“White with spots. They’re rare in the wild, but we have quite a few on the island. Small gene pool. An artist friend of mine in New York uses their antlers to make chandeliers andextremelyuncomfortable chairs.”
She stopped again at a painting hanging over the back of the green velvet sofa. “I don’t remember that either.”
At a glance, it looked like an ordinary painting of the house they were standing in—the famous house on Clock Island—but if you looked twice, you saw that the windows were painted like eyes, and the grand double front doors resembled a weird laughing mouth.
“You don’t remember it because I hadn’t painted it yet.”
“You tried to teach me how to draw the house.”
“I did?”
“Probably not how you wanted to spend your afternoon, teaching a snot-nosed runaway how to draw while waiting on the cops to drag her away.”
“I happen to like teaching kids to draw.”
“Really?” She raised her eyebrows. He didn’t blame her for being skeptical. When he’d started working with Jack on the books, he’d been dragged all over the country on school visits. No one was more surprised than Hugo himself when he realized he enjoyed that part of the job.
“Really.”
“You live on the island too?” she asked.
“For the moment,” he said.
“I have never been so jealous of anyone in my life. Jack really should have let me be his sidekick.”
“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. You know how hard it is to get good Chinese takeaway on a private island?”
“Fair point, but I think I could trade takeout for piebald deer on my lawn, pet ravens, and flying writing desks.” She raised her hand in his direction. “Plus, this place has its own personal world-famous artist in residence.”
“I’m famous only to children under twelve.” This wasn’t true, but it sounded good.
Lucy looked out the dark bay window, though there was nothing to see but the lights on the dock. “What’s going to happen?” she asked.
“I honestly don’t know,” Hugo said. “He didn’t consult me.”
Something in his tone must have betrayed something he didn’t want to betray. “You’re worried about him.”
“He’s getting older, slowing down,” Hugo said. “Of course I’m worried about him.” When talking to the children—and the former children—who read his books, Jack’s number one rule wasDon’t break the spell.Lucy was under the spell of Jack Masterson and Clock Island. Hugo wasn’t about to tell her that it wasn’t as wonderful as it looked, that the mysterious, mystical, magical Mastermind from the stories who couldsolve everyone’s problems and grant every child’s wish had been drinking himself into an early grave for the past six years.
She looked to the library. Voices murmured behind the closed doors.
“It’s safe to go in. It’s just a game,” Hugo said softly.
She shook her head. “Not to me.”
Hugo hesitated before speaking again. “I won one of his games, you know. It can be done, even by a fool like me.”
“You did? How?” She sat on the edge of the sofa. Hugo crossed his arms and leaned against the bookcase across from her. A bookcase haphazardly stuffed with rare first editions of legendary children’s books—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, The Hobbit, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens…Books worth a few million dollars displayed as casually as the magazines in a doctor’s waiting room.
“Jack never liked his old illustrator. The publisher hired him, not Jack. When his publisher decided to re-release the books with new covers, Jack held a fan art contest. Davey, my younger brother—he loved Jack’s books more than life. I’d draw him pictures from the stories all the time—the Storm Seller, the Black & White Hat Hotel, all those. Davey saw a story about the contest and demanded I send in my drawings. Never thought anything of it except I wanted to make him happy. Lo and behold—”
“You won.”
He raised his hands to say, guess so. “I won. The prize was supposedly five hundred dollars. That wasn’t the real prize. I won the chance to be the new illustrator.”
Lucy grinned. “I bet Davey reminds you that you owe him big-time every single day.”
“He did, yeah,” Hugo said. “He died a few years ago.”
