“Take it as a compliment,” Melanie said. “He didn’t try to cheat with us, just you.”
“Yeah, lucky me.” But it was, in a weird way, a compliment. Lucy had won the first game, and she did guess what the puzzle meant this morning too. If she won the next game, she’d be nearly halfway to victory and only on day two.
Jack came up the path and stood in front of the picnic table. Ms. Hyde stood at his side clutching a leather portfolio.
“Hello again, kids. As you’ve seen, we’re down a player,” Jack said. “Dustin left an hour ago. He told me to pass along his sincerest apologies to you, Lucy. Apparently, he’s suffering from what he calls S.L.S.D.—Student Loan Stress Disorder.”
“It’s okay,” Lucy said. “I forgive him.”
“Let me remind everyone,” Ms. Hyde said, “cheating—or attempting to cheat—in any form or fashion will have you disqualified immediately.”
“Which is a shame,” Jack said. His tone was melancholy. “Personally, I’m all for cheating, lying, and stealing. Where do you think I get all my book ideas?”
“That was a joke,” Ms. Hyde said. “No credible accusations of plagiarism have ever been lodged against Mr. Masterson.”
“I believe they knew I was joking,” Jack said. Then he clapped and rubbed his hands together with fiendish glee. “Now that that unpleasantness is out of the way, let’s play a new game.”
Ms. Hyde opened her portfolio and passed them each a single sheet of paper.
“What’s this list?” Andre asked. “The Utterly Impossible Scavenger Hunt? Seriously? We have to do a scavenger hunt that nobody can do? How’s that supposed to work?”
Lucy took her sheet of paper and glanced at the items on the list.
A wheelbarrow for a fairy garden
The wind under a kite
A solid-black checkerboard
“A jar of nine-legged spiders?” Melanie said. “Are you kidding? Either I’m having a stroke, or this list is crazy.”
“Both, possibly,” Jack said. “I’d bet on both, myself. Two points if you can divine the secret of the hunt. No points for second place on this game.”
“We gotta get a hint, Jack,” Andre said. “I can’t spend all day chasing down an origami salami or a damn fish with a secret!”
“Please,” Melanie said, her eyes pleading. “I felt so stupid after the last game. I know it will be something totally obvious when we find out. Could you make it a little more obvious before we begin this time?”
She smiled, but it was a shy and nervous smile. Did Melanie need to win the book as much as Lucy did?
“Ah, but that’s how life is,” Jack said. “Hindsight is twenty-twenty, they say, and they aren’t wrong. We only know the right thing to do after we’ve done the wrong one. To quote the supposedly great but mostly incomprehensible S?ren Kierkegaard—‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.’ Or, as all writers know, you can’t understand the beginning until you’ve read the end. And those are all the hints you get. Happy hunting, children.”
* * *
—
The three contestants read the list over and over again.
A crying wolf
An assortment of octopi
A ray of darkness
Lucy wanted to laugh, but the stakes were too high. The first two games had seemed so easy that a small part of her believed she had a shot at winning. Now her stomach sank. She had no idea what to do.
“There has to be a trick here,” Melanie said. “Right?”
Ms. Hyde cleared her throat before turning on her heel and following Jack back to the house.
“Right,” Melanie said. “No colluding. I’ll go figure this out somewhere else.”
Lucy watched her head off down a random path. Andre, looking too sure of himself for her liking, took a separate trail. Although the day was bright and breezy, the ocean gentle, and the sky filled with birds floating on the air currents, they had eyes only for the list.
Lucy stayed at the picnic table, re-reading the clues. Melanie was right, of course. There had to be a trick, a double meaning, something obvious she was missing. Her first instinct was to get on her phone and google some of these phrases, see if they meant anything. But that would be cheating.
Also, Lucy highly doubted the internet would be much help. This game seemed like something Jack had invented all on his own, like something from one of his books. And if it was like something from one of his books, it meant it was a game even a child could figure out.
So what was it? What was the secret of the list?
A scavenger hunt was like a treasure hunt, wasn’t it? Lucy decided a visit to the City of Second Hand was in order. Redd Rover’s Treasure Hunt Supply Store was housed in what looked like a cartoonish version of an old miner’s shack from California’s Gold Rush days, complete with a slanting roof, mismatched boards, and hand-painted signs. But when she peeked into the windows, she saw that all the shelves were empty. No help for her here.
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.