Three
Eleanor made it through chemistry without any more interruptions. Then she had math class (her second-weakest subject), and lunch (she looked for Otto, but didn’t spot him), and then it was time for history, where they were informed by the energetic teacher, Ms. Edith Green, that they would be walking into town to conduct an educational scavenger hunt.
The rest of the class was pulling on their coats and chattering with the buzzy excitement of being let out of the stuffy classroom for the day when Pip Foster skidded into the room, every bit as disheveled as she had been that morning.
Ms. Edith—she insisted on being “Ms. Edith” rather than “Ms. Green”—sighed. “Late again, Pip,” she lamented. “Punctuality is an important life skill.” The corner of her mouth curled up in an odd little smile, one Eleanor would almost call smug. “Though I suppose it doesn’t . . .”
She didn’t finish that trailing sentence. Pip wasn’t paying attention, anyway. She’d spotted Eleanor and was staring at her openly, frowning. Eleanor’s cheeks got hot. She looked away. And then she sneaked a quick sidelong look at the redheaded girl.
Eleanor hadn’t liked Ms. Foster—hadn’t liked the way she looked at Eleanor like she was a specimen in a jar, hadn’t liked her too-sweet smile and the way she spoke to Eleanor as if she didn’t really understand. The way you spoke to a pet. To be perfectly precise, she gave Eleanor the creeps. And when Pip had touched her, she’d gotten that crawling feeling over her skin. But then, it had happened with Otto, too. And she liked Otto.
So what did that mean about Pip? Pip seemed nothing like her mother—like she’d gotten her looks and nothing else. Every inch of Ms. Foster was polished and controlled, while Pip seemed like she had so much energy that it knocked everything a little askew, from her mussed hair to her untied shoelaces. She’d doodled in purple pen on her arm, squiggles and stars and exclamation points, and there was a birthmark peeking out of the collar of her shirt, where her neck and her shoulder met.
Was that a key?
Eleanor blinked, looking more closely, but Pip had shifted her bag on her shoulder, and the birthmark—if that was what it was—disappeared.
“It’s rude to stare,” Pip told her, but half her mouth hooked up in a grin. Then she darted out of the classroom after the rest of the students, leaving Eleanor to trail behind.
She’d probably just imagined the birthmark. And she’d probably imagined the thing in the tree, and the wickedness in Ms. Foster’s smile. This place was normal. She was normal.
Everything was going to be fine.
IT WAS A short walk from the Academy to the town square. If it weren’t for the modern cars, it would have been like walking through a time warp. Eden Eld was all cobbled streets and stately pines, quaint little buildings with bright white shutters, and, even this late in the season, tidy little beds of flowers everywhere. Even the autumn leaves had fallen in an orderly fashion, the perfect shades of red and yellow and orange, not one of them turned brown and lumpy.
The few flowers that were still in bloom peeked out from window boxes and along the edges of walkways. They were all the same kind, one that Eleanor had never seen before she came to Eden Eld. They had reddish purple petals that were oddly thick, and their leaves were long, with jagged edges. They were beautiful, Eleanor supposed, but unsettling, too. Those leaves looked like they might prick you. But something about them was familiar.
“Gather up!” Ms. Edith called, waving them toward her in the center of the town square. It was a tidy little plaza with trees—ringed by the flowers—on each corner and a monument at the center, a stone pillar with words carved on its imposing granite surface. “Take a worksheet, find a partner, and fill in the answers as you find them. You are free to wander, but be back in thirty minutes to turn in your papers. And if you’re not sure where to search, ask around! Learning is connection! History lives in all of us!”
Ms. Edith’s eyes were feverishly bright with the power of learning. Off to Eleanor’s right, Pip snorted and rolled her eyes a little. Eleanor hid a smile. Ms. Edith was a little overenthusiastic. She was younger than Aunt Jenny, and Eleanor was guessing she hadn’t been teaching long.
But she was thinking less about Ms. Edith and more about the assignment. Letting them wander? Talk to the locals? It would have been unimaginable at her old school. But she’d heard it over and over again: Eden Eld is the safest town west of the Mississippi. Why the Mississippi, she always wondered.
But they were right. She’d looked it up. Eden Eld’s crime rate was effectively zero. They only had one police officer, and she mostly directed traffic. The perfect place to raise a family, their website said. Our children are our future.
“Do you want to buddy up?” Pip asked her, shuffling over with a look of bored resignation. She gestured vaguely with the pair of worksheets already in her hand. “I’ve done a million of these things. We can probably knock it out in five minutes and go get some cocoa or something.”
“I, uh—”
“Otto said to look out for you,” Pip said, like this explained something. “He said you’re all right.” She seemed unconvinced, but open to the possibilities.
“You know Otto?” Eleanor asked.
“Everyone knows everyone here,” Pip said. “It’s the worst. Except Otto, obviously. He’s the best. Even if he is a giant dork. So what do you say?”
Eleanor bit her lip. She wanted to be friends with Pip, in a way that also made her want to hide in a very deep hole or a very dark closet and hope that Pip never looked at her again because what if she did something weird and Pip told Otto and then neither one of them ever spoke to Eleanor ever again and she had to change her name and move to Poughkeepsie and—
“Great!” Pip declared, as if Eleanor had answered her, and shoved the second worksheet into her hands.
“Oh. Okay. Thanks,” Eleanor managed. She took the offered worksheet and looked at the first question. “‘What is written on the Founders’ Monument?’”
“I already got that one,” Pip said. “I can fill it in for you.” She reached for the paper.
“Philippa, the spirit of the assignment is as important as the letter of the assignment,” Ms. Edith said, drifting by on a cloud of instructional bliss.
Pip sighed. “I liked her better when she was my babysitter. At least then I didn’t get graded,” she confided. She jerked her chin toward the granite pillar, which several students were clustered around. Eleanor hadn’t had a chance to learn people’s names yet, which made her feel as if there were a barrier between her and the rest of them, like a foggy pane of glass she was stuck on the wrong side of.
She hadn’t felt that with Otto. And strangely not with Pip either, who shouldered her way through the small crowd. Eleanor clung close, taking advantage of the gap behind her. Pip reached the monument and flourished her hands. “Ta-da,” she said, and then, conspicuously looking away, recited the words on the monument. “‘In honor of those present at the signing, for ensuring the safety and prosperity of Eden Eld for generations to come.’” She continued with the three short lines inscribed in blockier text beneath. “‘Eden Eld. Founded 1851. Drawn Onward.’ Kind of a terrible town motto, if you ask me, but weirdly they didn’t.”
Eleanor dutifully scribbled the answer—the space provided wasn’t big enough, and she had to turn the page and write in the margin, too. “What about the numbers?”
“What numbers?” Pip asked, looking at her.
Eleanor pointed. Halfway between the text and the ground was a tiny set of numbers carved carefully into the stone, each one no more than half an inch tall. 31313.
“Huh,” Pip said. “I never noticed those before.” She gave Eleanor a suspicious look, like maybe she’d stealthily carved them there herself. But then she just shrugged and added the numbers to her answer.
The rest of the students had wandered off, having finished with the first task, and were spreading out as they tracked down other entries on the worksheet. Pip skimmed the sheet and gave a decisive nod.
“‘A founder’s hands made these hands. What date is on my base?’ That means the clock tower—hands, get it? Bartimaeus Ashford built it. There’s a plaque on the side with the date it was built. And it is right next to Betty’s Bakery, which has the very best cocoa. We’ll do that one next.”
She grabbed Eleanor’s hand to pull her along. The instant their hands touched, that feeling shot through her again—except this time it was less like a bug crawling on her skin and more like a zing, a tingle that ran all the way from the bones of her hand to the socket of her shoulder. Pip looked down at their hands and then at Eleanor with a frown.
Had she felt it, too? But then she was off again, tugging Eleanor behind her, moving at a half run like it was the slowest setting she had. She leaped over a hay bale, and Eleanor was forced to follow, narrowly missing putting her foot down on the lumpy brow of a grinning pumpkin. Cheerful ghouls and glittering ghosts laughed from every window. It seemed like all the decorations were smiling. Smiling scarecrows, smiling spiders, smiling werewolves in overalls and straw hats. She’d never seen such a happy Halloween. It was a bit unsettling. And everywhere, the purple flowers grew, their petals peeling back from their centers like sneering lips.
“‘And even in the autumn and through the coldest winters the flowers bloomed,’” Eleanor whispered. Pip slowed down a bit, bringing the pace to a brisk walk, and looked back. She’d let go of Eleanor’s hand, but Eleanor still felt tugged along behind her.
“What was that from?” Pip asked.
“A fairy tale,” Eleanor said. That’s what the flowers reminded her of—her mother’s book of fairy tales. Thirteen Tales of the Gray, it was called. She’d read it to Eleanor every night when she was little.
A pang went through her, soft sorrow wrapped around sharp anger and neither of them right. The book had burned, with everything else in the house.
“Well, it’s true,” Pip said. “They bloom all year round, every year. And Eden Eld is the only place they grow.” She nudged one of the flowers, which was growing in the strip beside the sidewalk. Its head bobbed, and the gathered petals smacked against the toe of her shoe, the movement like a striking snake.
They’d reached Betty’s Bakery, Eleanor realized, a small, quaint building with the three-story clock tower looming behind it; that was why Pip had stopped. The smell of cinnamon and chocolate wafted out. A deep window seat at the front was filled with a Halloween display of intricately carved pumpkins. One read Betty’s Bakery in spooky script. The others showed a hissing cat, a wolf howling at the moon, and a bird with a wicked-looking eye. A man sat at a table out front, whistling as he carved a new one, a bucket of pumpkin guts beside him and newspaper covering the table.
“The clock tower’s right around the corner,” Pip said, somewhat unnecessarily. “If you go fill out the worksheets, I can get us cocoa. We can drink while we go find the other stuff.”
“Okay, yeah, you got it,” Eleanor said quickly and loudly, sounding like a complete weirdo, she was sure. She felt her ears go hot. She was, it turned out, really pretty terrible at being normal. But Pip didn’t seem to mind.
A wide, cobbled courtyard stretched between the bakery and the building next door, and exactly in the middle stood the steep stone walls of the four-sided clock tower. It was just a tower, with no building attached to it or anything, the base maybe ten feet by ten feet across. A wrought-iron gate blocked off the back of the courtyard. On the other side stretched an empty lot and then the tall, imposing shapes of the pines.
Eleanor hadn’t thought the trees were that close to town. From among the buildings, everything was so open and bright. Yet there the forest waited, just out of sight.
She crossed the courtyard to the mural of the clock tower. The side nearest her didn’t have anything on it. She walked all the way around the back and to the other side before she found the brass plaque that told the story of Bartimaeus Ashford, the youngest of the founders, who was an architect and clockmaker. The same Ashford who had built Ashford House, of course, and a bunch of other buildings in town. And the tower seemed just as strange as the house, in its own way. Ashford House had too many doors and stairs; the tower didn’t seem to have any. Wouldn’t it need to be repaired? Wound? Cleaned, even? But there were no doors on any of the four sides.
Weird. She shook her head and reminded herself that she wasn’t just sightseeing: she had to fill out the worksheet.
Pip had said that the date on the plaque was the date the clock tower was built, but she must have remembered wrong. The only date was Bartimaeus’s birthday: September 28, 1842. The date of Bartimaeus Ashford’s death is unknown, the plaque added. That, Eleanor thought, was odd as well. If he was so famous, shouldn’t they know when he’d died?
The skin on the inside of her wrist prickled, and she glanced to her right, not quite knowing why. She froze.
There, in the empty lot, stood a giant black dog. It panted, huge clouds of mist rolling out over its red tongue. Its eyes were red, too, and stared straight at her. It took a step toward her, its head dropping, its tail stiff and straight out behind it.
“I got you extra whipped cream,” Pip said loudly, coming around the corner. Eleanor’s eyes stayed locked on the dog. It growled, the sound vibrating through the air until it rattled her teeth in their sockets. “Here you go. Eleanor? Earth to Eleanor, we’ve got cocoa, come in, Eleanor.”
“Don’t you see the—” Eleanor started. Pip couldn’t have missed the dog. It was standing right there. But it was like she didn’t see it at all. Which meant . . . which meant Eleanor was definitely seeing things that weren’t there.
It had started again.
She forced herself to turn away from the dog. She smiled. “What do I owe you?” she asked.
“Nothing. My mom gives me a ton of allowance to make up for the fact that she has the maternal instincts of a sea slug,” Pip said, and handed over the cocoa. “Shall we go discover what kind of tree adorns the sign in front of the library?”
Don’t turn around. Don’t look at things that aren’t there.
“Let’s go,” she said with feeling. Pip grabbed her hand again and led her back around the front of the building, moving with enough speed that Eleanor had to be careful not to spill her cocoa. She listened for a growl, or the rattle of huge paws hitting an iron gate, but nothing came.
And then they were out of the alley and back in front of the bakery, where the man carving the pumpkin sat with a puzzled look on his face, scratching his chin and staring at what he’d made. He’d carved the pumpkin with words, and around them were ragged marks, like he’d plunged his knife into the pumpkin again and again without any artistry. Thirteen ragged marks, and two words.
GET OUT.
As they walked down the street, she almost thought she heard him crying.