Shuddering in apparent horror at the thought of such a scenario, Martha took a deep breath and tucked her hair behind her ears.
“In the event of such disasters, you, the time traveler, are doomed. Because you’ll never be able to get your train back running on the original track, much less on time, much less climb back to the compartment in which you began. Although technically you can live the rest of your life in the past or future, the carriage where you were born, the original present, is where you belong. Always. That’s where life will be the smoothest journey for you. Where things work out and love lasts. A life lived at any other time will be restless, rough, ill fated. You can visit the past and the future, but you can’t stay there. Not if you want any chance at happiness.”
“What does this have to do with the Neverworld?” asked Cannon, uneasy.
“We want to interrogate Jim’s parents? I believe we can. We just have to choose a day in the close past or the future where we can reach them in the eleven point two hours of the wake. Then we find the open window in our train and climb out. And this open window…” She nibbled her fingernail. “It’s somewhere here. I don’t know where yet, but it’s a collision of life and death. It tends to be suicidal. In The Bend, the protagonist uncovers it by accident in Chapter One when he tries to commit suicide. And obviously none of us has ever committed suicide.”
I shook my head. So did Whitley, Cannon, and Kipling.
“So that rules that out,” Martha said gloomily. “We’ll have to locate the open window by some other means. Which brings me to Lesson Three.”
She cleared her throat. “The Neverworld was created not only by me, but by each of you. My biggest contribution is Madwick’s Dark House at Elsewhere Bend. But what about you? The closer you study the Neverworld, the more of yourself you’ll find. Your darkest secrets. Your worst nightmares. Your fears and dreams. The embarrassing thing you never want anyone to learn. It’s all here, buried, if you look close enough.”
An uneasy chill inched down my spine.
There was something threatening in the way she announced this. The others looked uncomfortable too. Whitley sat on the couch, motionless. Kipling looked pale. Cannon stared her down, completely absorbed.
Martha surveyed her notebook with a faint smile. “Kipling.” She cleared her throat. “I meant to ask you.” She held up a page where she’d drawn a red wasp. “The scarlet-bodied wasp moth. Native to Louisiana. I’ve spotted three at Wincroft. Two crawled out of the attic upstairs. Another from a radiator. They shouldn’t exist this far north. Do you recognize it?”
“How did you…?” blurted Kipling. He chuckled nervously. “Momma Greer used to catch them in mason jars. Kept them all around the house. Pit fiends, she called them. Said the sting was lethal and she’d put them on me while I slept if I didn’t sit still during church.”
Martha nodded blankly, unsurprised. She turned the page.
“Cannon. Surely you’ve noticed all the Japanese larch?”
He sat up, nervous. “The…what?”
“The Japanese larch and silver birch trees growing around Wincroft. If you look closer, they’re dead. A bunch of tall, spindly black tree trunks sticking out of the ground. Those trees aren’t native to Rhode Island. They’re indigenous to the Chubu and Kanto regions of Japan. If you go up to one and dig down about six inches, chalky blue water pools everywhere.” She beamed. “You know what I’m getting at?”
Cannon only stared.
“Blue Pond?” she suggested. “Cannon’s Birdcage? The bug you discovered in Apple’s OS X operating system sophomore year? The accidental combination of keystrokes that crashes your hard drive, delivering the photo of Blue Pond wallpaper to your screen? The photograph is an almost surreal picture of a bright blue lake, dead snow-tipped trees growing right out of it.”
He was confounded. “Okay. What about it?”
“That photo is embedded in the Neverworld’s landscape. Everywhere.”
Cannon said nothing, only slipped to his feet, crossed the library to the window, stared out.
“Then there’s Whitley,” Martha went on officially. “There’s a volatility in the Neverworld’s weather because of you.”
“Me?” said Wit.
“Gale-force winds. Constant rain, thunder, lightning. It’s your temper.”
Whitley glared at her.
“The night we went back to Darrow,” Martha went on. “How we got chased by the police. I watched wind overturn every car in the parking lot. It was because of your confession about being the White Rabbit.”
Whitley huffed in apparent disagreement, but her eyes flitted worriedly to the windows.
“These details go for all of us,” Martha went on. “The closer we get to the truth, the root of who we are, the more unstable this world will become. Which brings me to Beatrice.”
She turned to me, her expression stony. My heart began to pound.
“I have no clue.”
Everyone frowned at her—and then at me.
“Your contribution is here. Somewhere. But I haven’t figured it out yet.”
I swallowed. What was Martha attempting to do? Intimidate me? Scare me? If so, it was working.
She sighed. “One thing I do know is that if we try changing the wake, we have to stick together.”
“Why is that?” asked Cannon.
“We don’t know how we’re going to react. The past hooks you like a drug. The future jolts you like an electric chair. Reliving beautiful memories can be just as devastating as reliving the terrible ones. They’re addictive. Given that time travel in The Bend is so dangerous, and that inside the Neverworld there are elements we can’t anticipate—the things you are each contributing—we have no idea what will happen if we even attempt this.” She shook her head, her voice trembling with so much emotion, she reminded me of an evangelical minister on a public access channel, lecturing a rapt congregation about the end of the world. “It could be a complete disaster. We could accidentally end up in different train compartments on different trains speeding in different directions. That means it’ll be impossible to ever make it back here. To Wincroft. Together. To vote. Then we really will be trapped here forever.”
The rest of us eyed each other in alarm. No one spoke.
I gazed down at the hulking book on my lap. I couldn’t breathe.
What was she up to? Was Martha actually trying to help us? Or was this new revelation only the meticulous and conniving arrangement of her chess pieces on the board, some ingenious trap we would all fall into, which would somehow result in everyone voting for her?
What I did know—or at least strongly suspected—was that she knew what my contribution to the Neverworld was. I could tell by the way she looked at me, by her flat, implausible explanation: I haven’t been able to figure it out.
Martha always figured everything out. For whatever reason, she’d decided not to disclose this piece of information.
Not yet.
For the next couple of wakes, we stayed in the library at Wincroft, studying The Dark House at Elsewhere Bend. We wanted to understand everything Martha had told us.