Read Secrets Under the Fog free: the opening chapter

Book One, Chapter 1: The New Kid and the Old Clock

The windshield wipers had been arguing with the rain for two hundred miles, and the rain was winning.

Wren Okafor-Hale sat in the passenger seat with her red sneakers on the dashboard and her notebook on her knees, and she counted. Not the wipers. She had given up on the wipers somewhere in New Hampshire, at four thousand and something. She was counting moves.

Tucson. Pittsburgh. Raleigh. Dayton. Milwaukee.

Five moves in six years. This would make six towns, if you counted the one she had been born in, which she did, because it had been the first place she had left.

"You're doing it again," said her mother.

"Doing what?"

"Moving your lips. You're counting something." Dr. Abigail Hale took one hand off the steering wheel to push her reading glasses up onto her head, where they joined a second pair she had forgotten were already there. "What is it this time? Cows? Gas stations? Times your mother has missed an exit?"

"Three," Wren said. "Exits. And I wasn't counting those, but I could have."

"Two and a half. The last one was a ramp with ambitions." Mom leaned forward and squinted through the glass. "Look, Bug. Look. We're coming down the hill."

Wren looked. There was not much to see. The road bent down through dark pine trees, and the trees were wet and black and dripping, and beyond them the whole world had turned the color of dishwater. Fog. It sat on everything like a lid.

Then the trees fell away on the right, and for just a moment the fog tore open, and Wren saw the town.

It was built on a hill that ran straight down into the sea, as if the houses had been sliding toward the water for a hundred years and had only just managed to stop. Steep streets. Gray roofs and white roofs and a few red ones. Chimneys. A harbor shaped like a cupped hand, with boats tucked into it, their masts swaying like metronomes. And at the top of it all, rising out of a square of stone, a tower with a clock face glowing white, the only bright thing in the whole wet gray afternoon.

Then the fog closed again and it was gone.

"Larkspur Cove," Mom said, in the voice she used for museum openings. "Population about three thousand two hundred. Founded in seventeen-something. Fishing, boatbuilding, lobsters, and a very famous clock."

"How famous?"

"Famous here."

"So not famous."

"Locally famous is still famous. Ask any clock." Mom grinned at her sideways. "It's called Old Gal. The town clock. Everyone calls it that. It's on top of Town Hall, and it's been ticking since 1902, and the woman who built the works is the same woman whose factory my museum is in. Isn't that wonderful? It's all connected. A whole town ticking along together."

"Noted," said Wren.

She opened Notebook 7. It was a black and white composition notebook with silver duct tape wrapped around the spine, because the spine had given up in Milwaukee. It was the seventh notebook she had filled, or was filling, and the front half was full of normal things: the license plates of every state they had passed, a list of words Mom had mispronounced, a drawing of a moose that had turned out to be a mailbox.

The back half was different. The back half was secret.

She flipped the notebook over and opened it from the other end, so that Mom, if she looked, would only see a page of upside-down scribbles. At the top of the first back page, in her neatest capitals, it said:

THINGS I WILL NOT MISS.

Under that were the pages. One for every town. Tucson: the heat, the scorpion in the bathtub, Kyle Pruitt. Pittsburgh: the hills, the bridge traffic, the girl who said her hair looked like a mushroom. Raleigh: pollen. Just pollen, but a lot of it. Dayton: the radiator that banged all night, the cafeteria fish sticks, being the new kid. Milwaukee: being the new kid. The wind. Being the new kid again.

It was easier, Wren had found, to leave a place if you had already written down why you would not miss it. That way, when the boxes came out and Mom started saying things like "a wonderful opportunity," Wren could open the back of her notebook and read the list and think, Good. Fine. Goodbye.

She turned to a fresh page and wrote, at the top:

LARKSPUR COVE.

She tapped her pencil against her teeth. Then she wrote:

1. Fog.

There. A start. She closed the notebook before Mom could see and stuck the pencil into her hair, where it lived, wedged between her two big puffs like a yellow antenna.

---

The house was at 9 Periwinkle Lane, and it was blue.

Not a dull blue, either. It was the bright, hopeful blue of a swimming pool in a commercial, small and square and leaning very slightly to the left, with a white door and white window boxes full of nothing and a chimney that went up straight and then bent, as if it had changed its mind halfway. Rain dripped off the gutters in silver ropes.

"Oh," said Mom, delighted. "Oh, look at the chimney."

"It's crooked."

"It has character."

"It has a problem."

"So do we all, Bug, and they rented us one anyway." Mom popped the trunk. "Grab the box that says KITCHEN, SORT OF."

They carried boxes through the rain. Most of their things were coming in a truck on Saturday, but the car was packed to the roof with what Mom called "the essentials," which included a teakettle, four mugs, two sleeping bags, a lamp shaped like a fish, every book Mom was currently reading (eleven), and the box of Wren's notebooks, one through six, which Wren carried herself and did not let anyone else touch.

Inside, the cottage smelled like old wood and salt and somebody else's lemon cleaner. The rooms were small. The ceilings were low. The floors creaked in a way that sounded almost polite, as if the house were clearing its throat. There was a kitchen with a round table, a living room with a stone fireplace, a bathroom with a claw-foot tub, and, up a staircase so steep it was practically a ladder, two bedrooms under the slant of the roof.

Wren counted the stairs. Fourteen. One of them squeaked, the ninth. She noted that for future reference, in case she ever needed to sneak down for a snack.

Her room was the smaller one, at the front. It had a slanted ceiling, a bed frame with no mattress yet, and a closet with a door that would not quite close. And it had a window.

The window was the best thing she had seen all day. It was set deep into the wall, so deep that there was a wide wooden seat built into it, with a faded blue cushion. When Wren knelt on the cushion and pressed her forehead to the cold glass, she could see down over the roofs of the houses below, wet and shining, stepping down the hill one after another like stairs for a giant. She could see the dark gap where the harbor must be. And above all of it, floating in the fog, she could see the clock tower.

From up here it looked close enough to touch. The face glowed white, with black hands. Twenty past six. The fog drifted across it and drifted away again.

"Do you like it?"

Mom was in the doorway with a box in her arms that said BATHROOM STUFF (IMPORTANT) (TOOTHBRUSHES).

Wren considered. "The window's good."

"The window is excellent. I picked this house for the window." Mom set the box down and came and knelt next to her, so that they were both looking out, two foreheads on the glass. "Monday morning I start at the museum. It's in the old Sallow Clockworks, down on the waterfront, a long brick building with big arched windows. Cordelia Sallow made clocks there for forty years. Clocks and music boxes and a carousel and I don't know what else. She was a genius, Bug. A real one. And now her factory's a museum, and the museum needs a director, and that's me."

"For how long?"

Mom was quiet for a second. The rain ticked on the glass.

"For as long as it works out," she said finally, which was what she always said.

Wren nodded. She did not say anything else, because there was nothing to say that they had not both already said in Dayton and in Milwaukee. Mom's job was history. History jobs were hard to find. When you found one, you went. Wren understood. She did understand. She just kept a list.

"I'm going to make tea," said Mom, standing up with a crackle of knees. "And then we are going to eat cold pizza on the floor like pioneers. Pioneers of pizza. It'll be historic."

"That's not even a pun."

"It's a historical pun. They're subtler." Mom paused in the doorway. "Your dad called while you were in the bathroom at that gas station. He says he'll call Sunday, same as always. He's saving you the crossword."

Something warm and complicated moved in Wren's chest. "Did he say which one?"

"The big one. He said there's a clue about a lighthouse and he refuses to solve it without you."

"Okay," Wren said, and kept her face very still until Mom had gone downstairs.

Her father, Tobi Okafor, was a sound engineer in Chicago. He could tell you what a room was made of just by clapping his hands in it. He and Mom had divorced when Wren was six, without any yelling, the way you might close a book you had both enjoyed and knew had ended. Every Sunday evening, wherever Wren was, he called, and they did the big crossword together over the phone, him reading clues in his deep slow voice and her writing in the answers. It was the one thing that had never moved.

Chicago was a long way from here. Wren had looked at the map. She had measured it with her fingers. Milwaukee had been ninety minutes from Chicago. Larkspur Cove was not ninety minutes from anywhere.

She did not write that down. Some things you did not even put in the back of the notebook.

---

They ate cold pizza on the living room floor, sitting on their sleeping bags. Mom read aloud from a pamphlet she had picked up at the gas station called Coastal Treasures of the North Atlantic, which had a whole paragraph about the town.

"'Larkspur Cove,'" Mom read, "'is known for its picturesque harbor, its historic waterfront Commons, and its beloved town clock, whose deep bronze bell can be heard across the bay. Local legend holds that the clock's builder, the eccentric clockmaker Cordelia Sallow, hid a great treasure somewhere in the town before her death in 1951, and generations of treasure hunters have searched for it in vain.'" Mom lowered the pamphlet. "Huh."

"Treasure?" said Wren.

"Legend," said Mom. "Every town with a clock has a legend. It's practically a law." But she looked at the pamphlet a moment longer than she needed to, and Wren saw her historian's eyebrows go up, the way they did when a document was more interesting than it had any right to be. "'In vain,'" Mom murmured. "That's a lovely phrase. Nobody says 'in vain' anymore."

"Because nobody looks for treasure anymore."

"Bug. Everybody looks for treasure. They just call it something else." Mom folded the pamphlet into her pocket and yawned enormously. "Bed. Well. Floor. Sleeping bags on the floor, and tomorrow you can explore, and on Saturday the truck brings our real beds and we will be civilized again."

At nine o'clock, as Mom was rinsing the mugs, the clock struck.

It was much louder than Wren had expected. The bell was not a ding. It was a vast round BONG that seemed to come from the sky itself, and it rolled down the hill and through the walls and into the floor, and Wren felt it in her teeth. She counted without meaning to. One. Two. Three. Each strike hung in the air, humming, and faded slowly, and just as it faded, the next one came. Nine.

Then silence, and rain.

"Well," said Mom. "That's not a clock you can ignore."

"Is it going to do that every hour?"

"Every hour, on the hour. People here say they stop hearing it after a while." Mom dried her hands. "Like the ocean."

Wren did not think she would stop hearing it. She thought she might be the kind of person who heard it forever.

She carried her sleeping bag upstairs to her empty room, because she wanted to sleep by the window. She told Mom she would be asleep in five minutes. Then she lay on the floor under the window seat for a long time with her eyes open, listening to the house.

Ten o'clock. The bell rolled down the hill. Ten.

The rain stopped sometime after that. The fog did not. Wren could hear the harbor now, little sounds she could not name: a creak, a slap of water, a far-off clank like a chain. Once, very faint, a dog barked, down by the water. A ship's horn sounded, low and lonely, and did not sound again.

Eleven. She counted that one too.

She thought about Monday, when Mom would start her new job. She thought about Tuesday, when she would start school, which in Larkspur Cove apparently began after Labor Day, so she had a few days of nothing before she had to stand at the front of yet another classroom and say her name while thirty strangers looked at her shoes. She thought about the list in the back of her notebook. Being the new kid. She had written it under Dayton and under Milwaukee. She would probably write it under Larkspur Cove too, eventually. It was only fair.

She did not mean to fall asleep, and she did not.

At some point she got up and climbed onto the window seat, with her sleeping bag around her shoulders like a cape, and her notebook in her lap. The glass was fogged on the inside from her breath, and she wiped a circle in it with her sleeve.

The town had gone dark. Only a few porch lights were left, blurry gold smudges in the gray. The harbor was gone completely, swallowed. But the clock tower was still there, its white face lit from inside, floating above the fog like a moon on a stick. The hands were almost together. One minute to midnight. Less.

Wren leaned her forehead on the cold glass and waited.

The bell started at midnight, the way bells do, and Wren counted without meaning to.

One.

The window seat was cold under her knees.

Two. Three.

Somewhere below, down by the harbor, a dog began to howl. It was a long, sorrowful howl, rising and wobbling and falling, and it came exactly with each strike, as if every strike hurt its feelings.

Four. Five. Six.

Wren found herself smiling a little. A dog that sang along with a clock. She thought she might write that down, in the front of the notebook, where the interesting things went.

Seven. Eight.

Fog had swallowed the harbor, but the clock tower floated above it, glowing.

Nine. Ten. Eleven.

The dog howled. Wren's breath fogged the glass, and she wiped it again.

Twelve.

She reached for her notebook. She pulled the pencil out of her hair and turned to the back, to the new page that said LARKSPUR COVE, with fog under it all alone. She was going to write noisy clock. It was a perfectly good thing not to miss. She had the pencil on the paper, the N already started.

Then the bell rang again.

Wren froze with the pencil in the air.

The sound rolled down the hill exactly like the others, huge and round and humming, and it went through the glass and into her forehead and into her teeth, and it did not care at all that it was not supposed to be there.

Thirteen.

Down by the harbor, the dog stopped howling, as though it had lost count too.

Wren sat very still. She listened to the hum fade out of the air. She waited for a fourteenth, or for someone to shout, or for a light to come on in one of the dark houses below, or for anything at all that would explain it.

Nothing came. Just the slap of water, and the creak of the house, and the fog.

She looked at the half-written N on the page. Then, slowly, she rubbed it out with the eraser end. A clock that struck thirteen was not a thing you could leave. It was a thing you had to find out about.

She turned the notebook over to the front, to a clean page among the license plates and the moose that was a mailbox, and she wrote, in small careful letters:

Thursday, Sept. 3. Midnight. Town clock (Old Gal) struck 13. Counted twice to be sure (counted once, but carefully). Dog by the harbor howled 12 times, then stopped. Why?

She underlined Why? twice.

Out in the fog, the clock face glowed, its two hands just beginning to separate, as if nothing had happened at all.

The sample ends here.