Neverworld Wake(26)
Then, one night, as the four of us sat reading in the library, I realized from the way Kip kept glancing curiously at the clock on the mantel that he was waiting for something. Martha must have said something to him about a group meeting, because when she appeared a few minutes after midnight, entering without a word, hauling her heavy black bag and taking a seat on the couch, he didn’t look the least bit surprised.
“It’s time,” Martha announced.
Whitley and Cannon surveyed her in shock.
“Nice to see you too,” said Cannon.
Martha gave him an official smile, clasping her hands like a judge.
“We’ve come back to where we started,” she said. “It’s as if the Neverworld’s walls are slippery and slanted, always sending us back to where we began. I suspect, like me, you were each pursued by the Keeper, often when you least expected it?”
I nodded. So did the others.
“He’s our caretaker. He tends us, keeping us alive and thriving, making sure we have the sustenance we need but also keeping us in check. This means he’s capable of anything, being at once a guide and a taskmaster, a custodian and a thorn. Maybe he leaves you alone, or offers you a sprinkling of advice. Or else he hounds you, reminding you of the one thing you wish to forget. He will become anything to make you grow in a certain direction. Most of all, he is the chairman of a grand design we can’t see.”
No one said a word, all of us listening in wonder, in shock. The way Martha sat there—squared shoulders, steady stare. She was no longer the mute nerd who blurted unfunny comments at weird moments, the girl more comfortable buried in the pages of an underground fantasy novel than living in the real world. This was a new Martha, one who had studied with Beloroda. She was a confident presence now. I had no idea where she was going with this speech, but she’d given it considerable thought, her every word as carefully selected as stones in an ornate necklace, each one meticulously polished and gleaming.
“The Neverworld is real,” she said. “To understand and conquer it, we must first understand and conquer each other. I’ve thought it over. We must set aside the question of who should live. We’re not prepared for that. Not yet. Because there’s another mystery we have to solve. It’s dogged each of us in different ways since it happened.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Cannon, frowning.
“Jim.”
His name was like a gleaming sword pitching through the air, landing hard at our feet.
“It was suicide,” whispered Whitley.
Martha stared at her, stony. “You don’t actually believe that.”
Wit seemed too uncomfortable to answer.
“I’ve been studying the Neverworld,” Martha went on. “This place, among many things, makes us the most powerful detectives in the world. We can go back to the scene of the crime an infinite number of times. We can interview bystanders. Witnesses. The police. Every teacher, janitor, and student. We can polish our questions, manipulate, intimidate, blackmail. There are no penalties and no rules. We can find out what happened to Jim once and for all.”
Martha’s dark eyes found mine as she said this, sending a shiver through me.
“But the case was unsolvable,” said Cannon.
“Yeah,” said Kipling in a low voice. “The cops didn’t get very far.”
“They were pressured by the school board to wrap it up quickly. The sooner everyone believed suicide, the sooner Darrow could repaint the bloody walls. That’s what our parents wanted. They wanted to sweep the scandal under the rug, for everyone to chalk the whole thing up to another doomed dream boy. The Legend of Jim Mason would be just another ghost story echoing through the halls.”
“So we’re Sherlocks for the foreseeable future,” said Whitley.
Kipling raised an eyebrow. “I’ve always had a thing for herringbone and bloodhounds.”
“I’m in,” said Cannon.
“Me too,” whispered Whitley.
“Beatrice?” asked Martha.
They all looked at me. I stared back, my heart pounding.
It was happening, after all this time: We were freeing the lion. Dredging the Titanic up from the bottom of the sea. We were unburying the man who’d been sealed inside the walls that night we went searching for the cask of the Amontillado.
We were going to find out what happened to Jim.
My Jim.
The cat-and-mouse game had begun.
The strange circumstances of Jim Livingston Mason’s death had always seemed unreal to me, even though I experienced them firsthand.
As I thought back on it now, holed up in that library with my four former best friends, returning to each detail felt like trying to recall the rules of an imaginary game I’d played as a child.
Senior year, spring semester before finals week, my boyfriend, Jim, went missing.
Two days later, he was found dead, floating in the lake at Vulcan Quarry.
He was my first love, though those words don’t begin to describe what he actually was. Moon. Voice in my head. Blood. Even though everyone and their grandmother will tell you young love never lasts, that its burn is much more fragile than it ever appears to the naked eye, I swore what Jim and I had was different.
He was beautiful in the unlikely way of some eighteenth-century hero galloping across moors on horseback: six foot three, honey-brown stare, uncombed black hair, cockeyed smile. But there was something else too. He was alive. If life force is a river’s current, Jim’s was so strong it could take off your fingers. He charged through an ordinary Monday as if he had been tasked with imparting a crucial secret about existence before Tuesday. He was a goofball, grandmaster of the Catchy Tune, the Double Entendre, the Shock Romantic Gesture, like giving me a vintage diamond Cartier pin in the shape of a bumblebee after he’d known me just a week. He wrote me a theme song called “The Queen’s Neck.” The worst thing about Jim was that his intensity attracted everyone. He was the light on a porch at night. Men and women, young and old, swirled around him, as if mistaking the attention of Jim Mason for a miracle dip in Lourdes. I couldn’t fault them. He made them feel important and less alone.