Chapter Twelve
While the cake cooled and Jack plunged the third-floor toilet, Calisa made the icing. She didn’t need a recipe for this: it was just powdered sugar with milk, butter, and vanilla. She’d made it for the cupcakes she’d baked for Mom-Kate’s birthday, the ones that had tasted like churros.
A flicker of orange caught the corner of her eye, and she glanced at the kitchen fireplace to see a flame dancing over the logs.
That’s still weird. What else was in the Faraway Inn that she’d failed to notice because it should be impossible?
How about the teapot that heated instantly and didn’t seem to have an on switch, despite Jack’s claim that it was an electric kettle?
Checking on the cakes, she decided they were cool enough.
She smeared raspberry jam on the first layer and then laid the next layer on top.
Jam oozed out the sides and dripped onto the plate, bleeding into the white icing and causing it to smear pink.
She should have waited until the cake layers cooled more, but it was late afternoon already.
If she delayed any longer, it would slip from teatime to dinner, and she’d latched onto the idea of reinstating a real teatime with homemade cake and tea from a possibly enchanted teapot.
If she could keep Kendra happy, then Auntie Zee would let her stay longer.
And the longer she stayed…the more answers I can find.
Had Kendra come out of the cleaning-supply closet?
What about Mulligan? Why had he filled a vial with hot chocolate?
She needed to know more! And for that, she needed to finish this cake.
She wished her hands would quit shaking so hard.
Nexus of realms. The words ricocheted inside her head.
Calisa smoothed the icing around the sides.
It wasn’t bakery quality—the icing was uneven, and the cake itself leaned to one side.
Jam clumped around the base, and she wished she knew how to make icing flowers to cover up the issues.
It was, however, clearly a cake, which had been the goal.
And as for her goal in coming here…well, an inn full of otherworldly guests was certainly a distraction from Ethan. She barked a laugh.
“It looks delicious,” Jack said behind her, and she jumped.
“How long have you been there?” Had he heard her cackling to herself? Almost certainly. Had she talked out loud? She didn’t think so.
“Not long.” His eyes slid toward the door, and she glanced out the window to see the statue just outside, looking in with her stone-blank eyes.
A shiver danced down her spine. “New question: How long has she been there?”
“Longer,” Jack admitted.
“Can she talk?” Calisa asked. To the statue, she asked, “Can you talk?”
The statue was silent and motionless.
Crossing to the window, Calisa stared at the statue. Her eyes were smooth gray. No pupils. No irises. She had a crease where eyelids would be, but no lashes. Her lips were closed. “Is she like the Weeping Angels? Only moves when I’m not looking?”
“What are Weeping Angels?” Jack asked.
“From Doctor Who. Never mind. Is she friendly?”
“She’s stone,” Jack said.
“That’s not a helpful answer.”
“It wasn’t a reasonable question.”
She thought it was very reasonable. There was, really, a ludicrous amount Calisa didn’t know about all of this, but it would be helpful to know if the shudder she felt was warranted. She skipped to the most important question: “Is she going to murder me?”
Jack rocked backward. “Of course not!”
“How do you know, if she can’t talk?” The statue still hadn’t moved, not even to flinch at the suggestion that she was murderous.
“She wouldn’t,” Jack said stoutly.
A point in the statue’s favor: Jack hadn’t been murdered yet. “I guess statistically I’m more likely to be murdered by a random human than a statue.”
“Can we stop talking about murder and talk about cake instead?”
Calisa grinned. That had sounded so adorably pathetic, like he’d been craving cake for his entire life and would perish without a bite of it in the next ten minutes.
It was impossible to stay mad at him. It was like trying to stay mad at a puppy dog, especially one with nice eyes, nice hair, and incredible muscles, who actually listened to what she said and cared what she felt and had stepped in front of her when an irate guest had charged toward her—Focus, Calisa, she told herself. “I have more questions.”
He sighed. “Of course you do. Can you just…not ask Auntie Zee? I’ll answer whatever I can. Just please don’t let her know you know.”
“But I do know, and she can explain all of it.”
“Yeah, but she’ll ask how you know, and she’ll never believe I didn’t tell you. I’ll be fired, and you’ll be sent home.”
Calisa opened her mouth to say she’d defend him—but how would she explain how she’d figured it out? She’d broken one of Auntie Zee’s only rules, rather flagrantly. She’d absolutely be sent home if she admitted that. “You’ll tell me what I want to know? No more lying?”
“I’ll do my best.”
She could live with that.
“Okay, so how does it work? The portals, I mean. How do the doors become portals? How do they connect to other realms?” Was it a wormhole?
A magic spell? Were they special doors, or had something special been done to them?
Did each door connect to a specific realm, or could they open to different ones?
Could Auntie Zee control which realm she reached?
How did she “take care” of the doors? What did that mean?
Did she control them somehow? Program them? “How does Auntie Zee do it?”
Coming into the kitchen, Auntie Zee asked, “How does Auntie Zee do what?”
Calisa saw panic cross Jack’s face. He stopped breathing, and his entire body went rigid. “Ahh…” She tried to think fast. “How does Auntie Zee find so many flavors of maple syrup?”
Auntie Zee narrowed her eyes.
“I’ve only had plain pancake syrup before,” Calisa said.
With a disdainful sniff, Auntie Zee said, “Corn syrup.”
“Yeah, um,” Jack said. “I was about to tell Calisa that there’s a local maple syrup farm that specializes in different flavors.” To Calisa, he said, “You need to try gingerbread maple syrup. Apple-cinnamon maple syrup. Rhubarb-flavored, which is a lot better than it sounds.”
“Wow,” Calisa said. Inwardly, she winced at herself. Wow?
But Auntie Zee didn’t question it. Instead she turned to Jack. “There’s a light on the second floor that’s flickering, and it’s not the bulb. I need you to look at the wiring.”
“Sure, yeah, right away.”
“I’ll show you.” After a glare at Calisa, as if to blame her for the faulty lighting, Auntie Zee led the way out of the kitchen.
Following, Jack mouthed at Calisa, “Thank you.”
She shrugged as if to say it was fine, even though it was absolutely not fine. All the questions were burning inside her. And if she couldn’t ask Auntie Zee…Maybe there’s someone else I could ask instead.
Leaving the nearly finished cake, she marched outside through the kitchen door.
And she took a deep breath.
The backyard of the inn overlooked the mountains, and the sun bathed them in amber. She tilted her head to feel the ordinary sunlight on her cheeks. An ordinary breeze wrapped around her. It smelled of flowers, but familiar flowers. By the greenhouse she spotted the statue.
She crossed to it, to her.
The statue was facing the mountains. She looked as if she’d just emerged from the greenhouse. She was frozen mid-stride, one hand still on the door handle.
“Hi,” Calisa said. “I’m Calisa, Auntie Zee’s grandniece, and I know you aren’t going to move or talk to me while I’m looking at you, so I’m thinking that I’ll ask you a question and then turn my back and then you can move or whatever, if you want to answer me, okay?
” The words spilled out of her—she could hear her own nervousness threaded through her voice, but she couldn’t help it.
She still knew so very little about what was going on and whether any of it was safe, or whether it would have been smarter to run screaming back to Brooklyn.
She tried to pick a yes-or-no question, ideally the most important one, but which was the most important one? What did she really want to know?
Everything. I want to know everything.
She ran through a list of questions in her head and then settled on one: “Do you need help?”
Calisa turned her back to the statue and looked at the inn. Prickles crept up her spine as she wondered what the statue was doing, if she really moved when no one was watching, what she wanted, why she was here, and whether she was dangerous. A few seconds later, she turned around.
The statue had moved her head to the left, gazing at the forest.
“No? Okay, good.” The statue didn’t need help, which was excellent news, since Calisa didn’t know what she’d have done if the statue had said yes.
Had she been born a statue? That was probably too personal a question to ask, and it wasn’t really at the heart of what Calisa wanted to know.
“Are you from here? From Vermont? From this world?” She turned her back and counted to five.
When she spun around again, the statue was looking in the opposite direction.
Another no.
Not from this world.
Calisa swallowed hard. She was actually communicating with a statue. “Do you want to be here? Are you here willingly?” Again, Calisa turned away and waited a few seconds.
This time, the statue’s head was lowered, her chin near her neck—a frozen nod.
That was good to know. She wasn’t from here, but she wanted to be here. Calisa considered what to ask next. It had to be yes or no.
From across the garden, she heard Jack call, “Calisa?”
To the statue, she said, “Thank you. You’ve been really helpful. If you need anything…” She wasn’t certain how to complete that sentence. “Well, I’ll, um, come talk with you again, if you don’t mind.”
Calisa trotted across the unmowed lawn toward Jack, who was frowning at her. “I should have said this before,” Jack said, “but really important: you shouldn’t go through any of the portals. If you’re tempted.”
She thought of the two worlds she’d already stepped foot in.
She’d barely seen either of them. She wanted to explore, to see what else was out there.
What other realms were hidden within guest rooms?
Or through broom closets? She thought of the linen closet in the bathroom where she’d found Steve—could the lizard have come through a portal?
He wasn’t like any ordinary Vermont lizard.
He could have come from…elsewhere. “Why not?”
“You go through a portal without Auntie Zee’s okay, she’ll fire you. She’ll fire me.”
“But why?”
“She thinks…it’s not safe. My dad…” Jack paused, swallowed. “He went through one to look for a way to help the inn. He…hasn’t come back.”
“You said…”
“I said he went for supplies for the inn,” Jack said. “That wasn’t a lie, or not entirely a lie. I simply didn’t say where he went. I don’t even know where he went. He didn’t tell me. Just that he was going through a door, and he’d be back soon.”
She had the sudden urge to wrap her arms around him. He looked as if he were about to crumble. “What about Auntie Zee? Can’t she tell you where he is? Can’t she go get him?” Maybe she couldn’t ask Auntie Zee questions, but Jack had known her aunt for years, possibly his whole life.
“She says…some of the doors don’t work anymore. She can’t open them again.”
Gazing at the three-story inn with myriad guest rooms and bathrooms and clothes closets and supply closets and linen closets, she wondered how many portals were inside it—and how many had failed. Calisa thought of her guest room with the red X—a room with a broken door? Was that what the X meant?
He continued. “That’s what Dad was trying to fix. He was looking for something that would fix the problem with the broken portals. After he went through…that door quit working too. It won’t reopen, at least not as a portal.”
“But…” What was he saying? Was his dad gone? Permanently?
Could that have happened to me?
“Isn’t Auntie Zee doing anything to try to get him back?” Calisa asked.
“She’s tried,” Jack said. “She’s still trying.”
Calisa looked at the inn again, at the weeds and brambles that surrounded it, at the broken shingles and occasional boarded-up window. The condition of the bed-and-breakfast…It was too dilapidated for it to have been a few weeks, as he’d originally implied. There was too much neglect here.
Softly, she asked, “How long has your father been gone?”
“Three years,” Jack said.