“Where’s that?”
Lucy went over to the map of the United States on the wall. A blue star marked where they were—Redwood Elementary School in Redwood Valley, California. She pointed her finger at the blue star and then ran it halfway across the map and stopped near Lake Erie.
“Wow. That’s far,” Christopher said.
“I wouldn’t want to walk there,” she said. “Detroit gets very cold in winter. Good to have a lot of scarves.”
“I know where the Mastermind lives.”
“Who?” she asked. The non sequiturs of small children never ceased to amaze her.
“The Mastermind from our books.”
“Oh,” she said. “You mean, Jack Masterson? The author of our books?”
“No, the Mastermind. He lives on Clock Island.”
Lucy wasn’t sure how to reply. Christopher was only seven, so she wasn’t in any hurry to tell him that the characters he loved in books and movies weren’t real. He didn’t have a lot to believe in right now, so why not let him think that the Mastermind from their Clock Island books was a real guy out there granting real kids’ wishes.
“How do you know where the Mastermind lives?”
“My teacher showed me. Want to see?”
“Go for it, Magellan.”
“What?”
“Magellan. Famous navigator. Had a rough time in the Philippines. Probably deserved it. But that’s beside the point. Show me Clock Island.”
He hopped up and pointed at the tip-top far right corner of the map.“There,” he said, and Lucy was surprised to see he’d gotten it exactly right. His fingertip touched a patch of water right off the coast of Portland, Maine.
“Good job,” she said.
“Is it really Clock Island?” he asked, scrunching his face at the map. “Is there a train and unicorns there?”
“You mean like in the books?” Lucy asked. “Well, it’s pretty amazing there, I hear. Did you know some people think the Mastermind and Jack Masterson are the same person?”
“But you said you met him.”
“I did meet Jack Masterson. A long time ago. He, um, signed a book for me.”
“He wasn’t the Mastermind, right?”
Damn. He had her there. The Mastermind always hid in shadows, shadows that cloaked him in darkness and followed him wherever he went.
“No, he didn’t look like the Mastermind when I met him.”
“See?” Christopher was triumphant. Nothing made a kid happier than proving a grown-up wrong.
“I stand corrected.”
Christopher traced a line from Clock Island back to their city—Redwood, California. “That’s really,reallyfar.”
His face was scrunched up tight. Maine was about as far as you could get from California and still be in the same country, which was precisely why she’d moved to California from Maine.
“Pretty far, yeah,” she said. “You’d want to fly there.”
“Can kids go?”
