Jack came up the path and stood in front of the picnic table. Ms. Hyde stood at his side clutching a leather portfolio.
“Hello again, kids. As you’ve seen, we’re down a player,” Jack said. “Dustin left an hour ago. He told me to pass along his sincerest apologies to you, Lucy. Apparently, he’s suffering from what he calls S.L.S.D.—Student Loan Stress Disorder.”
“It’s okay,” Lucy said. “I forgive him.”
“Let me remind everyone,” Ms. Hyde said, “cheating—or attempting to cheat—in any form or fashion will have you disqualified immediately.”
“Which is a shame,” Jack said. His tone was melancholy. “Personally, I’m all for cheating, lying, and stealing. Where do you think I get all my book ideas?”
“That was a joke,” Ms. Hyde said. “No credible accusations of plagiarism have ever been lodged against Mr. Masterson.”
“I believe they knew I was joking,” Jack said. Then he clapped and rubbed his hands together with fiendish glee. “Now that that unpleasantness is out of the way, let’s play a new game.”
Ms. Hyde opened her portfolio and passed them each a single sheet of paper.
“What’s this list?” Andre asked. “The Utterly Impossible Scavenger Hunt?Seriously? We have to do a scavenger hunt that nobody can do? How’s that supposed to work?”
Lucy took her sheet of paper and glanced at the items on the list.
A wheelbarrow for a fairy garden
The wind under a kite
A solid-black checkerboard
“A jar of nine-legged spiders?” Melanie said. “Are you kidding? Either I’m having a stroke, or this list is crazy.”
“Both, possibly,” Jack said. “I’d bet on both, myself. Two points if you can divine the secret of the hunt. No points for second place on this game.”
“We gotta get a hint, Jack,” Andre said. “I can’t spend all day chasing down an origami salami or a damn fish with a secret!”
“Please,” Melanie said, her eyes pleading. “I felt so stupid after the last game. I know it will be something totally obvious when we find out. Could you make it a little more obvious before we begin this time?”
She smiled, but it was a shy and nervous smile. Did Melanie need to win the book as much as Lucy did?
“Ah, but that’s how life is,” Jack said. “Hindsight is twenty-twenty, they say, and they aren’t wrong. We only know the right thing to do after we’ve done the wrong one. To quote the supposedly great but mostly incomprehensible Søren Kierkegaard—‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.’ Or, as all writers know, you can’t understand the beginning until you’ve read the end. And those are all the hints you get. Happy hunting, children.”
—
The three contestants readthe list over and over again.
A crying wolf
An assortment of octopi
A ray of darkness
Lucy wanted to laugh, but the stakes were too high. The first two games had seemed so easy that a small part of her believed she had a shot at winning. Now her stomach sank. She had no idea what to do.
“There has to be a trick here,” Melanie said. “Right?”
Ms. Hyde cleared her throat before turning on her heel and following Jack back to the house.
“Right,” Melanie said. “No colluding. I’ll go figure this out somewhere else.”
Lucy watched her head off down a random path. Andre, looking too sure of himself for her liking, took a separate trail. Although the day was bright and breezy, the ocean gentle, and the sky filled with birds floating on the air currents, they had eyes only for the list.
Lucy stayed at the picnic table, re-reading the clues. Melanie was right, of course. There had to be a trick, a double meaning, something obvious she was missing. Her first instinct was to get on her phone and google some of these phrases, see if they meant anything. But that would be cheating.
