Dreamland Social Club(39)

It was a pack of cigarettes.

“Do you smoke?” she asked, and he said, “On occasion. But in the spirit of the evening, I thought you might want one.”

“Oh.” She hadn’t been expecting this. “I don’t know.”

“Okay.” He put them down on top of the backpack. “I just figured the idea was sort of to, I don’t know, retrace her footsteps?”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s the idea.” Though she’d thought about it very little, had really just sprung into action. “At least I think that’s the idea. But I don’t think I want to smoke. I sort of can’t believe she ever did.”

“We’ll pretend!” Leo took two cigarettes from the box and handed her one and then said, “Okay, imagine we’ve climbed up to the highest peak of the Thunderbolt.”

“Okay,” Jane said, then they both took fake drags and started laughing. Jane faked a cough and almost right away a beam of light fell on their feet.

A guard.

Or the police?

“We gotta go,” Leo said, standing up and pulling Jane up and then shoving the blanket into his backpack as they ran for the gate. They were back on the boardwalk before the guard—the light—could catch up with them, and they just tore off into the night until they were breathless.

They slowed to a drag. A man in a black hoodie fell into step beside them, seemed to be eyeing them, and Leo said to Jane, “Hey,” and stopped walking. He looked at her pointedly and said, very slowly, “Your shoelace is untied.”

“Oh.” Jane looked down to find both shoes in order. Then she understood Leo’s hard gaze and bent to tie her shoe with a series of fake hand motions. When she stood back up Leo said, “Sorry. That guy.”

“Is he gone?”

Leo nodded. “We should probably call it a night.”

Jane nodded, and they walked quickly down off the boardwalk toward Preemie’s. Leo stopped out front and said, “Which key next?”

Jane said, “Parachute. Since I have no idea what the other two are for.”

“Well then, I would say that’s an excellent choice.” He adjusted the strap of his backpack on his shoulder with his thumb and left his hand there, long fingers resting on the front of his own shoulder. “When?”

Jane could barely talk she was so winded—in her head, if not in her lungs—from their escape from the guard, the shoelace ruse, the sight of those lean fingers. “Tomorrow night?”

“I’m in.”

She had the keys in her hand and looked at them. “What do you think ‘Bath’ means?”

“Don’t know,” he said. “Maybe just a bathroom they used to use?”

Jane smiled and shook her head. “Just doesn’t seem right.”

He shrugged and said, “We could ask my mom, but then she’d be onto us and no more sneaking out for me.”

“Let’s wait,” Jane said. “I bet I can figure it out.”





CHAPTER three


ARE YOU SICK?” her father asked, poking his head into her room around dinnertime. He’d already dragged her out of bed once that day for lunch—Chinese food—but then she’d gone up to study and had started daydreaming about Leo, about being with him again, about maybe kissing him—about trailing a finger across that seahorse, that anchor, that lightning bolt—and had fallen asleep again.

“No.” Jane sat up in bed. “Just didn’t sleep well last night.”

Again, not a lie.

“Well, we’re going down to Brighton Beach for dinner. If you want to come, be downstairs in ten minutes. And get a little gussied.”

They set out on foot down the boardwalk toward Brighton, which was the next beach down the boardwalk, where Russian sidewalk cafés with checkered tablecloths faced the ocean. Their table at a restaurant called Tatiana sat at the edge of a canopy that hung over the outdoor tables. All three of them sat facing out toward the stream of people passing on the boardwalk and, beyond them, the Atlantic—bright blue and calm.

The menu was almost entirely in Russian and Jane was having a hard time concentrating, but then her father asked the waiter a bunch of questions and ordered fish and sausages and stuffed pastries and cheese pies and pickled things and caviar and then he knocked back a few vodkas on the rocks. The clear liquid made him loose, chatty.

“So I reached out to some old colleagues,” he said, after he’d stuffed himself. “One in particular. A big fan of my work. And a big fan of your mother’s, too, for what it’s worth. I think he had a crush on her.”

Jane could barely find anything edible, had been washing down unchewed food with water.

Marcus said, “That’s great, Dad. Good for you.”

“But it gets better,” their father said. “He was so interested in the idea of the Tsunami that he got on the phone over the weekend and got me a meeting with someone at Loki Equities. Apparently they’re still in the market for their sort of flagship attraction.”

The word—Loki—caught like something pickled in Jane’s throat. “I thought you were showing the Tsunami to the city,” she said. “Not Loki.”

“Well, Loki seems to be where the action is, according to everyone I’ve talked to.”