We each crack open our books and dig in.
The room settles into silent concentration, rustled only by the quick flipping of pages, the pouring of more coffee, until George closes his copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a sigh. “I’m sorry. I don’t see anything,” he admits. “You guys have something?”
“I think I do,” Will says, jabbing his book. “Here. This one has a Helena and a plot about a ring. Listen to this. Helena is described as some sort of healer.”
I read the words over his shoulder:
“I have seen a medicine
That’s able to breathe life into a stone.
Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary,
With spritely fire and motion,
Whose simple touch is powerful to araise King Pippen.”
“Yes!” I say. “And look at this.” I bring out a pen to wrap a dark circle around another passage:
“Plutus himself,
That knows the tinct and multiplying medicine,
Hath not in nature’s mystery more science
Than I have in this ring.”
Will hesitates and then leans forward to pick up the Stone from around my neck, my skin heating at the brush of his fingers. I watch his lips carefully as he speaks.
“If this Stone has the power to make someone better by its touch,” he says, “to heal like ‘multiplying medicine,’ then no wonder Stefen wanted it.”
He holds it to the light, shining through clear and sharp to illuminate the teardrop suspended inside, and I remember, suddenly, how off I’d felt at first when Miles had taken it. The persistent, pounding headache. And that was only after wearing it for a month.
“That could maybe explain why the Hypnosis Variants didn’t work on you,” George says.
“Why my mother was never sick growing up,” I add softly. I take the Stone back from Will with fingers that betray the slightest shake.
“And,” Will says, “maybe that’s why she could leave, even though she was from here.” He gestures to demonstrate his point and make sure I grasp it. “Because she was wearing that Stone.”
It protected her, I think. Until the day she must have taken it off to send it to Stefen. I close my eyes. It lines up with when she’d become ill. And why the Disappearances finally caught up to her.
“So maybe someone stole that Stone from Shakespeare,” Beas muses. “And it released some sort of Curse from his very own pages.”
“But—?wait,” Eliza says. “This still doesn’t make sense. The Helena Stone might have been what helped Juliet leave. But that doesn’t explain why we’re still cursed.”
“Right. Why wouldn’t the Curse have just followed your mother?” George asks. “And why would it affect so many different towns? If the Curse is on the Stone, then the Disappearances should have ended here and started up in Gardner.”
I sigh. Every time I think we’ve glimpsed the end of the maze, we run straight into another wall.
Think.
“Let’s take a break,” I say. Will leads us to the kitchen, where we ring around the wooden table, making sandwiches on crusted bread and eating Mrs. Mackelroy’s casseroles. I can’t help but notice that Will barely touches his, and suddenly I’m no longer hungry, either.
I take a plate to Miles in his room. He tries to hide what he’s working on, but I see it anyway. He’s crushing seed packets of lilies of the valley, mint tea bags, fir needles. All of Mrs. Cliffton’s favorite things. He sees me looking at his piles, his attempts at little makeshift Variants. “I’m going to find a way to bring her back,” he says fiercely. I can tell he’s been crying.
I hesitate. Set the plate down on the desk. Touch his arm gently before I leave. “Me, too.”
When I return downstairs, the rest of them have finished lunch and traipsed back to the library. I sink down into my seat with newly blazing resolve, and George hands me a plate of cookies.
