Jack’s house could dazzle anyone. It had dazzled him all those years ago. The room, the whole place really, was something out of a Victorian fever dream. Deep purple wallpaper patterned with silver chains and skulls…a ceiling painted the palest sky blue…a large bay window that looked down the hill that led to the ocean, not that they could see it now in the dark…Lucy paused at the massive marble fireplace, a low fire murmuring inside, and picked up a long piece of rusted metal off the mantel.
“What’s this?” Lucy asked. “Railroad spike?”
“Coffin nail,” Hugo said.
She looked at him, eyes wide. “From a real coffin?”
“A hundred years ago, this island belonged to a wealthy industrialist’s family who buried their dead in their own private graveyard. The pine boxes rot, but the nails don’t. Sometimes they work their way up to the surface.”
“And onto the fireplace mantel?”
Hugo took off his coat, tossed it over the back of the sofa. “Jack’s an eccentric, if you hadn’t figured that out yet.”
“‘Jack’s an eccentric,’ said the artist who literally painted himself?” Her tone was teasing. She looked pointedly at his forearms.
He’d rolled his sleeves to the elbows. Both arms, from wrist to shoulder, were covered in full-sleeve tattoos, abstract swirls of paint colors so that his arms looked more like a paint palette than a person.
“He’s an eccentric and I’m a hypocrite,” he said, rather pleased she’d noticed his tattoos. He looked at both forearms, seeing his ink again through her eyes. “Overkill, you think? I blame youth and sambuca.”
“No, I like them,” she said. “Makes you look like you’re made of paint. Paint and pain.”
“I’m made of poor decisions,” he said, though he was impressed she’d intuited the meaning of his ink. Because what was the life of an artist but paint and pain?
Lucy carefully touched the eye socket of the cyclops skull hanging on the wall by the fireplace, a prop from the Disney Channel film version ofSkulls & Skullduggery.
“This house is amazing,” she said. “I was so nervous the first time, I don’t remember much of the house.” She studied the wall clock that served as a map of Clock Island, her finger hovering over the times and the little pictures of wishing wells and tide pools…
The Noon & Midnight Lighthouse
The One O’Clock Picnic Spot
The Tide Pool at Two
Puffin Rock at Three O’Clock
Welcome Ashore at Four
The Five O’Clock Beach
Southernmost Six
Seventh Heaven Guest Cottage
At Eight O’Clock We Wish You Well
The Nine O’Clock Dock
The Forest and Fen at Eleven and Ten
“How is this place real?” Lucy said.
Hugo shrugged. “Sometimes I’m not sure it is.”
She looked up, eyeing the chandelier curiously. “Antlers?”
“Loads of deer on the island. Even some piebald ones.”
“Piebald?”
