Neverworld Wake(67)

“Did Cannon tell you why he had come here?” Martha asked, and bit her lip.

“He did.”

“What did he say?”

Kipling smiled demurely. “Why don’t you ask her?” He nodded at Whitley.

She glared at him, livid. For a moment, I thought she was about to start screaming, unleashing one of her rages. Instead, she sighed.

“Cannon was my best customer,” she said.

“What are you talking about?” I whispered.

“Adderall. The White Rabbit gave him his boundless supply. He popped them like Tic-Tacs. He still does.”

“All that time during school, he never knew you were the White Rabbit?” asked Martha.

Wit shook her head. “Not until Vida. I was too scared to tell him.”

I thought back to Cannon’s reaction when he’d learned Wit was the White Rabbit. He had been livid. Now I understood why. It was because she had known his secret all along, and had never told him hers.

“So let me get this straight,” said Martha. “On the night Jim died, Cannon called the White Rabbit for another stash of Adderall, and you sent him out here.”

Whitley nodded, sullen.

“Why here?”

Wit shook her head. “Jim had found me out a few weeks before. He was watching me constantly, telling me I had to stop. I was afraid to do a drop on campus. So I decided out here was perfect. It was remote. I texted Cannon as the White Rabbit, telling him he could find his supply inside a desk in the mapping office. Only I couldn’t make it out here in time. I got caught talking to Mrs. Lapinetti about my Italian final. I raced back to the quarry and did the drop, but I had no further contact that night from Cannon.”

“When did you make it back here?” asked Martha.

“It was three in the morning. I didn’t see anything or anyone, I swear to God.”

“You must have just missed them.” Martha checked her watch. “When Jim turned up dead at the quarry, you must have suspected Cannon. After all, you knew he’d come out here.”

Wit nodded. “But I knew he’d never willingly hurt Jim.”

Martha turned, staring up at the Foreman’s Lookout.

“So the only question now is…”

She fell silent, nibbling a fingernail.

“What?” prompted Kipling.

“How did Jim appear so suddenly under that car?”

She turned on her heel, resolved.

“Come,” she ordered.

Beckoning us to follow her, she vanished into the grass.





When we caught up to Martha, she was crouching underneath the Foreman’s Lookout. Staring overhead, I saw in astonishment that the ladder to climb up was missing. I realized then that what remained of it was strewn all over the ground.

“Incredible.”

Martha gasped in shock over some revelation, then stood up, shaking her head.

“It’s really the most impossible sequence of events.”

“What?” asked Kipling.

“Momma Greer was right.”

“About?”

“The freak possible.”

Martha rolled one of the pieces of wood under her sneaker, then gazed up at the landing suspended high over our heads.

“Poor Jim.”

She looked at me, and instantly I felt chills inching up my arms. What was she aiming at? What was she trying to do? It was dark, but her eyes sparkled behind her glasses, alert, alive.

“It happened right here,” she said. “Jim was undone over Beatrice confronting him about his lie, the night he went off with Vida. He was also distraught over Estella Ornato. His perfect life had fallen down around him, so he escaped here, as he often did, to be alone, to write music. He started to climb up to the Foreman’s Lookout, but the ladder gave out. He managed to grab a few supporting beams, trying to save himself, but they didn’t hold.”

Martha bent down to inspect a piece of the wood, showing us that the underside was completely rotten.

“He fell. It was a considerable distance, five, six stories, a drop that would have killed most people. Yet Jim survived.”

“How?” I whispered.

“He was drunk. It’s why drunk drivers survive car accidents. Drunks don’t tense up on impact. They relax. That saves their lives. He was unconscious for an hour. Maybe two. Then he woke up.” She squinted out at the quarry road. “He must have heard the car, or seen the headlights. Or maybe he was just trying to get to his bike.”

Martha hurried to the other side of the road and dragged Jim’s bike out of the grass, throwing it at our feet with the flair of a magician whisking a rabbit from a hat.

“He crawled from here to here.” She pointed toward the road. “That’s eight, ten feet? He was trying to get help. At that point, Cannon had climbed behind the wheel again. If Jim called out, it was lost in the crickets, the engine, the radio. We couldn’t hear a thing, or see much in the dark. Neither did Cannon. Cannon, assuming the White Rabbit stood him up, has to get back to school, drive the car back before Moses returns to the gatehouse after his AA meeting. Frustrated, he puts the car in reverse, hitting Jim. He realizes what’s happened, and he goes crazy. He calls Kipling, who is in his debt. Kipling arrives, and together they decide that the only way out of this unimaginable turn of events is to throw Jim into the quarry and pray the police think suicide.”