by Wendy Mass
A memory of a lesson on camouflaging taught by one of the experts her grandmother had brought in flitted around the edges of Daisy’s mind, but she couldn’t bring it into focus. Philip and Logan were still trying to get their hearts to stop pounding. Miles hung on every word. “I just want to be sure—are you talking about hiding the place where the beans grow? The one the contract said you would protect?”
“Of course,” Frank said. “How many paradises do you know of?”
“None,” Miles admitted. “Well, Logan’s candy factory is as close to paradise as I ever thought I’d get.”
“You’re about to get closer,” Frank said.
“Wait, what?” Philip said, coming out of his stupor. “It’s right here? And you’re actually going to show us?”
Frank nodded. “Henry made that inevitable when he gave you the chocolate to use for the contest. Right or wrong, he set you on this path. That decision gave him many sleepless nights over the last five months, I’ll tell you that. He did it without asking Evy or myself first, which went against the contract. But that’s my little brother for you, always looking out for me even when I’m not looking out for myself.”
They all stared at him, struggling to make sense of it all. He looked from one confused face to another and sighed. “Guess I’m going to have to start from the beginning. Come, show me the exact spot where you last saw your cat.”
They walked to the side of the house, and Logan pointed a few feet in front of them. “It was right around there.”
Frank walked over to the area, kept walking, and disappeared.
“Taerg s’oelilaG tsohg!” Miles shouted, and he fell to the ground as his legs gave out under him. A symphony burst into Philip’s head. That used to happen to him when he was young and something upset him and he needed to escape his thoughts. His brain was protecting him from having to process this. Logan’s legs wobbled, but he leaned on the metal detector like a cane and managed to stay upright.
Then Frank’s head appeared. Just his head. “Well?” he asked. “Aren’t you coming?”
They all gaped at the floating head until the rest of Frank’s body appeared. “Okay, that wasn’t very nice of me,” he admitted. “Couldn’t resist. I’ve never had an audience before, you understand.”
Frank held out a hand to a shaking Logan. “Let me show you. Everyone hold hands, and then, Logan, you take mine.” Although reluctant to let go of the security of the metal detector, Logan lowered it to the ground. He helped Miles up, gripping his hand tightly. Philip took Miles’s other hand. Then Daisy took Philip’s and AJ’s.
Frank led them toward the backyard. One by one they each gasped as the person in front of them vanished. Then they were in darkness. Utter, complete darkness.
“Hold tight,” Frank instructed as they stumbled forward and slightly downhill. They were already holding on so tightly they’d lost feeling in their fingers.
“Where are we?” Philip choked out. Fear—not only of the whole disappearing thing but of the oppressive darkness—squeezed his throat muscles together.
“Don’t worry. We are only a few steps from where we were on the side of my house,” Frank assured them as the downward slant grew steeper. “An elaborate system of mirrors bends the light around objects in my yard. Your cat didn’t disappear. She simply walked between two of the mirrors. As did we. Houdini made an elephant disappear this way—we’re hiding something a little bigger than that.”
“Mirrors!” Daisy exclaimed. “Of course!” Now she remembered what that expert had spoken about—the art of hiding large objects in plain sight. She’d never seen it done in real life, though.
Logan felt relief wash over him, knowing that his entire view of reality—a reality where cats and people were not able to disappear—would not need to be revised. His breathing slowed down for the first time since Aurora vanished.
“We’re in an underground tunnel,” Miles said. “Right? The ground is slippery, and the air smells like it does on a rainy day, but much stronger.”
“You are correct,” Frank said. “I love the smell, don’t you? So earthy and rich. All the silica and minerals in the dirt here make the odor even stronger. The high humidity in the air releases oils in the stone. That’s what you’re smelling.”
“But there’s barely any humidity in this part of the country,” AJ said. “Even your grass doesn’t grow.”
“That’s true,” Frank said. “You can see the effects of the infrequent rain in the front yard. But in the backyard, things are a little different.”
As he said the word different and took one more step, a blast of heat made them suck in their breath. It must have been at least forty degrees hotter now. It felt hotter than the Tropical Room, hotter than anyplace any of them had ever been.
One more step forward and the darkness faded as abruptly as it had fallen upon them. Walls of rock and sandstone rose up high on either side of them to form a narrow valley or canyon, the far end of which only Daisy could see. They blinked as blinding sunlight reflected off the powder-white sand that covered the ground. A stream of blue water flowed like liquid glass down a narrow riverbed, and the smell of chocolate filled their noses.
Frank spread open his arms. “Welcome to Paradise!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In the years to come, whenever they talked about that first moment, they found they couldn’t raise their voices above a whisper. For Logan, the image that always came to his mind had to do with the tree. Not the lone cocoa tree itself, which stood in the center of the valley with its lush green leaves and low-hanging blue pods and branches as wide as he’d ever seen. No, what first caught his eye were the hundreds—or maybe even thousands—of butterflies perched on the branches, gently flapping their red wings. He had a feeling a few of these had followed his grandfather back home to the factory once and started families.
The butterflies made a big impression on Miles, too. When he spotted them, he knew for sure that he never needed to look for another sign. All those times during the contest he’d hoped to see a red-winged butterfly, hoped it would tell him if he was on the right path, if he had made the right choices. And now here they were. All of them. One of the sentences he’d copied before the trip floated back to him. Be where you are. A sense of great peace unfolded inside him. He was exactly where he was supposed to be.
For Philip, the butterflies—which he assumed had stopped in this hidden valley on some kind of migratory path—didn’t hold much interest. The blue pods underneath them did, though. He dropped Daisy’s and Miles’s hands (which he was embarrassed to admit he’d still been clutching) and stumbled toward the tree. He was unused to walking in sand, thanks to his lifelong distaste for the beach, and he couldn’t get the hang of lifting his feet high enough. The sand covered his shoes and weighed him down. His knees and palms landed over and over again in the soft, hot sand, but he didn’t really mind. An almost childlike glee had fallen over him. The beans really existed, and he had an idea. He counted ten ripe pods on the tree, and maybe more underneath the dense piles of butterflies. Ten pods would yield about four hundred beans. Plenty.
As for Daisy, while the cocoa tree and the butterflies and the tall cliffs and the sand made her very happy, she found herself drawn to the water. She kicked off her sneakers and ran. A pro at running on sand, she sprinted past Philip and the cocoa tree, past the hammock strung between two clumps of palm trees, past a sitting area complete with a circle of wooden chairs, each with its own striped umbrella, and straight to the river’s edge. She quickly understood that the water only appeared blue because it reflected the thin gash of sky above. Up close it was completely clear, allowing her to see all the way to the moss-covered pebbles on the bottom.
“Wait till you see that in the dark,” Frank commented as he walked past her. By the time she tore herself away from the water to question what he meant, he was gone. She turned from side to side but didn’t see him anywhere.
“He left,” AJ said, strolling u
p to her, his shoes dangling from one hand.
Logan and Philip hurried over, both barefoot and carrying cocoa pods under each arm like oversized blue footballs.
“Frank’s gone?” Logan asked, fearing the answer.
“He walked past Daisy toward the mouth of the stream,” AJ said, “and then he just did that disappearing thing.”
“Should we try to find him?” Logan asked. “I bet if we threw some sand around, we’d hit the mirrors, right?”
Daisy thought for a minute, then nodded. “We could do that. But I don’t think we should. I think he’s testing us.”
AJ nodded. “I think so, too.”
“Testing us to see if we’d take the beans?” Philip asked. He’d expected the pods to be heavy, but they couldn’t weigh more than a pound each. “I think we may have failed already, then.”
Logan shifted uneasily. He was so used to helping harvest ripe cocoa pods from the trees in the Tropical Room that he honestly hadn’t thought twice about it. And these just twisted right off the trunk. At home Avery had to cut them off with a very sharp knife.
“I don’t know if you’re supposed to take them or not,” Daisy said. “But I think Frank wants to see if you can follow in your grandfather’s footsteps. If you have what it takes to protect this place.”
Logan lost his grip on both pods, and they slipped from beneath his arms. Daisy’s hands flew out and she caught the pods easily.
“Not exactly right,” Miles said, joining them. “I don’t think Frank wants to see if Logan can protect this place. He wants to see if all of us can protect this place. Together.” Then he added, “Well, maybe not all of us. Sorry, AJ.”
AJ tilted his face to the sun. “Hey, I’m just here for the ride. I mean, the drive. You know what I mean.”
“How do you know that?” Philip asked.
Miles leaned back again and spread his arms wide. “Look around. We’re the only people he’s let in here. A mapmaker’s job is to reveal the world, right? And here he was, all these years, hiding something so amazing, keeping it safe from the outside world for reasons that we don’t entirely know yet. That has to mean something.”
“It doesn’t have to mean that he’s handing the place over to four kids,” Philip argued.
“I think Miles is right,” Daisy said. “Frank’s leaving. He’s donating his maps to Maggie’s museum. In his head he’s already gone.”
Philip was suddenly struck with a thought so outrageous that he momentarily swayed on his feet and sank onto the wet sand by the riverbank. “Are you okay?” Daisy asked, looking at him with concern. Philip Ransford the Third never intentionally sat in dirt. The others huddled around him.
“Logan,” Philip said, trying to keep his voice from shaking, “do you know whose idea it was for your father to host a group for the candymaking contest? Had he ever done it before?”
Logan shook his head. “I know my grandfather had hosted kids a few times before I was born, but my dad never did till you guys. Why?”
“I think your grandfather was trying to find replacements even back then. The right combination of four people. But they never worked out. We proved we could work as a team when we made the Harmonicandy, and that’s why Henry gave us the chocolate. He knew our individual skills, and he knew what we could do together. He was just doing what Sam would have wanted.”
They all knew he was right. They felt it in their bones. It was their destiny to be there together. Figuring out what that meant for each of them would have to wait, though.
“What if we could move the tree?” Philip suggested. “Like maybe bring it to the Tropical Room and even grow our own beans there. And then this could be, like, a tourist destination. Isn’t it kind of selfish that they kept it to themselves all these years?”
No one had an answer to that. But Logan could speak to the part about the tree. “We can’t move the tree. Cocoa tree roots go really, really deep. You can only replant a seedling, and then it would take between three and five years before the first crop. We’d also need to move the soil.” He turned to gaze at the magnificent tree. He was able to see more of the tree itself now, since many of the butterflies had flown off and were either flying lazily around it or sitting along the riverbank. Besides its unusual height and width and fullness and bright blue pods, something else was just… different.
“I expected there to be more cocoa trees here,” Daisy said. “I wonder why whoever planted it just planted one.”
“Yeah,” Miles said. “And whoever did plant it, we know it was growing cocoa pods at least fifty years ago, when Sam and the others found it.”
“That’s it!” Logan said. “That’s what’s been bugging me that I couldn’t put my finger on. The tree is way too old! Cocoa trees only grow fruit for, like, twenty-five years.” He grabbed for one of the pods Daisy had laid on the sand. He needed to know if the cocoa beans were still good. They couldn’t possibly be. The pod slipped right through his hands, and he gave a little groan of frustration before kneeling down in front of it instead.
He ran his hand over the long ridges. The skins of cocoa pods were usually thin enough to break open with just a stick. This one was thick, though, and they would need a knife. Daisy realized what he was trying to do, grabbed it, and broke it right in half.
“Thanks,” he said. The milky-white film that covered the beans looked normal and healthy. They all reached into a section and began pulling and scraping the outer layer off the beans. It didn’t take long until they had their answer. Out of the forty-six beans in the pod, forty-five of them looked like normal brown cocoa beans, except they crumbled as soon as they hit the air. The forty-sixth bean was bright blue, firm, completely round, and smelled like chocolate.
In unspoken agreement, they repeated the process on the other three pods, with exactly the same result. Only one surviving bean in each—the blue one. “All that work to grow a pod,” Miles said, “for only one bean to live.”
“I don’t understand how it’s possible to smell like chocolate if it wasn’t roasted,” Philip said, rolling one of the beans in his hands. “It wasn’t even fermented yet, and that’s when the chocolate flavor first starts to come out. Right?”
Logan nodded.
“It must be the microbe in the beans,” Daisy said. “Like it roasts it from the inside out?”
They all stared at the bean in Philip’s palm, imagining that process. “I’m starting to see why they felt they needed to hide this place,” Philip said, glancing back at the tree. There wouldn’t be four hundred beans in the harvest; there would only be forty. He pressed the bean into Logan’s hand. “Eat it,” he said fervently. “Go on, eat it, hurry.”
Logan stared at him. “What do you mean? Why?” He caught the others exchanging glances. “I don’t understand.”
“Your scars,” Daisy said. “They faded a little. I mean, a few of them did. After you ate some of the Magic Bar.”
Logan was stunned. “They did?” He knew the bar had made him feel different, and he knew Evy could tell, but he thought that was just from his reaction about it.
“On your arm,” Daisy clarified. “But we think if you eat these, maybe all your scars will get better.”
His head spun. Could he do this? Should he do this? All that trouble the tree went to in order to produce only a few beans. Other people needed this much more than him, like Henry. These were supposed to be for Henry.
As much as Miles wanted to help Logan, he needed to say something first. “Before you decide, remember what Evy said. They stopped making the candy bar partly because they couldn’t be sure it didn’t have other side effects. And as we know, they haven’t used them since then.”
Logan hesitated, but the time had come to tell them what Evy had whispered. “They did use the beans once more. Evy told me they’d given Sam their permission, but she didn’t tell me what he wanted them for.…” He suddenly blinked. A memory sliced through his head of a stick figure drawn with crayons and the strong smell of choc
olate where there wasn’t any chocolate. More memories hit him, ones long buried and forgotten.
“Are you okay?” Miles asked with concern.
Logan nodded. He swallowed hard. “I know what he did with them. He gave them to me when I was in the hospital, after the accident. He made a game out of it. He made me a get-well card and told me every night to eat a magic bean and I’d get better. As bad as my scars might be, I think he saved my life.”
Daisy reached out and squeezed his hand tightly. “I think so, too.” The medical reports made more sense now, but she didn’t see the need to tell him that.
Tears filled Logan’s eyes. “But then why didn’t he use them to save himself when he got sick? He could easily have gotten more of the beans.”
“Because they’d agreed not to,” Miles said. “In the contract, remember? You can’t protect something if you’re using it for selfish purposes. And you know, maybe it’s not so powerful that it can keep someone from dying when it’s their time. Henry obviously didn’t use it for his eyes, either.”
“You’re right, he didn’t.” Logan blinked away his tears and pressed the bean back into Philip’s hand.
“Are you sure?” Philip asked. “It would make your life so much easier and…” He trailed off. He couldn’t tell Logan that it would also make him feel better. He’d probably never stop feeling guilty about what had happened that day, even though he knew it was an accident. If Logan’s scars were gone, maybe Philip would finally be able to let it go.
“I’m sure,” Logan said. “But thank you.” He smiled. “If Frank really does ask us to be the new guardians of this place, that means we’d be bound by the same rules. And you know what it also means?” His eyes glinted. “It means Henry wouldn’t be anymore.”