“You have no sense of romance.”
“What are you talking about back there?” Sam called.
“The trip,” I lied. Well, it was only sort of a lie.
“I was telling Jo about the coordinates,” Sam said. “But I explained that we have no idea where the next stop is supposed to be. I got that right?”
Jo turned around. “Sam says all the other clues were place names?”
“Arcadia. Huzzah. Mantua. But this one isn’t.”
“Zed-splain it,” Sam said.
Well, since they were asking for my expertise, or Zed-spertise, how could I refuse?
“The stanzas in the poem Taylor left behind link to specific chapters,” I began. “Considered together, they’ve pointed to towns and places where clues are hidden. I think they might all have been places where Taylor felt comfortable somehow.” I stopped for a moment, imagining the author sitting and reading in front of Lysander’s grave, or partying with the crowd in Huzzah all those years ago.
“Focus,” Sam called.
I shook my head. “Sorry. But the last stanza and fragment don’t seem to do the same thing.”
“Why not?” Jo asked.
“Well, the stanza is clearly about Yves Lanois. He’s a werewolf, the last of the four great monsters in Taylor’s book. The chapter is also about Yves and Lysander, the vampire, and their first date.”
(Did Jo and Sam exchange another look when I said that? Yes.)
I recited perhaps my favorite bit from the fragments:
They dined together for the first time. But the dinner was so much more than just a meal.
How sad are the humans who see food as fuel, Yves thought. How much life they miss. How much joy.
The clouds obscured the light of the heavens, allowing the vampire and the werewolf the time to enjoy the meal and the company.
The chef delighted and surprised them with dishes designed for their particular tastes. For Lysander, the sanguine perfection of flying things. For Yves, the bounty of the forest, the prizes of the hunt.
Spurred on by the transcendent food, they moved from pleasant chat to deeper conversation as they discussed good and evil and dined on plant and beast.
A perfect synthesis of the delights of the earth and of the mind—and of the soul.
Soon, like the Ipomoea alba that surrounded their table, their love bloomed.
And then . . . they kissed.
Jo instantly endeared herself to me by saying, “That is so beautiful! No wonder you fell in love with this book.”
Gabe had now taken his headphones off. “The Ipomoea is the key here. It blooms only at night.”
“Like a werewolf,” Jo said, increasing her Zed rating exponentially.
“Yes!” Gabe replied. “It’s actually called the moonflower in English, which is in the last stanza of the poem. And the specific one the werewolf mentions is found in only a few places in the world, including the US southwest.”
“But why Texas?” Jo asked. “I thought you were heading for New Mexico?”
“We know we have to end up in New Mexico,” I said, “but right now, the coordinates give us this huge chunk of the state. So we need one more number to pinpoint exactly where we need to go.”
Gabe jumped in. “And the flower doesn’t really bloom west of Texas because it needs moisture, and once you get too far west, it’s all desert.”
“And Gabe discovered one other cool thing about Texas flowers that Taylor might have been hinting at: the state flower is the bluebonnet.”
“In Latin, the Lupinus texensis, or Texas wolf flower.”
“Texas it is!” Jo said.
“Where we are now,” I added.
“Is the moon part significant?” Jo asked.
“We think it’s possible that they’re eating under a full moon, but Yves doesn’t transform because of the cloud cover.”
Gabe nodded. “Why else put that detail in there? It has to be night because vampires can’t be out during the day.”
“And werewolves can’t be caught with a clear full moon,” Jo said.
“Bingo,” I said. “But that’s as far as we got. There’s no Moonlight, Texas, so we’re stumped.”
Jo thought for a bit. “Austin has these things called moonlight towers. They’re like giant lamps.”
“Yeah. We saw those when we were doing research,” I said. “But Austin is in the wrong part of the state.”
“How?”
“Distance,” Sam said. “It’s something I noticed as the driver. Each stop has been about the same number of hours apart. And if we draw a line from where we’ve been to where we’re heading, it cuts across north Texas, not south.”
“It all makes sense,” Jo said. She turned back around, and I saw her check the rear-view mirror.
“Hmm,” she said.
I turned to look out the back window, but I couldn’t see anything weird.
“What did you see?” Sam asked.
“Probably nothing.” But Jo kept staring at the mirror.
Then she stopped, and she and Sam exchanged a glance.
Now they were definitely doing the parental “act cool in front of the kids” thing.
Sam quickly changed the subject.
“All that food talk is making me hungry,” she said.
Jo’s face lit up. “I know the perfect spot. It’s a little off the main road, just past Happy. An old hippie kind of place. A little dated, but it is amazing!”
“Amazing how?”
“You’ll see.”
Chapter 26
Moonlight
Fry bread was not something I had ever experienced before.
Now it was all I wanted to eat for the rest of my long and amazing life.
The diner we stopped at was called Jennie’s, and Jennie turned out to be, as she told us, the “cook, waiter and head bottle washer.”
She was also the first person to notice the blue, pink and white horizontal stripes on my leggings.
“Awesome trans flag pattern,” Jennie said as she showed us to our booth.
I stopped walking and broke into a huge smile.
“I have an apron with the same pattern,” she explained.
She also immediately used they/them pronouns when seating us. She took our orders for drinks, winked at me, then turned to Sam. “Do you think they’d like fry bread?”
Sam smiled. “I think they would love that. Zed?”
Jennie turned back to me. “But seriously, would you like some fry bread?”
I looked at Jo. “You were right. This place is amazing.”
When the fry bread came, it was crunchy, soft, chewy—sort of like if you deep-fried a cloud.
We also ordered a tableful of other delectable dishes. Corn tortillas and a green salsa. Squash in a mole sauce. Beans and rice with a tangy zip at the finish.
“A werewolf gourmet would love this place!” I said.
We ate in silence, except for brief exchanges about how wonderful everything was. Jennie, now sporting her trans flag apron, went back and forth between us and the kitchen, reappearing regularly with some tray of veggie delights.
Finally, completely stuffed, I sat back in my chair and took in the restaurant itself.
Jo was right—it looked a little old. Not rundown, but with decor from a different era. There were faded pictures of old cars covering wood-paneled walls. One whole wall was filled with license plates. I quickly spotted plates from Arizona, New York, Ohio, British Columbia. But there were also plates from Alaska, Hawaii and even Ireland and Germany.
Jennie saw me looking around. “My moms founded this place a long time ago,” she explained. “Some of the decorating needs a little updating. But it’s a full-time job just running the place.”
“Did you say ‘moms’?”
She nodded. “Let’s just say the traditional roadhouse wasn’t as . . . uh, welcoming as they wanted. They wanted a safe space for people on the road to come and enjoy a good meal without looking ove
r their shoulders the whole time. So they filled that niche with this place. It was all very chic at the time.”
“I’m not sure license plates were ever chic,” I said with a chuckle. “Cool? Yes.”
“The license plates were little thank-yous that people would leave behind. A few were even mailed to us years later. A lot of bars around here do this, but these were different. That’s why I’ve never taken them down.”
“Different?”
“It was comforting to look at the wall and know that you were not alone. There was a community of people like you, and it was a global community.”
I sat and stared at the wall with a sense of wonder. Every person who had left or sent a plate was someone who had found community here.
Somebody like Taylor writing that book.
“So was one of your moms named Jennie too?” Gabe asked.
“No. My moms were Bernice and Hazel.”
“Sound like hurricanes,” I said.
Jennie snorted. “Pretty accurate, actually. Bernice died when I was in chef school. Hazel made me promise I’d make the place my own if I wanted to keep it going. So after she died, I changed the name from the Moonlight Diner to Jennie’s Diner.”
Gabe spat out some of the cola he was drinking. I sat bolt upright.
“Moonlight?”
“That was the original name. It became a kind of secret that people would pass along about a safe place on the road through these parts. ‘The Moonlight has a varied menu’ was code for ‘You can eat there safely.’ And if someone you weren’t sure about asked, you’d say, ‘The Moonlight is a dump.’ That was a total lie, by the way. Hazel was a certified cordon bleu chef.”
All the pieces were coming together perfectly. This was exactly the sort of place Taylor might have sat to write. This was home to the same community the book embraced. The food was amazing and always had been. Yves Lanois’s kind of restaurant. The postcards in Huzzah were from a General Wolf and said “Come dine with me.”
This was the final place Taylor wanted us to go.
Gabe and I ran over to the license plates.
“Where was Yves from?” Gabe asked.
“Luxembourg,” I called.
I ran my fingers up and down the rows of plates. I must have hit all fifty states and a dozen other countries before Gabe cried out, “FOUND IT!”
I ran over.
There it was—an almost square black metal plate tucked into a spot between an ancient jukebox and the polished wooden bar.
“LUX” was stamped in white letters above the plate’s numbers, which were also in chipped white paint.
If we were right, the final parts of the coordinates were now ours.
Gabe pulled out his notebook and wrote in the final sequence:
33.1284N
107.2528W
Jennie walked up beside us. “That was one of the plates we were mailed.”
“Do you remember who mailed it?”
She smiled. “I was so young when most of these were put up, but this one . . . it was odd. Even Hazel thought it was odd. The plate had come in a plain envelope with no return address. But there was a note inside and a dried flower. The note said something like ‘Thanks for the wonderful meal,’ and it was signed with this French-sounding name.”
“Yves Lanois?”
“Something like that. I was only a young kid then. I just remember that it sounded French.”
“Do you still have the flower?” Gabe asked. “Maybe it was the moonflower!”
Jennie laughed. “No. That was lost a long time ago. The note’s lost too. But that’s the cool thing about license plates—they can last a long time.”
But I knew we didn’t need the note or the flower. The numbers on the plate were the key.
I asked one final question very carefully.
“Has anyone else been here looking for this plate?”
“Maybe someone with big feet?” Gabe added.
Jennie thought for a second.
Gabe and I held our breath.
Finally, she said, “Not since I’ve been here full time. And definitely not recently.”
Gabe and I exhaled.
The historian was either behind us or on the wrong track. Maybe he was headed to South Carolina!
We hugged the heck out of Jennie, then ran back to the booth to tell Sam and Jo the news.
Chapter 27
Truth?
That night, we splurged and rented rooms at a nearby motel recommended by Jennie.
But I didn’t sleep much.
I kept whispering excitedly to Gabe, even though he’d insisted we needed to rest.
How he could even sleep was beyond me.
“I wonder what the book will look like. Do you think Taylor drew pictures? How many more chapters are there?”
“Go to sleep, Zed.”
“Sleep? I can’t believe Sam and Jo wouldn’t let us drive through the night. Sam wouldn’t even plug in the coordinates!”
“Good night.” Gabe put his headphones on.
“Fine,” I said. I reached over and grabbed my herbal tea from my mug warmer.
But I stayed up, whispering to myself, “The door was open, and he was unsure of how to proceed,” over and over. It was another line from Lysander’s chapter.
I felt the same way Lysander must have felt the night before his dinner date with Yves.
I shivered. Tomorrow I would also finally find out what happened in the Battle of Thistlethorn!
Oh! And what happened after Lysander and Yves’s first kiss!
OH! OH! And if Cassandra and Marion ever found each other!
Or—and this must have been Gabe rubbing off on me—whether the plants Lysander and Yves found could heal Marion’s undead wounds.
All the possibilities swirled around in my brain, rising and falling like a grand orchestra of ideas.
Finally, the sun rose. I waited until its rays reached the tops of the trees outside the window before I sprang up to wake everyone.
I wrapped myself in my comforter and pounced on Gabe.
He only stirred, so I pulled his pillow out from under him. A trick I got from my younger sister Lillian, who—I had learned firsthand—was extremely good at waking people up. Dad called her the Human Alarm Clock.
Gabe blinked for a second, then bolted upright, arms raised in the air.
“I’m up!” he said.
Now that he was awake, I could see the excitement in his eyes too.
“Race you to get ready!” I yelled.
He jumped out of his sheets and started to take off his pajamas.
I threw away the comforter with a flourish, revealing my already fully dressed magnificence.
“Aw, that’s unfair!” he said.
“Sorry, Gabe! You should have known I would be prepared. I picked out this outfit before we even left on this trip!” I was wearing a large crewneck sweater with a classic Dracula face on it. My sweats were Memphis print but in Gothic vampirish red, gold and black.
I grabbed one of Jimi’s walkie-talkies from my backpack. I had slipped the other into Sam’s bag the night before and turned it on. Now I turned mine on too and pressed the Talk button.
“GOOD MORNING! LET’S GO FIND THE MONSTER’S CASTLE!!!!”
Sam pounded on the wall, and I knew I’d been successful. Jo was right: the walkie-talkies did come in handy.
I slid mine back into my pack.
“Now to breakfast!”
Gabe and I shot out the door.
Soon, we were back at Jennie’s, enjoying the most amazing hash browns in the world. She’d opened early just for us.
Sam and Jo were sitting together—closely, I noticed—on the other side of the table.
I swallowed a mouthful of perfectly prepped spuds and gave a satisfied smile. “Jennie, you are a culinary genius,” I said.
“Thanks so much! The omelets will be up soon.” Then she was off to the kitchen.
“Any chance we can get the rest to go?”
“Sorry, Zed,” Sam said. “We’re not rushing. We’re already up earlier than any human should be.”
“But we need to move!”
“I thought your amazing brain needed nourishment.”
“That’s a good point.”
“And I need coffee,” Jo said. “I’m like Les—no life in this corpse until at least my second cup.”
Jennie seemed to magically appear with a carafe.
“Fair trade from friends of mine in Costa Rica,” she said.
I didn’t drink coffee, but it smelled amazing.
Then I did a drum roll on the tabletop.
“Sam, where does your GPS say we’re heading?”
She plugged the coordinates into her phone, then stared at it like it was broken.
“That can’t be right.”
“What can’t be?” I asked, straining to see the screen.
“Truth or Consequences?”
“Truth or what?” Gabe said.
She passed her phone across the table.
“The coordinates say we’re heading to someplace called Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. That sounds made up.”
“No, it’s real,” Jo said. “Although there’s not much there. It’s named after an old radio show. Apparently, they ran some nationwide contest back in the 1950s, offering to bring the show to any town that would change its name to Truth or Consequences. Used to be called Hot Springs. My grandparents would sometimes go there for vacation. They actually do have hot springs—and this big festival commemorating the radio program every spring.”
“That is the weirdest bit of trivia I have heard on this trip,” Sam said. “And that’s saying a lot with these two along for the ride.”
“Three,” I said. “Don’t forget Aloysius.” I’d smuggled him into the restaurant and now raised his head above the tabletop.
“I wish I could forget that thing. It gives me the creeps,” Sam said.
“Mission accomplished.” I stroked the jackalope’s fur.
Jennie returned numerous times with more coffee and omelets that melted in the mouth.
Then, finally, we were off.
To get to Truth or Consequences, you actually head off the highway and drive through a couple of wildlife refuges.
The Fabulous Zed Watson! Page 13