I slept like the dead for eleven hours straight. When I finally did emerge from sleep, it was sudden, as if I had been thrown from the back of a moving car. My eyes flew open, and I instantly remembered my nightmare had been about Hunter. She hadn’t died—yet—but I couldn’t bear it if anything bad happened to her. I reached for my phone.
“Hi,” she answered on the first ring.
“Are you okay?” I blurted.
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I had a nightmare about you.”
“Was I hot?” she asked.
“What?”
“In your dream. Did I look hot? No point dying if I didn’t look good.” She cackled at her own vanity. She was a sick puppy. I kind of loved that about her.
“It’s not funny,” I chided. “And what makes you think you were dying in my dream?”
“Why else would you call me?” she answered. Good point.
“Well, you didn’t die, but every time I’ve dreamed like this, the person did,” I explained.
She was unmoved. “So what happened to me?”
“You fell and skinned your knee.”
“Ouch. I can see why you’d be concerned.”
“I’m serious, Hunter! My dreams are serious.”
“I’m sure they are.” I heard a distinct exhale.
“Are you smoking?” I challenged.
She cleared her throat. “No . . . no, of course not.” I could tell she was lying. “Why, was I smoking in your dream too?”
“Yeah, smoking hot,” I assured her. It was useless. I wasn’t going to scare her out of . . . what? Not running down an alley? I was glad I’d called, and she was fine. I decided to change the subject. “Guess who visited me last night?”
“Your angel boyfriend?”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I protested.
“So it was him. What’s his name, Gavin? You should be worried about yourself.” She blew into the phone again. “I checked into it. Messing around with an angel is no joke.”
“You checked with who?”
“Just watch yourself,” she repeated.
“Maren!” my grandmother called up the stairs. “Can’t sleep the entire day away.”
“I have to go,” I said. “Call you later.”
We said good-bye, and I tried Jo’s number. I wanted to make sure everything was okay with her gran. Straight to voice mail. I hung up and fired off a quick text instead.
As soon as I hit send, the events of the previous night at Campbell Hall rushed my still-foggy brain. I tried not to give in to them. Happy thought. Surely, I could find a happy thought. Gavin. A warm peace flooded over me. I held my hand up and remembered him holding it again. I could almost feel the pressure of his strong fingers. I had zero desire to move.
I rolled over and blinked at the clock. It was almost noon, definitely time to drag myself out of bed. And, thankfully, it was Saturday; two days before I had to worry about seeing anyone at school. How was I ever going to face Anders . . . or Graham? Maybe I could just take classes on the Internet, or convince my grandparents to homeschool me.
As soon as I sat up, I regretted it. My head felt like it was full of rocks, and my stomach was sour. I didn’t know if it was from stress or poison. Probably both.
I shuffled to the bathroom and surveyed the damage. I looked tired and pale, but that was pretty much my standard appearance. My hair still had a few shiny curls molded into it, and there was a trace of sparkle on my neck. I dabbed concealer under my eyes, and over the bruise on my elbow, brushed some blush on my cheeks to at least pretend I wasn’t a zombie, and headed downstairs.
While I fixed myself some tea and toast, I listened dutifully to my grandfather’s new joke. It had something to do with Irish men on a plane. I willed the toaster to work faster while I waited for what I knew would be a terrible punchline about poop. British jokes were always about poop.
“That’s nothing, you should see the mess in the back of mine!” my grandfather exploded. My grandmother just rolled her eyes. “Do you get it, Maren?” he asked me.
I got it. But it wasn’t remotely funny. I smiled and nodded, stuck a triangle of toast in my mouth so I couldn’t possibly talk to them, and took my breakfast back upstairs.
Once back in my room, I lugged the giant armchair around so that I could sit in it with my feet up on the window seat, and snuggled down under the rose blanket with my mom’s journal. Now that I knew one of the buildings was Campbell Hall, I wanted to look more closely at those pages to see if I could learn anything else.
I flipped to the first page that showed the sprawling country mansion. Definitely Campbell Hall. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t recognized it right away. It was exactly the same in the drawing as in person—from the balconies under the front windows to the huge columns by the entrance. I traced the outline of the sketch with my fingertip. How crazy that my mom had drawn the very building I’d just been inside.
After a while, my legs started falling asleep, so I decided to tuck them under me. As I shifted my weight, the leather-bound book fell to the floor. When I reached down and scooped it up, a thin, pink ribbon about ten inches long, with a silvery pattern printed on it, fluttered free. When I picked it up, I saw that the decoration was actually a vertical row of tiny letters. Probably a bookmark with a lame inspirational quote.
GAITRMNITQMLJCSUKDMANAENDEO—
AIC?SLERWSVOYOXTPTTOFMGFA?
I tried to read it, but it made no sense. It didn’t spell out a single legible word except END, which didn’t inspire any confidence in me. Why would my mother have a ribbon in her journal with a random string of letters on it?
Once I looked closer, I realized the letters weren’t printed, but handwritten in her dainty, swooshy script; all capital letters, with two dots—one about two-thirds of the way down, and one at the end. If my mother took the time to write it, it wasn’t random. It had to mean something.
I found a pen and paper in the desk, and copied the letters. I looked at what I wrote upside down, sideways, and then held up to a mirror. I tried rearranging the letters, grouping them into words, using every third one . . . nothing.
It was possible that there was a key somewhere else, where the letters were randomly assigned to others, such as all Ws equaling As, but my mother wasn’t a fan of such simple cryptograms. They were either too easy to work out, hence their popularity in newspaper puzzle sections, or they were too hard because they required spiriting two different messages to the same person separately but quickly.
I tried again. I wrote the letters in boxes, in crosses, and even circles. I tried reading the letters backward, and then backward in twos and threes. Still nothing.