Neverworld Wake(60)

That was when I felt the wake coming on. I set down the gun and left without a word, leaving the Masons staring after me, uncertain, afraid. As I raced past the pool, I saw two police cars inching up the vertiginous drive. One emerged, shouting at me in Greek.

I ran to the edge of the cliff.

As I stood there, the rocks and dirt began to loosen and tumble under me, as if I were the weight of a building, as if I weighed ten million tons. Boulders were pulling out of the ground. I leapt into the air, shouting, just as the ground dropped out. I was plummeting fast, upside down, breath sucking from my lungs. Blue sky spun overhead. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to quiet my mind as I thought of Wincroft the day I’d first arrived there, though almost immediately something else slipped into my head.

A connection. It was barely remembered, an itch at the back of my brain.

I’d seen it before. Twice.

I tried to ignore it. Spiky grass, bushes, and cypress trees were spinning past me. Screaming, I opened my eyes to catch sight of the entire cliff through the dust, then the house dismantling behind me, a roaring mass of shattered glass and steel and rock coming for me as we all fell toward the sea.

It was too late.





“Hon? You okay?”

Someone was shaking my shoulder.

My eyes opened. I jerked my head up, shouting.

A large woman with red hair and heavy eye makeup stared down at me, visibly freaked out. She was wearing a pink visor emblazoned with a cartoon chicken, a heart on its chest.

“Sorry, hon, you can’t sleep here. Do you need me to call someone?”

I looked around. I was in a wooden booth in a cramped fast-food restaurant. People around me were eating fried chicken and fries and drinking milk shakes. The walls were covered with heart wallpaper, photos of couples kissing or holding hands. I blinked at the paper mat in the tray in front of me.

Alonso’s Honey Love Fried Chicken. One Taste and You’re Lovestruck.

“Where—where am I?” I blurted.

“Newport. I can call your mom for you, hon. Or a shelter?”

I shook my head and lurched to my feet. I realized dazedly that I was wearing my old Darrow uniform: a white blouse, green tartan skirt, black tights, the beat-up black Steve Madden ankle boots that had seen me through four years of school.

“Seriously. I can call someone.”

I pressed a hand to my throbbing head, and stumbled away from the woman.

What had happened? Why hadn’t I made it to Wincroft? Then I remembered the thought that had slipped into my mind as I’d been falling.

It was what Vida had said, about the ride she’d given Jim.

Some dingy section of town. Dollar stores. A pet store. The parking lot had some man in a chicken costume handing out heart balloons.

“Why did Jim want to go there?” Cannon had asked her.

Maybe he wanted to eat fried chicken and buy a pet iguana? I have no clue.

Fried chicken and hearts had turned up again in the coupon inside Jim’s empty case file.

$5 off a bin of Honey Love Fried Chicken. Soul Mate Special!

Finally, it had appeared in an email I’d read in Edgar Mason’s in-box. A restaurant owner had been asking for another loan. I hear your concerns, but it’s time to expand on the line of frozen fried chicken dinners with romance-related flavor names.

I staggered past the cashier, blinking at the laminated advertisement on the counter.

ALL-NEW! Honey Love Fried Chicken Organic Chicken Dinners, now available in the frozen-food aisle at a supermarket near you. Try our original flavor! Honey Love Mesquite.

“May I take your order, miss?”

The teenage boy behind the cash register was staring at me. With a fitful smile I shoved open the door and moved outside, steadying myself on a Newport Daily News vending machine. After a moment, I realized I was staring at someone wearing a yellow cartoon chicken costume passing out heart-shaped balloons to passersby. The strip mall was exactly as Vida had described it. There was a handful of people loitering around the parking lot.

I leaned down to check the newspaper date.

Friday. May 14. Last year.

I’d managed to get it right. After all, I remembered the night I’d watched Jim drive away with Vida as if it were yesterday.

An elderly man was pushing a shopping cart loaded with shopping bags past me.

“Excuse me?” I asked. “What time is it?”

He checked his watch. “Twelve-forty-nine.”

Vida had said she’d dropped Jim off around eight or nine o’clock, which meant I had nearly eight hours to kill until he appeared. I hoped the wake would last that long. If Jim even did appear. It was a long shot. It also wasn’t the worst connection to make. Whoever had confiscated the papers from Jim’s case file at the Warwick police station hadn’t looked twice at the coupon, but what if it had been actual evidence? What if it had been stuck in Jim’s file because the detectives had been tracking his movements during the final days of his life, and they’d discovered he’d come here to this complex, to this restaurant?

My head was still pounding. I slipped along the covered sidewalk, past a liquor store, a Dollar Mart, a pet store called Man’s Best Friend. I had to change my clothes. If Jim did come here, the restaurant was small. He’d spot me immediately. But I had no money to buy clothes. I watched the people come and go, men in faded T-shirts racing into the liquor store, women hauling toddlers, an old woman bent over ninety degrees pushing a cart. When I spotted a smiling woman leaving a stationery store walking a Pomeranian, I approached her.