“I don’t think so,” I said.
They turned to me in surprise. I told them what Jim had said in the parking lot.
“Well, if it wasn’t suicide,” said Whitley, “then what happened?”
I dug in my pocket and pulled out the bumblebee pin, placing it on the coffee table.
Kip widened his eyes. “What is that, child?”
“The gift Jim bought me freshman year.”
“Oh, that’s right,” said Whitley.
“Didn’t someone steal it from you?” asked Martha.
I nodded. “I just found it upstairs in Whitley’s jewelry case.”
Wit stared at me, her face pale.
“You stole it from me. I know you did. It was one of your notorious thefts. Wasn’t it?”
“Bee, I’m so sorry—”
“You never think. Little do you know how your most haphazard gestures inflict such pain. It hurts to be your friend. It always has. But I still love you.”
Ignoring Wit’s astonished face, I went on to explain how I’d been stuck in the neck with the pin moments before the wake, which had sent me plunging back into the past with thoughts of Jim.
“I didn’t do it, Bee,” said Whitley. “I swear.”
“I know. It was Cannon.”
Everyone gaped at me.
“He knew you’d taken it, so he stole it out of your jewelry case the first night we changed the wake. He wanted to throw me off track, send the rest of you into a state of perpetual limbo. He doesn’t want us to find out what happened to Jim. He doesn’t want to ever leave the Neverworld.”
“You think he had something to do with Jim’s death?” asked Martha.
“I don’t know yet.”
“Bee does have a point,” said Kipling with a dubious expression. “Cannon knows if anything goes wrong he’s supposed to meet us here. So where the hell is he?”
“He’s hiding somewhere in the past or the future,” I said. “There’s really only one way to get to the bottom of what happened to Jim.”
No one spoke for a minute, all of us doubtlessly thinking the same thing.
“No,” said Martha, shaking her head. “No. It’s out of the question, Bee. No.”
“It’s not as dangerous as you think,” I said.
“Yes, it is.”
“I did it already. I went back even farther, five years by accident. The crazy thing about the past is that you never meet yourself. There are no doubles. If you arrive there, your past self exits on cue to make room for you.”
Martha looked furious. “How long are your wakes now?”
I shrugged.
“Ours are only four hours.” She shook her head. “They’re getting shorter and shorter. And it’s getting worse. Every time we go into the past or future, it makes the possibility of a unanimous vote even more impossible. Don’t you get it?”
She snapped this at me so furiously—eyes bulging, glasses going crooked on the end of her nose—I could only stare back in shock. We all did.
She fell silent, seemingly embarrassed by her outburst.
Kipling turned to me. “How long is your wake now?”
“Six hours?”
“It’s enough time to try, isn’t it?”
Martha said nothing, staring sullenly at the floor.
“If we arrive at Vulcanation at one in the morning,” I said, “even if your wake is four hours, or three, I’m almost positive it will give us enough time to see what happened to Jim.”
With a pang of queasiness I thought back to his last text. Sent at 11:29 p.m.
I’m going to the quarry. Meet me.
They still didn’t know about the texts from Jim. I wasn’t going to tell them.
“Let’s do it,” said Whitley.
As the rest of us talked about the logistics of changing the wake, Martha stayed silent, slumped way down in the couch cushions, her expression a mixture of resentment and hopelessness. It appeared my suggestion of venturing once and for all to Vulcan Quarry was flying in the face of her grand plan. It had made her lose control of the group, though what she was so anxious about, and what this meant for the vote, I could only imagine.
When I woke I was staring at a clear night sky filled with stars, the deafening screech of crickets in my ears. I was lying in thick grass, the long, razorlike blades slicing my bare arms. I was wearing my Darrow uniform. I lifted my head, realizing with a rush of relief that I was outside the quarry, though almost immediately relief gave way to suffocating dread.
The rusted chain-link fence was only a few feet away. I checked my watch.
It was 1:02 a.m.
I crawled to my feet, dizzy, and looked around.
There was no sign of anyone.
I groped my way along the fence, kicking back the grass, the gnarled coils of brambles sharp as barbed wire. Ahead I could see the rusted yellow sign: NO TRESPASSING. Somewhere near was the hole we’d always used. I bent down, forcing aside the weeds, fumbling along the ground. I found the hole and crawled through.
Far ahead, suspended in the sky, I could see the Foreman’s Lookout. I shivered, trying to ignore the nausea rising in my throat. The old wood tower looked like an abandoned space station in the dark.
“Bee!” hissed a voice behind me.
I whipped around. Whitley was waving at me from the other side of the fence. Kipling was behind her, his head barely visible above the ocean of grass. I directed them toward the opening, and within seconds they were beside me.
“Where’s Martha?” I asked.
“Missing,” said Kipling, scrambling to his feet.
“What?”
“She bailed.”
“One second she was there,” said Whitley, shaking her head. “The next, nowhere.”
“She never wanted to come,” said Kipling. “So she didn’t.”
We eyed each other, unsettled at the thought. Where had she gone? Was she hiding out like Cannon somewhere in the past or future, terrified of what we were about to discover?
There were so many questions, but there was no time to figure them out. Not now.
“We need a hiding place,” I whispered. “There’s that cement pipe in the grass next to the entry to the mining shafts. We could stay there.”
Whitley frowned. “What about the old mapping office right beside the road?”
I shook my head. “Too obvious. Jim might see us. Then we’ll have interfered with the past, and we won’t find out what actually happened.”
“Cement pipe it is,” said Kipling, with a cryptic grin.
We took off, fighting our way through the grass to reach the quarry road. Little was left of it, apart from bits of rock and gravel, and the grass there was only knee-high. As we headed down the path, I noticed after a minute that Kipling was lagging far behind, an oddly bleak look on his face. When he saw I was waiting for him, he glanced up, feigning a smile.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Oh, sure, child. Splendid. It isn’t every day I get to watch one of my friends get murdered.”
I put my arm around him for reassurance, pulling him beside me as we trudged on, fighting back the fronds, the wail of the crickets so deafening, it sounded like a million knives being sharpened in my ears. Yet the question blinked glaringly in my mind: How did he know Jim was murdered? He’d blurted it without thinking.
As if he knew.
As we walked on, Kipling seemed unconcerned about his disclosure, which made me wonder if it had actually been one. Did he know something? Or was he only giving voice to his suspicion that someone came out here tonight to kill Jim?
Within minutes we had reached the center of Vulcanation, where the old quarry road made an elongated U past the mapping office, the outhouses, the Foreman’s Lookout. The Lookout was held aloft by four massive steel legs reinforced with crisscrossing beams, the wood ladder stretching up the center like an old, arthritic backbone. There were a few more structures dotting the road—lodging for the miners, little more than heaps of rotten pine logs—and a collapsed crane, which looked like the remains of a great blue whale.
The three of us paused, looking around, apprehensive. It was totally overgrown and wild, more than I remembered. The tempo of the crickets’ screeching began to quicken as if it were the pulse of the night itself, terrified, on edge.
There didn’t appear to be anyone here.
Not Jim. Not anyone.