by Lisa Graff
“How . . . ?” He frowns at the portrait in my hand, of the girl with the birthmark on her right cheek—the tiny brown heart-shaped cherish. “But, CJ,” he says. “That’s you.”
SEVEN
“I THOUGHT YOU said you were starving,” Jax says as I lay out the pages from the box of JENNIE JUNE’S PRIVATE STUFF! We’re seated across from each other at an old-fashioned ice cream parlor called The Cherry on Top. The chairs are shaped like half-peeled bananas, and the air smells like waffle cones. Jax wanted to head straight back to L.A., but I convinced him to stop for a snack first because I need a minute to figure things out.
I push my bowl of rocky road away to make more space for the drawings. “I’ll eat in a second,” I say.
Jax dips his spoon deep into his triple chocolate blast. “Don’t let it melt too much. It’s really good. You think they put espresso in their chocolate base? I think I taste espresso.”
“You could ask them,” I say, because I have slightly more important things on my mind. I rearrange two of the drawings on the table, like maybe if I get them in the right order everything will suddenly make sense.
It turns out there are a bunch of drawings of me in the orange box. Me as an infant, sleeping. Me as a toddler, eating. I tap my fingers on the table, trying to figure it all out. “Do you think these are what my mom was hiding from Aunt Nic? How did they even get here?”
Jax is still mostly concentrating on his ice cream. “I’m sure there’s a logical explanation,” he says.
“Like?”
“Like . . .” He puts his spoon down to check out one of the drawings. A baby gazing up from a bouncy chair. “Well, maybe it’s not actually you. Maybe your mom was drawing some other baby.”
I shake my head and point to the baby’s cheek in the sketch in his hand, and in all the other sketches, too. “Cherish, cherish, cherish. And anyway”—I take the sketch Jax is holding, put it beside my own, real-life face—“it is me. It looks just like me. Hair and nose and eyes and everything. Right?”
Jax presses his lips together. “Yeah,” he admits. “Okay. But maybe someone else drew them, instead of your mom.”
“They’re all signed ‘JJA,’ my mom’s initials.” I shuffle through them again. “And they’re all the same style, just like the mural she made in Ashlynne’s room. So I guess it’s possible that someone learned to draw like her, made these pictures of me after I was born, signed her initials on them, and then put them in this box in her old house. But that would be . . .”
“Weird,” Jax finishes for me.
My mom must’ve drawn these pictures before I was born. That’s the only thing that makes sense. Somehow, she knew what I was going to look like, and she put the drawings there for me to find, instead of Aunt Nic. “This must be what Spirit’s been leading me to all along,” I say. “Maybe I wasn’t supposed to be looking for a tether at all.” I still have the mushroom cap, weighing down my coat pocket, but as hard as I try I can’t squeeze any emotional energy out of it.
“But then why send you a message in an octopus?” Jax asks. “And why ‘take heed’? Couldn’t they just send you your mom’s address instead?”
I don’t even bother rolling my eyes. “Spirit doesn’t work that way, and you know it.”
“Sure,” Jax replies, and for a second it sounds like he’s actually agreeing with me. Until he says, “But what if . . . ?” He lets his spoon clank into his ice cream bowl, and somehow I can tell that I’m not going to like whatever comes out of his mouth next. “What if none of this has anything to do with Spirit?”
“But the signs—” I begin.
“Look.” He leans to one side to dig in his pocket, then pulls out his phone. “This is what I was trying to tell you before. Seriously, are you even going to try your ice cream?”
I do roll my eyes then, because, hello, can we focus? But just to shut him up, I take a bite of my rocky road.
“Whoa, this is good.” I immediately scoop up some more.
“Right?” Jax grins. Then he scrolls through his phone. “I was thinking, in the car, that if that guy Gerald found an octopus message before you did, then maybe other people have found them, too. So I did an image search. And look.” He hands me the phone.
The screen is filled with photos of octopus messages. Same as the one I found on my wrist. Same as the tattoo on Gerald’s arm. Dozens of them. I scroll down. Hundreds. They’re all the same sort of octopus, but they’re not all stamped on skin. One is embossed onto the front of a hardcover book. One is burned into toast. Another’s carved into a leaf, still hanging from a tree. And all of them have messages spelled out in the tentacles, one letter at a time. NOT AT ALL, one says. LOOK LEFT, reads another. One octopus, stamped on a bottle of clear liquid, commands, DRINK ME. The spookiest one is whittled under the eye socket of a human skull, and it warns, I SEE YOU.
“What . . . ?” I begin, but I don’t even know how to finish the question.
Jax takes back his phone. “Once I realized that people were getting these messages all over the place”—he’s typing quickly with his thumbs, trying to pull up something else—“I starting digging even more, to figure out where they were coming from. People have tons of ideas. But the one I think is probably right is that it’s a group of magicians who do it.”
“Magicians?” I scoop another spoonful of ice cream. “Like Harry Potter, wands and potions?”
“Harry Potter is a wizard,” Jax corrects me. “And anyway, they’re not real magicians. They’re guys who saw ladies in half, that kind of thing.”
“Um . . .”
Jax doesn’t seem to notice how ridiculous I think his theory is. He’s still typing. “There’s this group of them. Or a club, or whatever. Le Char Mer.” When he says that, I look up. He pronounces the word “char” with that soft ch. “It’s French. It means ‘the sea chariot.’”
I go back to my ice cream.
“The letters,” he tells me, “when they’re mushed together—Char Mer—it spells ‘Charmer.’ Like someone who casts spells.”
I might finally be getting where Jax is going. “That’s what Gerald said when I told him about the octopus on my wrist. He said I’d been ‘charmed.’”
“Exactly.” Jax is excited now, like he’s gotten me to join his team. “So it has to be these guys, right?” He flips the phone to face me, shows me an image of about thirty mostly white, mostly male, mostly old people posing on a lawn in front of a huge mansion. “Le Char Mer Board of Directors,” says the photo caption. “They’re described as”—Jax reads the words off his phone—“‘an elite society of professional magicians specializing in the unbelievable.’ Apparently they have this huge mansion, where tons of magicians come from all over to put on magic shows for weird rich people. That’s the first floor, anyway. On the second floor they have this, like, secret society. It’s very mysterious. And lots of people think they’re behind the octopus messages.”
I definitely have not joined Jax’s team. “O . . . kay,” I say slowly.
“The mansion is in L.A.,” Jax goes on, like that’s going to convince me. “Not even twenty miles from the theater where your aunt’s show is tonight. That can’t be a coincidence.”
“But I didn’t find any of the messages in L.A. I got that stamp on my arm yesterday, in Santa Barbara. And anyway, the signs were from Spirit, not some weird magicians.”
“But—”
“Maybe Spirit used those guys to send me the messages,” I tell him. “I’ll buy that. But it doesn’t matter who did the stamping. It matters what the messages mean.” I point to the drawings on the table. “That’s the part I have to figure out.”
“Well,” he says, and I can tell he doesn’t agree with me but is letting it go for now, “you know who might be a good person to ask about it?” He places two fingers over the image of the board of directors, zooming in on one corner until th
e entire screen is taken up by a single face. “This guy.”
And when I see whose face it is, I nearly choke on my rocky road.
It’s Roger Milmond. Aunt Nic’s TV producer.
“But why would he . . . ?” I start. But then I discover I’m out of words.
Jax scoops up his last spoonful of ice cream and gets a sly look on his face. “You might just be able to convince me to take a short detour to go ask him,” he says.
EIGHT
IF THE DRIVE to Bakersfield felt long, the drive back to L.A. is unbearable. “We should go faster,” I tell Jax, my hand gripped around the gearshift. He’s getting better with the clutch, but I still don’t trust him to shift without me.
“You’re the one who wanted to slow down,” he says.
“That was before.”
“Mmm,” he mmms. Which I’m starting to learn is his way of saying he thinks I’m being a moron.
I pull my atlas out of my messenger bag. I want to double-check that we’re on the quickest route. After four painful minutes of driving at the exact same speed, Jax says, “Do you think your aunt knows her producer is in a weird magic club?”
“I don’t know.” I run my finger over the line for the 5. “I just want him to tell me how he knew to give me the message. Like, can he hear Spirit directly, or . . . ?”
“How can you possibly still think that message was from Spirit? You know it’s from this Roger guy. We should ask him what he meant by ‘take heed.’ Maybe you’re in danger or something.”
“Mmm,” I mmm.
“You’re impossible, CJ. You’ve got clear evidence, right in front of your face”—he points to the phone in the cup holder—“and you’re totally ignoring the obvious conclusion.”
“Funny,” I say, tapping the orange box in my lap. “I could say the same thing about you.”
“Mmm,” he tells me.
“Mmm,” I say back.
We’re quiet for a long stretch of highway. Dirt. Rocks. Rocks. Dirt.
“You know what I keep thinking?” Jax asks out of the blue. But he doesn’t say anything I’d expect him to. “Your mom’s friend Ashlynne must’ve been ballsy. I mean, if Grant was my dad, and he told me to stop dating someone, I’d ghost them so fast.”
I laugh. “Yeah.” But then my thoughts turn to Grant’s voice when he was telling me about Ashlynne. “I just can’t believe he stopped talking to his own daughter. Who cuts their own family out of their life like that?”
“My grandpa did,” Jax says. “He ran away from home when he was younger than me. Never spoke to his family again.”
“Seriously?”
Jax nods, eyes on the road. “He said he was better off without them.”
“But they were his family.”
Jax shrugs one shoulder. “Abuelo always said real family doesn’t treat people the way his parents treated him.”
I run my hand across the top of the orange box. “I just think it would be better to have some parents than none.”
“Mmm,” Jax says.
“Mmm,” I reply.
And I guess that’s that.
Well. Almost.
“HORSE!” I scream, because I’ve spotted one hanging out in an open barn next to an old farmhouse just off the road. “Did you see it?” I ask Jax after we’ve zoomed past. “Did you see the horse?”
He is looking at me like I have four heads. “This is not a fun game,” he insists.
* * *
• • •
One thing about dead people—everybody’s got them. Rich people, poor people, and every sort of person in between. So back in the day, when Aunt Nic still made house calls, we used to go to all different places. I’ve been inside homes of people so poor the bedroom walls were sheets, and I’ve been to estates where the furniture is so fresh and white, you’d swear no one in the house knows how to sit.
Le Char Mer is like nothing I’ve seen before.
“Whoa,” Jax says as we stop at a red light and the mansion comes into view. We’ve been winding along Route 1, with the gorgeous blue of the ocean on our left and near-shear cliffs on our right, and there it is, this enormous white building with actual towering turrets at every corner.
Even the walk from the parking lot to the entrance is impressive. The path is lined with hedges carved into sea creatures—a seahorse, a dolphin, even a hedge shaped like an eel. When we finally reach the mansion, there’s a marble fountain out front with an old dude in the center sporting a beard and a giant fork. His chariot, pulled by eight octopuses, floats on top of the bubbling water.
“Poseidon,” Jax says as we pass by.
“Bless you,” I reply.
He lets out a deep sigh. “No,” he says, pointing at the bearded fork guy. “That’s Poseidon. From Greek mythology. The god of the sea. Or, as you might call him in a report, Aquaman.”
“All right, all right, I get it, you think I’m a moron.”
“I just think you should go to actual school.”
“You don’t.”
He does not have an argument for that.
The front door is massive, with hundreds of tiny sea creatures carved into the dark wood. Only a few dozen people are milling about in the lobby, but the room is dark and loud, so it feels crowded. The walls are a deep-brown wood, like the door, and carved with seascapes. Four darkened hallways branch off four different walls. A Roman numeral above the curved doorframe of each hall distinguishes it—I, II, and III. The doorway to the fourth hallway is blocked by a solid wooden door, and the marking above it is X.
The ceiling is frosty like sea glass and slowly shifts colors from blue to green and back again. Four more fountains burble around us. Being in this room makes me feel like I’m deep underwater. I can’t decide if it’s calming or terrifying.
Jax, who seemed totally fine outside with Poseidon, is back to scratching his arm. He sinks against one wall, eyes darting all around. I’m just thinking about how hard this must be for him, with all these new people in this new space, and how well he’s holding it together—when suddenly the carving on the wall nearest his elbow, a long strip of seaweed, starts swaying, and then a wooden fish darts out and nestles into some wooden coral an inch farther along the wall, and Jax leaps away with a terrified yelp.
Everyone, now, is looking at him.
Scratch-scratch-scratch.
“You okay?” I whisper. “You want an”—I flash my hands at him, ready to help—“escape?” He shakes his head. When his breathing slows a little, I say, “You stay here. The walls are weird, but it’s just mechanics.” I run a finger along the piece of seaweed that moved before. There’s a groove in the wood, and I can shift it back and forth if I push hard enough. There must be someone manipulating it from behind the wall, or from a remote control or something. “I’ll see if anyone knows Roger.”
Jax gives me a weak nod. I head toward the couple closest to me, a man in a dark suit and a maroon tie, and a woman in a long black dress and heels.
“Excuse me,” I say. “Do you guys know where I can find Roger Milmond?”
The woman wrinkles her nose at me. “Roger Milmond?” she repeats.
“He’s a TV producer. He works with my aunt. Monica May Ames. You ever hear of her?” I don’t like the way this fancy lady is looking at me, in my puffy coat and ratty sneakers and messenger bag.
“Are you lost, sweetie?” The way she says it, you can tell she wouldn’t care if I was.
I’m about to tell this lady where she can stuff her “sweetie,” but I’m interrupted by gasps and cries from the crowd. From out of nowhere, a flock of fat white doves comes swooping over our heads. They soar through the room toward the hallway marked II—and as they enter it, the hallway’s dark floor suddenly ripples with light. All the well-dressed grown-ups in the room start laughing and clapping, like they can’t believe
they were just freaked out by birds. They gather themselves together and follow the doves down the hallway.
All except the woman in the black dress. She’s too busy shrieking.
“Get it off!” she hollers at her husband, flapping her arms above her. “Dev, get it off of me!”
She’s swatting at a dove, a single bird that didn’t follow the flock and is now sitting calmly in her hair. I can’t help myself. I let out a huge snort.
The dove looks at me then—I swear, it looks right at me—and it blinks. Just once, like it means something. And then the bird flies off, follows the others down the hall.
“That was disgusting,” the woman spits, reaching for her husband’s arm. And I must be getting better at this whole “take heed” thing, because I notice it.
“Where did you get that bracelet?” I ask the woman, reaching for her wrist.
The charms on her silver bracelet are mushrooms. Long, thin, with swoopy stems and big bulby caps. They look just like the ones from my mother’s sculpture.
“Excuse me.” The woman yanks her arm away.
“Where did you get it?” I ask again.
At first the woman only huffs at me, but then she looks around and seems to decide she wants to be nice, because she says, “My friend’s gallery carries them.” She half shows me the charms again, flipping her wrist over. “James Darek, that’s the designer. He’s made a few pieces, just for my friend.”
Could this be another message from Spirit? Another sign I’m supposed to follow? Or is it just a strange coincidence?
“Where’s the gallery?” I ask.
But the woman’s husband is tugging at her arm to leave. So she only tells me, “Sorry, sweetie. They’re sold out.” And together they tromp off.
After the room is cleared of fancy people and birds, Jax looks much calmer.
“This place is the weirdest,” he says, walking over to me. “How do you think we’re ever going to find—?”
“You kids looking for Roger Milmond?” comes a voice. And suddenly there’s a new woman in the room with us. She’s wearing a long sparkly gold dress that hugs her hips, and her shiny black hair is pinned up at her neck.
