I get a little chill. “You can do that?”

  “Sadly, no. I vote you phone the author.”

  “Me? Why don’t you?”

  “She’s more likely to talk to you,” Jilly says.

  “Oh, I think she’ll talk to a famous faerie painter.”

  “But you’re the one who brought her character so skillfully to life.”

  “Says the woman who’s never seen the show.”

  “Not true,” Jilly says. “Last night I read Nora Constantine and the Secret of the Red Corvette, and then Wendy showed me the first two episodes of the show. I think you did a wonderful job. I totally believed you. Though I have to admit I liked the late sixties setting of the books better. Why would they change that for the show?”

  “I never thought about it,” I say. “They probably didn’t have the budget.”

  “I wonder what Emma G. Rohlin thinks of the change. You should ask her when you’re talking to her.”

  “So that’s settled, is it? I’m the one talking to her?”

  All Jilly does is give me an expectant look.

  “Fine,” I tell her. “Though it’s not like I have her phone number. It’s probably unlisted.”

  “We’ll ask Saskia. She’s good at finding out things like that.”

  Which is how, after breakfast, I find myself with Jilly back at Bramleyhaugh, climbing the stairs to the third floor where Saskia and Christy live. Their rooms are much like the rest of the house, crowded with books and antique furniture, all except for Saskia’s study.

  We pause at the threshold. Jilly knocks on the doorjamb by the open door, and Saskia looks up from where she’s sitting in one of a pair of chairs in the corner. She’s tall and gorgeous, blue-eyed with a generous mane of yellow-gold hair. It seems like every woman in this house has gorgeous curls and ringlets except for Mona and me. Mona’s is short and blond, while my thick red mop is boringly straight. Boring because it refuses to hold a curl and takes forever to dry.

  “Can Bobo come in?” Jilly asks Saskia before stepping inside.

  “Of course. Can I get him a pillow or something to lie on?”

  “He can tough it out,” Jilly says. “We’re not going to keep you long.”

  The contrast between the study and the rest of the house is striking. Outside the room, it’s all wooden wainscoting and Persian rugs, paintings and framed photographs hanging in every spare inch that isn’t blocked by a bookcase—much like the rest of the house. But the furniture in Saskia’s study is spare and modern, the floor polished wood. There’s a contemporary bookcase with a tidy array of poetry books and notebooks, and her window overlooks the yard in the back of the house. The two other walls hold only one painting each, abstracts by Isabelle Copley, who doesn’t live here in the house, but is among Jilly’s family of choice.

  And there’s no computer.

  The expanse of the desk holds just a single notebook with a fountain pen in the gutter to keep the pages open.

  Saskia sets a poetry book on the glass table between the chairs and stands. She motions us to sit down and pulls over the chair from the desk when we do. Bobo eyes Jilly’s lap and hops up. Saskia reaches over to ruffle the fur on the top of the pup’s head and he closes his eyes. If he were a cat he’d be purring.

  “How can he not always have lived here?” Saskia says.

  Jilly beams. “It’s really like that, isn’t it?’

  “Have you formally adopted him yet?’

  “Geordie took care of it yesterday.”

  “Oh, those Riddell boys,” Saskia says. “They treat us well, don’t they?”

  She glances at me. “You look surprised,” she adds.

  “Not about Geordie or Christy,” I assure her. “I’ve just never been up here before. It’s not like I expected.”

  “What were you expecting?”

  “For it to be like the rest of the house, except more writerly.”

  She smiles. “You’ll have to go to Christy’s study for that. I like to have open space so that the words can find me more readily. Christy prefers to let them creep around the baseboards or swing in through the window from the trees outside, but really, how can you even tell where they’ve been?”

  “God help me,” Jilly says. “Why does that even begin to make sense?”

  I turn to her. “It does?”

  But I kind of know what she means because I can just picture Christy waiting on the arrival of a pack of scruffy words, coaxing them onto the page with the whispered promise of being tucked comfortably into his latest story.

  “Can I get either of you something to drink?” Saskia asks us. “Maybe some water for Bobo?”

  Jilly shakes her head. “But we were hoping you could track down a phone number for us.”

  “Anything to stay off a computer,” Saskia says.

  She looks at me. “You’re probably just as bad.”

  “Hey, I do email and stuff,” I say.

  “The one I want is probably unlisted,” Jilly says with just the right amount of being terribly misunderstood in her voice.

  Saskia smiles. “Whose number do you want?”

  “Emma K. Rohlin’s.”

  “The writer?”

  Jilly nods. Saskia closes her eyes for a moment then rattles off a phone number.

  “Just a sec,” Jilly says. She pulls a little notebook from her pocket and scribbles the number into it. “Thanks, Saskia. You’re the best.”

  “How did you do that?” I ask. “Did you already know the number? No, wait. Why would you even know the number?”

  “She talks to the spirits in the wires,” Jilly explains, but as is often the case when she tells me something, I have no idea what she means.

  Saskia laughs. “More like spirits in the wireless these days.”

  I look from one to the other. “What am I missing here? Did you guys set this up to amaze me? Because rest assured, I’m amazed.”

  Saskia seems confused, but Jilly’s bouncing happily in her seat, enough to get a protest from Bobo.

  “Ask her anything,” Jilly says. “Or at least anything you’d ask Google.”

  “What?

  “Go ahead.”

  “But…”

  You know how it is. As soon as someone says something like that your mind goes blank. Or at least mine does.

  “I’d show you,” Jilly says, “but then you’ll just keep thinking that we’ve had this planned.”

  Then I remember something Jilly told me yesterday.

  If I need to use the internet, I just ask Saskia since she pretty much is the internet.

  I just put that down to being one more of all the crazy things she’s been telling me over the years. But I’d seen a real, honest-to-god ghost and, despite what Tam said last night, it looks like I’d better start entertaining the idea that maybe she’s being factual rather than whimsical.

  I take out my phone and open a browser.

  “What’s the speed of light?” I ask and type the words in the search bar as I speak.

  Saskia answers before my browser page loads. “186,000 miles per second.”

  A few seconds later the same answer comes up on my phone.

  “What did I tell you?” Jilly says.

  I don’t respond. I just look at Saskia for a long moment before I finally say, “You’re the internet?”

  “What? No.” She laughs. “Who told you that? Wait, never mind.” She shoots Jilly an admonishing glance. “No, I just have a connection to it that lets me bypass using a device.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  She shrugs. “Maybe I was born there.”

  I close my eyes and try to process that, but it makes no sense. When I open them again, Saskia is looking at me without guile.

  “No, seriously,” I say. “Where’s the science for that? Wait—were you born there?”

  “It’s magic,” Jilly says. “Just like faeries in the garden and brownies in the attic, or Christy’s shadow, although she hasn’t been around for a while.”

  “Magic,” I repeat.

  Jilly nods. “Only different.”

  She puts Bobo on the ground and stands up.

  “Come on,” she tells me. “You have a phone call to make. I’ll be with you and you can put us all on speakerphone if that makes you feel more comfortable.”

  As I sit there in stunned silence, she tugs me to my feet.

  “Thanks, Saskia,” Jilly says as she pulls me by my hand out of the room.

  “She’s really the internet, isn’t she?” I murmur as we head down the stairs. “You said that.”

  “I’m sure I didn’t. But if I did, I only meant she’s my internet.”

  “Oh, that’s so much more comforting.”

  “Life isn’t meant to be comforting,” Jilly tells me. “It’s big and it’s messy, and there’s always another mystery for every one we think we’ve solved.”

  On our way to the studio we pass through the kitchen where Wendy’s sitting at the table with a mug of tea and a sandwich. She grins when we appear and holds up the book she’s flipping through.

  “Look,” she says. “Hot off the press. Marisa just dropped it off a few minutes ago.”

  Marisa and her husband run East Side Press. Every year for FaerieFest they do a limited run of signed prints—this year’s run being the pile still waiting in the studio for Jilly to sign. A couple of years ago they also published a collection of her paintings in a lovely hardcover edition that did so well they decided to follow it up this year with a reproduction of Jilly’s sketchbooks.

  The finished book’s a little bit of a cheat because they took pages from a whole mess of her sketchbooks and put them all together as though they were simply one, but I saw the galleys a few months ago and it came together beautifully. The finished copy, which we all pore over for a few minutes at the kitchen table, is stunning.

  At first Jilly had been less than enthused about the idea. She only warmed to it as we all started going through the various sketchbooks to pick our favourite pages. The finished book is called Jilly Coppercorn’s Faery Sketchbook, but it contains at least as many taken from her endless rambles through the backstreets and alleys of Newford as there are of actual faerie beings.

  “I guess it didn’t turn out too badly, did it,” she says now.

  Wendy and I exchange a knowing look at yet another example of what Sophie calls “the humble Jilly.” Don’t get me wrong. Jilly’s passionate about her art. She just can’t seem to understand why anybody else would make a fuss over it.

  “No, it’s just brilliant,” Wendy says.

  I nod in agreement.

  Jilly smiles. “Well, I pay you to say that. Money well spent.”

  Wendy fakes a punch at her but Jilly dances back out of reach.

  “I’d be happy to exchange fisticuffs with you later,” she informs Wendy in a la-dee-da sort of a voice, “but right now Juniper and I have a phone call to make.”

  She heads off toward the studio with Bobo.

  “Did Marisa only leave the one copy?” I ask Wendy.

  She shakes her head and points to a box by the door.

  “There’s plenty for everyone,” she says.

  I grab a copy for myself before following Jilly to the studio. She’s already sitting on the sofa, a phone on the coffee table in front of her. Bobo gives a little groan when he has to shift to make room for me to sit beside them.

  “So we’re actually doing this,” I say.

  “Justice waits for no woman,” Jilly tells me.

  “Right.”

  She opens her notebook to the page with the number and I punch it in, then press the speaker phone button. Emma Rohlin answers after a couple of rings.

  “Hello, Ms. Rohlin,” I say. “This is Juniper Wiles. I don’t know if you remember me, but—”

  “Dear girl, of course I remember you. How lovely to hear your voice.”

  “I’ve got you on speaker phone,” I say, “and my friend Jilly Coppercorn is with me. Is that okay?”

  “Of course. To what do I owe this mysterious pleasure? Somehow I suspect I’ll like it.”

  “And I like you,” Jilly says. “Hi Ms. Rohlin.”

  “Please. ‘Emma’ will do just fine. Now, are you the same Jilly Coppercorn who does those exquisite paintings of faeries living in alleyways and junkyards?”

  “I guess I am.”

  “You should do another book,” Emma says. “My granddaughters and I are coming close to wearing the first one out.”

  “My publisher just put out a new one, a collection of mostly faerie sketches. I can send you a copy if you’ll tell me your address.”

  Emma does, adding, “Aren’t you a dear. I’m hardly surprised that the two of you are friends. Did Juniper tell you how, whenever I visited the set of the show, she went out of her way to take me around and make sure I was always comfortable?”

  Jilly gives me a stern look. “She did not tell me that.”

  “Now, how can I help you girls?”

  “It’s about Ethan Law,” I say.

  There’s a brief silence before she responds with a clipped, “I see.”

  I wait for a moment. Before I can go on to say—I’m not sure what. Apologize? Ask her why the name disturbs her—she asks, “Has he been bothering you?”

  “Not exactly. He’s dead.”

  “Oh dear. What happened?”

  “No one knows, exactly, but it seems he was murdered several days ago. We’re looking for the reason why,” I say. “We heard you’d had a correspondence with him that you suddenly broke off, and wonder if you’d mind telling us what it was about.”

  Emma chuckles. “It seems a bit of Nora has rubbed off on you after all those years of playing the character.”

  I pause and glance at Jilly, who nods encouragingly and motions for me to continue.

  I want to say, no, Jilly’s put me up to all of this, but I realize it’s not entirely true. At least not anymore. Now I need to know what happened as much as Jilly does.

  “I guess it has,” I finally say. Jilly smiles and pats my knee.

  “Just remember the trouble that Nora’s curiosity could get her into.”

  “I will.”

  “So,” Emma says, drawing the word out. “Ethan Law. He seemed like such a disarming young man at first, and to be fair, he was unfailingly polite in all the emails he wrote to me.”

  “But,” Jilly prompts her.

  “Turned out he was slightly off his rocker. He had this mad idea that I hadn’t created Nora and the rest of the characters from the books. The first few emails were pleasant enough, but as time went on he kept pressing me for details on how I’d come to discover this parallel world in which the actual people lived—the ones I’d based my characters on. I stopped responding to him when he asked me if I was aware that the real people were bleeding into this world, and whether I could give him information about these supposed people.”

  I take a deep breath. “He really thought I was Nora,” I say.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, dear,” Emma says, “but from what I knew of him I’m not surprised. Oh well. Let’s hope he’s found his peace.”

  “At the risk of you hanging up on us,” Jilly says, “we should tell you that Juniper only met Ethan on Monday, after he’d been dead for a few days.”

  There’s another silence before Emma says, “I don’t believe I heard that correctly.”

  “And then yesterday morning,” Jilly goes on, “Nick—an acquaintance of Ethan’s—got a rather cryptic text from him, asking Nick to tell Nora that Palmer is back.”

  The silence that follows that is longer.

  “I’m disappointed in you, Juniper,” Emma finally says. “I don’t know what you hope to gain by this ridiculous story, but I think we’re done here.”

  “Please, please don’t hang up,” I say. “Emma, I swear we’re not pranking you. I’m as confused about all of this as you are. As strange as it sounds, I know for sure that I met Ethan on Monday in a café. He was very pushy about me being Nora and I shut him down. I only discovered his death yesterday morning when the newspaper reported his body having been found. According to the coroner, he’d been dead for several days.”

  “The article said he’d been missing for a week,” Jilly puts in. “It was all reported in The Newford Star Tuesday morning, the same day Nick got that text. All we’re trying to do is figure out what happened to him—and what his ghost wants from Juniper.”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” Emma says, her voice firm.

  “I didn’t either until this week,” I tell her.

  The dead air that follows is long enough that I start to think she’s hung up. But there’s no dial tone.

  “There is something else that I didn’t mention earlier,” Emma says. “When Ethan Law first contacted me his name was very familiar because I once had a character with that name.”

  “I don’t remember that,” I say, “and I’ve read all the books, including the novelizations based on the show.”

  “Novelizations?” Jilly says. “I thought the show was already based on Emma’s books.”

  “Yes, but it was quite different from my books,” Emma tells us. “They updated the setting, dropped some characters, added new ones. The novelizations grew out of the television show.”

  “So where does Ethan fit in?” I ask.

  “There was going to be a subplot with a gay couple in one of my original books,” Emma explains, “but this was the late sixties and my agent told me that the juvenile market wasn’t ready for that. You have to remember the times. It was still a few years before Judy Blume’s groundbreaking work. Come to think of it, there wasn’t even a specific young adult market at the time. That wouldn’t come for years. In the end, I let her talk me out of it.”

  “And Ethan Law was the name you gave one of those gay characters,” Jilly says.

  “Indeed. I thought it was only coincidence that this young man would have the same name. He could have had no access to my unpublished manuscripts. The only people to have ever read them are my daughter and my agent, and they would have no reason to tell anybody about it.”

  “There’s no such thing as coincidence,” Jilly says. “There are only connections we haven’t figured out yet.” She looks at me and adds, “Either the professor or Christy told me that.”

 

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