“No, please,” I say quickly. “I like it.”
The Variants. They are like Sterling’s North Star: one bright spot to orient them against an ever-advancing darkness.
“These, the Mind’s Eye Variants, were another stroke of luck,” he says, and I can tell that he is pleased to continue. “I was actually in search of a Variant for our missing dreams. However, that one has proven to be very elusive, even to this day.” He wets his fingertip to skim through the pages.
“I’d already experimented unsuccessfully with a number of things—?Saint John’s wort, peppermint, white periwinkle—?when I stumbled across a passage on the legends of the Middle Ages. It said that people would place sprigs of rosemary under their pillows to ward against nightmares. But of course, rosemary is also associated with memory.” He smiles. “I could have just looked at Hamlet. You’d be amazed at how many hints I’ve found within Shakespeare’s pages.”
My head shoots up, and Will looks at me. I can tell he remembers my asking about it, and he gets a funny look. “Huh,” he says.
“Shakespeare?” I prod Dr. Cliffton.
“Yes,” he explains. “I’ve found that with the Variants, most—?not all, but a good portion of them—?have roots in literary clues.”
So another piece of the puzzle slides into place. That’s what Mother’s markings mean: she was looking for literary clues to help solve the Disappearances. It’s exactly the sort of thing she loved. A real-life riddle. She probably saw it all as a big game.
“‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance,’” Will says, holding the mortar and pestle in front of him like a skull. “‘Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.’”
“If becoming Sterling’s first athletic champion woodworker doesn’t pan out, you could always find work as Hamlet,” I say, nudging him gently with my elbow. Then I drop my arms rigidly back to my side.
Am I flirting with him?
“Or Ophelia, rather,” Will corrects. He grins and nudges me back when he sets the pestle down.
Is he flirting with me?
“It seems so obvious to me, now,” Dr. Cliffton says absently. “I guess that’s the way it is with most things when we are looking at them with new eyes.”
He bends to his desk drawers again, and I tense. But he opens the second drawer and, reaching underneath a stack of papers, retrieves a small vial. It is round and squat, with a glass stopper.
“The very first batch of Mind’s Eye I ever made,” he says. He pulls the stopper and lets me peer inside at the swirling mist that is the same lacquered, shell-like color as the one I saw in the Market. “This Variant is most potent when used as a paste on the eyelids,” he says. “When I discovered it, I found that I could recall the very first conversation I ever had with Matilda. I could see the blue cotton dress she had on, down to the detail that it was embroidered with white flowers on our first day at Sterling Elementary. I was able to relive the exact details of an event that had disintegrated in my memory almost thirty years ago.”
My throat tightens. “On the days you find something you thought was lost forever,” I say, “it must feel like bringing it back to life again.”
Dr. Cliffton nods. “I think there are a lot of things in Sterling we appreciate now, more so than we ever could have before they disappeared.”
I think about this, rolling it around in my mind like a marble throughout the rest of the evening. I think of it when I replace Dr. Cliffton’s book in his desk drawer in the moments after everyone is called for dinner. When I slip off Mother’s necklace, lay it on the nightstand, climb into bed, and pull the quilt up to my chin.
I sleep soundly until the light of the next morning nudges me awake. When I open my eyes, it takes a moment for my vision to focus.
Then I jolt up. Panic explodes in a spray of fireworks within my chest.
I reach out to my nightstand. Its surface is smooth and empty.
My mother’s necklace is gone.
Chapter Sixteen
Date: 3/14/1941
Bird: Killdeer
To protect their nests from an approaching predator, killdeer will attract attention to themselves by flapping in fake distress and dragging one of their wings on the ground as if it is injured.
Once the predator has moved away from the nest, the killdeer ends the act and flies away.
Phineas doesn’t start by teaching me how to rob graves. Those are messy and exposed. Instead, we start with bleach and locks.
“If cleanliness is next to godliness,” he says, pouring amber glass bottles into the washtub, “then sloppiness is the fastest way to a jail cell.”
