She smiled. “I’m on Clock Island again. This is crazy.”
“Every morning I say the same thing. I don’t smile when I say it, though.” He was joking, but she didn’t laugh. She didn’t seem to be paying any attention to him. Instead, Lucy Hart was in a trance. Or, more accurately, was entranced. Her purse, which was just a canvas tote bag with the words Redwood Elementary and a redwood tree on the front, slipped down her shoulder and landed with a soft thud at her feet as she turned and gazed around the room.
“We have time. Look around if you want.”
“I want.”
Jack’s house could dazzle anyone. It had dazzled him all those years ago. The room, the whole place really, was something out of a Victorian fever dream. Deep purple wallpaper patterned with silver chains and skulls…a ceiling painted the palest sky blue…a large bay window that looked down the hill that led to the ocean, not that they could see it now in the dark…Lucy paused at the massive marble fireplace, a low fire murmuring inside, and picked up a long piece of rusted metal off the mantel.
“What’s this?” Lucy asked. “Railroad spike?”
“Coffin nail,” Hugo said.
She looked at him, eyes wide. “From a real coffin?”
“A hundred years ago, this island belonged to a wealthy industrialist’s family who buried their dead in their own private graveyard. The pine boxes rot, but the nails don’t. Sometimes they work their way up to the surface.”
“And onto the fireplace mantel?”
Hugo took off his coat, tossed it over the back of the sofa. “Jack’s an eccentric, if you hadn’t figured that out yet.”
“‘Jack’s an eccentric,’ said the artist who literally painted himself?” Her tone was teasing. She looked pointedly at his forearms.
He’d rolled his sleeves to the elbows. Both arms, from wrist to shoulder, were covered in full-sleeve tattoos, abstract swirls of paint colors so that his arms looked more like a paint palette than a person.
“He’s an eccentric and I’m a hypocrite,” he said, rather pleased she’d noticed his tattoos. He looked at both forearms, seeing his ink again through her eyes. “Overkill, you think? I blame youth and sambuca.”
“No, I like them,” she said. “Makes you look like you’re made of paint. Paint and pain.”
“I’m made of poor decisions,” he said, though he was impressed she’d intuited the meaning of his ink. Because what was the life of an artist but paint and pain?
Lucy carefully touched the eye socket of the cyclops skull hanging on the wall by the fireplace, a prop from the Disney Channel film version of Skulls & Skullduggery.
“This house is amazing,” she said. “I was so nervous the first time, I don’t remember much of the house.” She studied the wall clock that served as a map of Clock Island, her finger hovering over the times and the little pictures of wishing wells and tide pools…
The Noon & Midnight Lighthouse The One O’Clock Picnic Spot
The Tide Pool at Two
Puffin Rock at Three O’Clock
Welcome Ashore at Four
The Five O’Clock Beach
Southernmost Six
Seventh Heaven Guest Cottage
At Eight O’Clock We Wish You Well
The Nine O’Clock Dock
The Forest and Fen at Eleven and Ten
“How is this place real?” Lucy said.
Hugo shrugged. “Sometimes I’m not sure it is.”
She looked up, eyeing the chandelier curiously. “Antlers?”
“Loads of deer on the island. Even some piebald ones.”
“Piebald?”
“White with spots. They’re rare in the wild, but we have quite a few on the island. Small gene pool. An artist friend of mine in New York uses their antlers to make chandeliers and extremely uncomfortable chairs.”
She stopped again at a painting hanging over the back of the green velvet sofa. “I don’t remember that either.”
At a glance, it looked like an ordinary painting of the house they were standing in—the famous house on Clock Island—but if you looked twice, you saw that the windows were painted like eyes, and the grand double front doors resembled a weird laughing mouth.
“You don’t remember it because I hadn’t painted it yet.”
“You tried to teach me how to draw the house.”
“I did?”
“Probably not how you wanted to spend your afternoon, teaching a snot-nosed runaway how to draw while waiting on the cops to drag her away.”
“I happen to like teaching kids to draw.”
“Really?” She raised her eyebrows. He didn’t blame her for being skeptical. When he’d started working with Jack on the books, he’d been dragged all over the country on school visits. No one was more surprised than Hugo himself when he realized he enjoyed that part of the job.
“Really.”
“You live on the island too?” she asked.
“For the moment,” he said.
“I have never been so jealous of anyone in my life. Jack really should have let me be his sidekick.”
“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. You know how hard it is to get good Chinese takeaway on a private island?”
“Fair point, but I think I could trade takeout for piebald deer on my lawn, pet ravens, and flying writing desks.” She raised her hand in his direction. “Plus, this place has its own personal world-famous artist in residence.”
“I’m famous only to children under twelve.” This wasn’t true, but it sounded good.
Lucy looked out the dark bay window, though there was nothing to see but the lights on the dock. “What’s going to happen?” she asked.
“I honestly don’t know,” Hugo said. “He didn’t consult me.”
Something in his tone must have betrayed something he didn’t want to betray. “You’re worried about him.”
“He’s getting older, slowing down,” Hugo said. “Of course I’m worried about him.” When talking to the children—and the former children—who read his books, Jack’s number one rule was Don’t break the spell. Lucy was under the spell of Jack Masterson and Clock Island. Hugo wasn’t about to tell her that it wasn’t as wonderful as it looked, that the mysterious, mystical, magical Mastermind from the stories who could solve everyone’s problems and grant every child’s wish had been drinking himself into an early grave for the past six years.
She looked to the library. Voices murmured behind the closed doors.
“It’s safe to go in. It’s just a game,” Hugo said softly.
She shook her head. “Not to me.”
Hugo hesitated before speaking again. “I won one of his games, you know. It can be done, even by a fool like me.”