Chapter Twenty-Six
The next day, Whit was waiting for her in the driveway with an eagerness that made her grin.
“You’re obsessed with me,” she joked, after they’d kissed beside her car.
“Wow, okay,” he said, turning to walk up the porch.
“It’s going to be hard for you to focus today, I can tell.”
But in the end, it was Merritt who had trouble. For an hour at least, she tried to write the death scene. She was still waiting
for something to click, to have some indication that Ursula’s creator would’ve approved of her impulse to kill off the half-fairy.
She’d asked Whit whether he had checked Helen’s email for clues, and of course he had: the inbox, the sent folder, the drafts,
the trash, all of it. There was nothing.
They spent some time reading back over the last four or so chapters they’d written, wondering whether the story could possibly
lead in a different direction, waiting for a different narrative thread to tug at them both. They drank more tea, they watched
the rain, they kissed again. Then it was time to go and get Annie from the nanny share.
“Why don’t you come?” Whit said. “She’d be happy to see you, and we can keep talking about Ursula.”
Merritt did not need much convincing. She suggested they make a tumbler of hot chocolate for Annie on this dreary day.
“Let’s take the jeep,” she said, once they were in the garage.
“It’s raining.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, is this one of those famous two-wheel-drive jeeps everyone’s always talking about?”
He rolled his eyes. “No, but it gets kind of cold—”
“Whit,” she said, placing a hand on his upper arm. He looked at her. He smiled.
“Live a little?” he asked.
“Exactly.”
So they took the jeep and listened to the National as Merritt watched the rain toss about the branches of trees, which were
now almost entirely bare.
“Surprise,” Whit said when Annie popped into the backseat. Merritt twisted around.
“We brought you hot chocolate.”
Annie’s eyes grew wide and excited, then narrowed.
“Any marshmallows?”
“Just say thank you, please,” Whit laughed.
Merritt laughed, too, and Annie buzzed from the back, chattering about the day’s miniature dramas, and for a moment Merritt
felt like she had slipped outside herself, pulling away from the doom and gloom of Ian Hoult and the strange twists and turns
in her life. And again, she realized, she was happy. The car was warm, the windows were pleasantly fogged. Annie was joyful.
Whit was good. And she was a part of it.
Whit was content as he drove home, Merritt in the passenger seat, Annie leaning over the console with the hot chocolate tumbler
in both hands. Mostly Merritt and Annie talked, rehashing the plot of the latest Kate DiCamillo book, which Kathleen Pryor
had pressed into Annie’s hands, and which she had read in less than twenty-four hours.
“Is your car broken down again?” Annie asked eventually.
They were nearing the house now, and it was getting close to dark, especially with all the rain.
“What?”
“Is your car broken down again? Like the last time you picked me up?”
“Oh,” Merritt said with a laugh. “No. Your dad and I were trying to figure something out about the book, and we figured we
could talk about it on the way to getting you. Although we didn’t actually talk about it, did we?”
“Not a word,” Whit said, but his brain had hooked on Annie’s question. He needed to talk to her about him and Merritt, but
he dreaded the idea. How much had she pieced together already? Evie had told Annie that they were just friends, but that was
weeks ago. It had been true at the time. But now . . .
“What are you trying to figure out?” Annie asked.
Whit glanced at her in the rearview mirror. They hadn’t spoken much about what it was he and Merritt were doing, though he
knew she understood. She had not yet read the Greenwood Castle Saga—Helen had insisted that Annie wait until she was ten or
eleven to do so—but she was familiar with the world of the books, as most kids were.
“Well,” he said, realizing that Merritt was deferring to him, “we’re almost finished with the story, and there’s a character
whom we think—well, we think it might be best for the story if that character died.”
Annie’s eyes went big.
Oh God. Was she thinking about death? About Helen’s death?
Oh God.
But then her face turned playfully angry.
“Aw, that’s mean, Dad.”
Whit laughed. “Yes, it sort of is. But it seems like the right thing.”
“Is that what Mom wanted to happen?”
They were on the driveway now. Whit sighed and slowed the car to a stop before answering. He turned around to look at Annie, noting the way Merritt sat tactfully still.
“Well, sweetie, we don’t really know. We just have to do our best and make the smartest guesses we can, because Mom didn’t
leave anything behind saying what she wanted.”
He wasn’t sure how these words would affect Annie, who sat straight and eager, her reddish hair down, looking longer than
he could remember it ever looking before. In the instant before she responded, he was struck by the knowledge that she was
getting older all the time. She looked so big.
The face she did end up making was not what he had expected. Her eyebrows furrowed, and her scrunched-up cheeks made her eyes
go squinty. She was surprised, maybe even indignant.
“Yes, she did,” Annie said, with a little spice in her voice.
Ah, Whit thought, indignant it is.
Then her words caught up to him.
“What?” he said, more loudly than he’d meant to. “What do you mean?”
“Yeah,” Annie said brightly now. “I’ll show you.”
She got out of the car, and Whit looked to Merritt, whose face was curious. But nothing like the cold shadow that passed over
and into Whit. He got out of the car and followed Annie into the house. Upstairs he went, with Merritt close behind him.
Then they were in Annie’s lavender room, standing amid the round paper lanterns and several discarded items of dirty clothes
flung across the wood floor. Annie walked directly to the Larkin secretary desk where she kept her mother’s knickknacks and
the picture from the Halloween party. For the first time in Whit’s presence, she lowered the drop-front panel—the part that
actually made the shelf into a desk. Then she stepped aside.
“See?”
Whit moved forward, feeling his heart beat with every step. The weight of the cold shadow seemed to double.
At the desk, he reached out his hand to rub the spines of ten or so Moleskine journals, all in different colors, worn and
lined up like—well, like exactly what he and Merritt had been looking for. He grabbed one at random—a red one—and held it
in his hands, turning it over without opening it.
And suddenly he knew the truth he’d been avoiding for over two months: he didn’t want these to exist. That first year after
Helen died, he would have given anything to find this treasure trove. It would have made everything so much easier. Finding
them now was like rebuilding a car engine through trial and error only to learn that you lived next door to a world-class
mechanic. This collection of journals was the I Ching, the Key to All Mythologies. This was it.
But ever since he’d met Merritt he’d been okay with the possibility that there was no such store of answers. He’d been glad—grateful
to do this with her, to build this story with Merritt. He had thought he needed notes or guideposts, when in fact he only needed her.
But now . . . now it was all here, and it had been here all along. He felt a hot streak of anger sear through him, filling
his chest, his shoulders, his arms and legs. He was angry that these journals existed, and angry that he hadn’t known about
it. Angry at Annie, angry at Helen, at himself. Why hadn’t he thought to look here? Why had he been so complacent and stupid?
“Have you read these?” he asked.
“Only a little. It’s a lot of stuff about her books. Did I do something wrong? I know Mom said I couldn’t read the books until
I was ten, but you said I could take whatever I wanted—”
“No,” Whit said urgently, feeling the anger begin to leave him like air from a punctured balloon. “No, no, honey. Of course
not. I’m so glad you have these things.”
He pulled her close to him, gazing at Merritt over her head.
She looked stunned. Not quite stricken, as he felt, but flabbergasted. And she was smiling. It was a soft, noncommittal thing,
but it was certainly a smile.
“Thank you for showing me these,” Whit said after a while. “I’m going to take them for a bit, if that’s all right, but you
can have them back after. Sound good?”
Annie nodded, though she clearly was still worried that she’d made a misstep. Whit hugged her again, this time fiercely, until
the flash of anger he’d felt finished burning itself out.
Now the Moleskines stood in three wonky stacks on the kitchen table, with Whit and Merritt staring at them from chairs on
either side. In the windows, the sky had gotten very dark.
“What do we do with them?” Whit asked, feeling suddenly childlike.
“You read them,” Merritt said immediately.
“I do?”
“Of course you do. Isn’t this what we’ve been looking for?”
“I guess so—”
“I’m sure she expected you to. And now you can look for any indication that Helen might have been okay with killing off Ursula.
Or if not Ursula, Christabel or Rupert. Just some sign that it was on her mind. Or maybe evidence that it was really not. Both work, right?”
Whit nodded.
“All right,” he said. “Yeah.” Then, “I think I better . . .”
“Of course,” Merritt said, grinning almost too widely as she stood. “Let me know . . .”
She trailed off. Whit understood.
“I’ll let you know what I find. See you tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” Merritt said, still wearing that stage smile. “See you then.”
It took the closing of the front door for Whit to realize that he’d dropped his eyes back to the journals and Merritt had
slipped out, unnoticed.
As she drove home through the heavy rain, Merritt cried. She cried and cried.
Whit started at the end. The last journal, the only one that was incomplete.
The first page said simply:
Book V
The Plan
The pages that followed were filled with several sections of disorganized lists and graphic brainstorming efforts and then,
finally, a twenty-page, highly detailed outline, all in Helen’s achingly familiar handwriting.
Whit read this, spellbound, and found himself smiling, laughing, and letting out short sounds of approval and admiration.
Even just in outline form, the last three pages made him cry.
When he finished, he set the journal down and looked around the kitchen.
“Dear God,” he said aloud. “We got it all wrong.”