To tell you the truth, I was feeling downright woebegone. As in, stuck in the doldrums without a map, Ethan Wate.
W. O. E. B. E. G. O. N. E.
Nine across.
That’s when it came to me. Not so much an idea as a memory—of Amma sitting at our kitchen table, all hunched over her crossword puzzles with a bowl of Red Hots and a pile of extra-sharp #2 pencils. Those puzzles were how she kept things right, figured things out.
In that moment it all came together. The way I saw an opening on the basketball court or figured out the plot at the beginning of a movie.
I knew what I had to do, and I knew where I had to go. It was going to require a little more than scooping out a cake or pushing around a button, but not much more.
More like a few strokes of a pencil.
It was time I paid a visit to the office of The Stars and Stripes, the best and only newspaper in Gatlin County.
I had a crossword puzzle to write.
There wasn’t a single grain of salt lining any window at The Stars and Stripes office, any more than there was a single grain of truth in the paper itself. There were, however, swamp coolers in every window. More swamp coolers than I had ever seen in one building. They were all that remained of a summer so hot that the whole town had almost dried up and blown away, like dead leaves on a magnolia tree.
Still, no charms, no salt, no Bindings or Casts or even a cat. I slipped in as easy as the heat had. A guy could get used to this kind of access.
Inside the office, there wasn’t much more than a few plastic plants, a reenactment calendar that hung crookedly on the wall, and a high linoleum counter. That’s where you stood with your ten dollars when you wanted to put an ad in the paper to hawk your piano lessons or new puppies or the old plaid couch that had been sitting in your basement since 1972.
That was about it until you got behind the counter, where three little desks stood in a row. They were covered with papers—exactly the papers I was looking for. This was what The Stars and Stripes looked like before it became an actual newspaper—when it was still something closer to the town gossip.
“What are you doing in here, Ethan?”
I turned around, startled, my hands up at my sides as if I’d just been busted for breaking and entering—which, in a way, I had.
“Mom?”
She was standing behind me in the empty office, on the other side of the counter.
“Nothing.” It was all I could say. I shouldn’t have been surprised. She knew how to cross. After all, she was the one who’d helped me find my way back to the Mortal realm.
Still, I hadn’t expected to find her here.
“You’re not doing ‘nothing,’ unless you’ve decided to become a journalist and report on life from the Great Beyond. Which, considering how many times I tried to get you to join the staff of The Jackson Stonewaller, doesn’t seem likely.”
Yeah, okay. I had never wanted to eat my lunch in there with the school newspaper staff. Not when I could be in the lunchroom with Link and the guys from the basketball team. The things I thought were important back then seemed so stupid now.
“No, ma’am.”
“Ethan, please. Why are you here?”
“I guess I could ask you the same question.” My mom shot me a look. “I’m not looking for a job at the paper. I just want to help out on one little section.”
“That’s not a good idea.” She spread her hands on the counter in front of me.
“Why not? You were the one sending me all those Shadowing Songs. It’s practically the same thing. This is just a little more—direct.”
“What are you planning to do? Write Lena a want ad and publish it in the paper? ‘Wanted, one Caster girlfriend. Preferably named Lena Duchannes’?”
I shrugged. “That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but it could work.”
“You can’t. You can barely pick up a pencil in this realm. You don’t have physics working on your behalf as a Sheer. Around here, picking up a feather is harder than dragging a two-by-four down the street with your pinkie.”
“Can you do it?”