found work. By coming to Clock Island, they learned to face their fears. And once they’d found their courage, they were brave enough to finally tell their mother they would be willing to give up their friends and their school and their home by the ocean if it meant they could all be together again.
Of course the Mastermind had a secret going-away gift for them. As they were pulling away in the moving van after selling their house, Astrid opened an envelope that had just arrived for her to find a note inside and a key. The letter told her it was the Mastermind who had bought their little blue house by the ocean, and it would be waiting for Astrid when she was all grown up and ready to come home again.
It was a bittersweet ending but one full of hope and promise. Ironically, it wasn’t Astrid’s gift for solving riddles that helped her wish come true, but her courage and her honesty. Very sweet. Very touching. But it didn’t help Lucy. Or did it?
What did the kids in the books have to do to get their wishes?
First, they had to make a wish. Then they had to get to Clock Island. After that, they answered riddles or played strange games. Then they had to face their fears. Was she afraid of anything? Anything other than failure?
Lucy took a deep breath of ocean air and started down the lighthouse ladder. She found the path again and started to make a circuit around the island. She walked past the picnic tables again, then reached the Tide Pool at Two.
She stood on the gray stones, worn smooth by the endless comings and goings of the water, and looked deep into the glassy water, hoping to see something in there. Fish or algae or starfish or sea urchins…but she saw nothing. The ocean kept its secrets.
Secrets. Secrets. A fish with a secret. What could that possibly mean?
As Lucy walked along the beach toward Puffin Rock at Three O’Clock, she re-read her list.
A crying wolf
An assortment of octopi
A humble actor
A jar of nine-legged spiders
A fish with a secret
A loaf of cat
A doll condo
A shelf on an elf
A slice of Pi
A wheelbarrow for a fairy garden
A solid-black checkerboard
The bang from a drum
The wind under a kite
A shadow’s shadow
An origami salami
A chicken-fried Kentuckian
A ray of darkness
She wanted to scream but didn’t. Jack’s riddles were always obvious once you knew the answer. Hindsight was twenty-twenty. He did say that to them, right? So that had to mean something, didn’t it?
She pulled a pen from her coat pocket, counted with her finger, and read out every twentieth letter. M…A…She counted them all several times, including the numbers and then excluding the numbers. Nothing.
What else had Jack said?
Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. A quote by Kierkegaard, the philosopher.
Understood backward?
All right, she tried reading the clues backward.
A crying wolf became flow gniyrc A.
That wasn’t it either.
Jack had also said that all writers knew that you couldn’t understand the beginning until you’ve read the end.
So she read the clues backward to front.
Darkness of ray a Kentuckian…
That wasn’t it.
She was about to give up when she decided to look at the last letter of each phrase. With her pen, she circled all the final letters, and instantly, she knew she was onto something.
A crying wolf—F
An assortment of octopi—I
A humble actor—R
A jar of nine-legged spiders—S
A fish with a secret—T
FIRST
Heart racing, blood pounding, Lucy circled all the last letters until she had the answer.