She recognized those books. They were the first four Clock Island books in their original covers—The House on Clock Island, A Shadow Falls on Clock Island, A Message from Clock Island, The Haunting of Clock Island.
Lucy laughed, groaned. She shook her head and wiped the tears from her cheeks with her hand.
Good job, Jack, she thought. She had to hand it to the man. He had found a way to scare the holy shit out of her. Face her fears? Well, he’d found her worst fear, hadn’t he?
She stood up and went to the door, into the hall, and strode to the opposite end of the house to Jack’s writing factory, as he called it.
Lucy knocked once and loudly on the door.
“Yes?” Jack said from inside. Lucy opened the door and entered, shutting the door behind her. Jack sat at his desk behind a pile of papers that looked like letters.
“Lucy,” he said with a genuine smile. He always looked so happy to see them. It couldn’t be real, could it?
“Nice try, Jack,” she said. “How’d you do it?”
His head tilted slightly to the side. “Do what?”
“Make it look like my friend Theresa sent me a text message? I know she wouldn’t do it herself, so you had to fake it. You went in and changed her contact number to yours. Face your fears?” she asked. “This is my fear, right? I told Hugo about Christopher and Hugo told you.”
“Yes, I know about Christopher. But what happened?”
“You know what happened. You or one of your lawyers or somebody sent me a text message telling me he’s being transferred to a new foster family twenty miles away.”
He exhaled, then sat forward. “Oh, Lucy.” He shook his head. “I might play some infuriating games, but I wouldn’t torture you. Never, my dear. Never.”
She didn’t want to believe him, but she believed him, and now that she looked at his face and his eyes—that wise rumpled face, those gentle, tired eyes—she knew she’d been crazy to believe for one second that Jack had engineered that message.
“I have to go home,” she said.
“What? Now? Tonight? There’s a storm.”
“I don’t care. I have to get to the airport to catch the first flight back. He’s moving the day after the last day of school. Friday is the last day of school. This Friday, Jack. He’ll be gone Saturday, and if I don’t get home right now, I won’t get to spend time with him before he moves. I have to be there when they transfer him, or he’ll…He won’t be okay. He’ll be terrified if I’m not there. He’ll be—”
Alone. He’ll be scared and alone. No, she couldn’t let that happen. Not to him. Not to her Christopher. She had to be there when he left. She had to be there to tell him it would be all right, that she would see him as often as she could, that he was going to be okay, that it would be scary, but he wasn’t alone. Lies, of course. She had to be there now.
“Lucy, I would put you on my private plane if I had one and fly you home right this second, but there is no pilot in the world who would take off in this weather.”
As if on cue, something hit the side of the house. A broken branch from a tree limb, most likely. But she didn’t care.
“Fine then,” she said. “I’ll find my own way to shore and then rent a car.”
She turned to leave, and when Jack called her name, she looked back, desperate for help.
“Don’t do this,” he said. “Please? We can help you. And we will. But you must be patient.”
“Patient?” She shook her head, laughed bitterly. “Since I was a little girl, you’ve been promising I’d be all right when I grew up. I am not all right. And now you bring us here to play this game for what? Because you think we’re like kids in your stories who’ll do anything you tell us to do? Even Clock Island is fake. There’re no storms in the bottles, and the train tracks go nowhere. Nowhere. Christopher is real, though. He matters to me a billion times more than any book, any game. And I’m not going to tell him that he has to wait until he grows up to be happy. He’s going to be happy now, even if it kills me to make him happy.”
Lucy turned on her heel and left Jack alone in his office.
Forget him. Forget it all.
All she had to do was get to Portland. She’d rent a car and drive down to New Hampshire or Boston, wherever planes were still taking off. She had her debit card. Of course she’d blow half her savings on the rental car and the plane ticket, but it wasn’t humanly possible for her to stay here on the other side of the country while Christopher was back in Redwood, scared and alone. The image of him in his bedroom at the Baileys’ house packing his few clothes and books into garbage bags made her want to throw up.
Surely the rain wasn’t so bad she couldn’t at least get to Portland tonight. As she threw her things into her suitcase, she glanced out the window and saw a few boats out there on the water. It wasn’t a hurricane, not even a squall. Just a storm. She’d run down to the dock and see if there was a boat she could borrow. Sean owned a speedboat, and she’d learned how to drive his. A speedboat would do, or a fishing boat. She’d even take a rowboat if that was her only choice. Borrow first, apologize later. Jack would understand.
With her things packed, she grabbed Hugo’s coat and threw it on, went down the steps to the front door, and walked out into the rain. It was a cold rain, fast and driving, but it didn’t matter to Lucy. Her mind was set. She was getting back to California by tomorrow morning, and nothing and no one could stop her.
Lucy put her head down and walked into the wind. No amount of tightening the cord on her hood would keep it from blowing back. Forget it. She’d just get wet.
The dock was ahead. She could see the two lights at the end of it, but the boats were gone. Of course. It was night. All the household staff had gone back to the mainland.
There had to be more boats somewhere. This was an island owned by a man worth millions of dollars. Where was the boathouse?
Lucy glanced up and down the beach, saw nothing, peered through the trees swaying wildly in the wind, and spotted a small stone building. Maybe that was it. She lugged her suitcase back up the path and took the fork into the woods that led toward the stone building.
When she got closer, she realized it wasn’t a boathouse but a storage shed behind Hugo’s cottage. But he could tell her where to find a boat.
She knocked on his door, pounded on it.
“Hugo?” she called out. “Hugo, it’s Lucy!”
He opened the door, phone in his hand. He was talking to someone, but he didn’t seem at all surprised to see her.
“Call you back,” he said and shoved his phone into the pocket of his jeans. Hugo must have just gotten out of the shower. His hair was damp and his feet were bare.
“Hugo, please, I need to get to Portland.”
“Not tonight, you don’t.” He reached out and took her by the arm, then pulled her inside his house. It must have been Jack on the phone.
“Let me go,” she demanded and pulled her arm from his grasp.
She started to turn, to open the door, when Hugo said something that stopped her.
“This isn’t what Christopher would want you to do, and you know it.”