This Isn't What It Looks Like (30 page)

As the kids listened in disbelief, the secretary somehow persuaded their principal to let them have twenty-four hours to find
the necklace. After that, the principal would call the police about the necklace—and their parents about expelling them.

*     *     *

Minutes later, Opal ushered them into the stables. The still-shell-shocked Yo-Yoji flung himself down on a bale of hay.

“Why are you helping us?” asked Cass.

“Just doing my job,” said Opal with the hint of a smile. “Aren’t secretaries supposed to be helpful?”

“I was wrong about you,” said Max-Ernest. “I thought, well, I didn’t trust you.”

Opal laughed, incredulous. “Oh really? After I gave you that mirror?
And
the monocle?”

“You
gave
them to me?”

“Well, left them for you. Same difference. You didn’t really think I would be so careless with my things, did you?”

“Oh, no, I guess not,” said Max-Ernest, turning red because he had assumed exactly that.

Opal grinned. “And what about the
KICK ME
note? A nice touch, I thought.”

“What
KICK ME
note?” asked Yo-Yoji.

“I
knew
you wrote that!” said Max-Ernest, ignoring Yo-Yoji. (For some reason he was still reluctant to admit he’d walked around with
a sign on his back that said
KICK ME
.)

“Well, I didn’t write the message on the other side,” Opal corrected. “That was from Pietro.”

Cass stared at him. “You know Pietro?”

Chuckling, the secretary sat down on a stool and pulled off her rather large silver platform shoes. “You guys really don’t
know who I am, do you?”

“You mean you’re not Opal… like the rock?” asked Max-Ernest.

“Nope, not any kind of opal.” She took off her trademark opal ring and tossed it over her shoulder.

“Don’t worry, it was plastic,” she said, seeing the shocked expressions around her.

She peeled away each of her absurdly long fingernails in rapid succession, revealing the bare, unpainted, and very short nails
underneath. Then she reached up, gripped her blond hair in her hand, and yanked off what turned out to be a very big wig.
Underneath, her hair was brown and short-cropped.

“Here—why don’t you keep this?” she said, tossing the wig in the direction of Max-Ernest. “You never know when you’re going
to need a quick disguise.”

Finally, the secretary started wiping makeup off her face with a tissue. The shadow of a beard began to show.

Cass smiled for perhaps the first time all day. “Owen!”

“No kidding. Took you long enough,” said the
Terces Society’s resident spy and master of disguise, now speaking in a deeper voice without any trace of a New York accent.
“Pietro had me visit your school to find out what I could from Mrs. Johnson. We knew the Midnight Sun was watching her, but
we thought it was about the Tuning Fork. We didn’t think it was about a magnetic rock…. Well, don’t just stand there, help
me. My other stuff’s over there—” He pointed to a small army duffel on the floor that looked about as different from Opal’s
patent leather purse as a bag possibly could.

Cass handed it to him and he dumped the contents unceremoniously on the ground: jeans, T-shirt, tennis shoes, and a pair of
sunglasses.

A moment later, Owen came out of a horse’s stall dressed as himself—something the kids had seen only once or twice before.
(Although no longer a working actor, he was almost always dressed as someone else, whether that was a cowboy in a ten-gallon
hat or a secretary in a ten-gallon wig.)

“Speaking of disguises, you guys have any guesses about who that spook was in the armor? The Unknown Knight? Anybody get a
look at his face?”

They all shook their heads.

“Even you, Yo-Yoji? You were pretty close,” Owen observed.

“I couldn’t even see the dude’s eyes. Just, like, shadow. His mask was pretty big.”

“It wasn’t ’cause of the mask,” said Cass, finally fessing up to what she’d been fearing. “It was ’cause he’s invisible.”

Haltingly, she told them about her encounter with Lord Pharaoh—and about how she had been forced to give him the last remaining
bit of Time Travel Chocolate. “I didn’t think it would be enough to work, but it must have been,” she said, stricken. “When
I heard about Pietro’s warning, I started to worry. Now I’m sure of it.”

“How can you be
sure
of it?” asked Max-Ernest. “I mean, the average person would consider the whole story pretty unlikely.”

“I just am. Did you see the way he looked at me? It was like we were communicating or something. Plus, Ms. Mauvais said her
master has returned. Who else would that be?”

“From what I hear from Pietro, I think Cass is probably right,” said Owen.

“I knew there was something not normal about that guy!” said Yo-Yoji.

“I’m sorry. It’s all my fault,” said Cass, miserable. “I should never have eaten the chocolate. Now, instead of me having
the lodestone, Lord Pharaoh does!”

“Don’t blame yourself. You did what you had to do,” said Owen, not exactly contradicting her. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.
In the meantime, you guys try to find out which way Lord Pharaoh went. But do not, I repeat, DO NOT go after him, do you hear
me?”

“Why not?” asked Yo-Yoji. “He was going after me.”

“Yeah, that’s my point. I’m the guy who’s always ready to throw you into the deep end, so if I’m telling you to stay away,
there’s gotta be a good reason, right?”

“You know, I
have
met Lord Pharaoh before,” Cass couldn’t help saying.

“Was he a ghost at the time? Whose powers we don’t even know? If he’s out of his armor now, he could be anywhere and we wouldn’t
see him. He could be in this very room.”

Cass glanced around through the monocle. “He’s not.”

“Well, there’s some good news at least!” Throwing his rucksack over his shoulder, Owen walked out the door.

“How do we figure out where Lord Pharaoh went if we don’t go after him?” asked Yo-Yoji after Owen had disappeared. “Just follow
his tracks out of here, then stop?”

“I doubt we’ll even get that far. He’s a ghost. For all we know, his horse is a ghost, too, and it won’t leave any tracks,”
said Max-Ernest. “Hey, what are you doing here, Ben?”

At some point while they were talking, Benjamin had walked in. He tugged on Max-Ernest’s sleeve and started mumbling.

“He says he has an idea where we could look for Lord Pharaoh,” Max-Ernest translated.

“How do you know about Lord Pharaoh?” asked Cass angrily. “Have you been eavesdropping?”

“He’s still spying for them, I knew it!” said Yo-Yoji.

Benjamin shook his head over and over.

Max-Ernest translated again. “He says he just wants to help. He feels terrible about what he did and wants to make it up to
us.”

“OK, so how’re you helping, Ben?” demanded Cass.

“He says the camera obscura is located on the highest point in the area. He stayed there after the rest of the school left
and noticed you can see all of Ren-Faire and even outside of it. Maybe we’ll be able to see Lord Pharaoh from there…. Actually,
not a bad idea, Ben.”

A faint smile lit Benjamin’s face.

M
inus the crowd of students, the camera obscura had a calmer, more contemplative quality—like a museum or a library.

The screen did indeed offer a sweeping, panoramic view of the Renaissance Faire but, alas, only of one side of the faire.

“Lord Pharaoh could be riding past us right now, but we can’t see him because this hole is pointed in the wrong direction,”
Max-Ernest complained.

“Maybe we should get out of here, start asking around.
Somebody
must have seen which way he went,” said Yo-Yoji. “What do you say, Cass?”

“Just a sec,” said Cass, taking out the Double Monocle. “I think I just saw something.”

At first, when she looked at the image on the wall through the monocle, not much looked different. There were no signs of
Lord Pharaoh that she could see, on horseback or off, in armor or out of it. But there was one jester hat that couldn’t help
grabbing her attention—despite her best efforts to ignore all the jester hats at the faire. The point wasn’t that it looked
so much like
the
Jester’s hat (although it did). The point wasn’t even that the man wearing the hat looked so much like the Jester (although
he did). The point was that this particular hat, as well as the man wearing it, was only visible when she looked through
the monocle. Three times she removed the monocle to check, and three times the man disappeared from her sight. And yet when
she raised the monocle to her eye, he looked just as clear and present as anybody else who crossed her path.

Her ears flushed with excitement. It was the Jester.
Her
Jester. In
her
world. Just… upside down.

As above, so below
, she thought, remembering the upside-down jester in her last tarot card reading.

The Seer had told her to follow the Jester. Is this what she meant? Or was Cass just seeing things? Maybe the Jester isn’t
really there at all, she thought, and my head is re-creating him from memory. Then again, her entire journey into the past
had—in a sense—been in her head. It was all so confusing!

The sound of a cell phone ringing brought Cass’s attention back into the room.

Max-Ernest took his phone out of his pocket and looked at the number, befuddlement on his face. “Who do you think it is?”
he asked his friends. “The only people that ever call me are you guys. Unless it’s about my brother…?”

Nervous, he clicked on.

“Hi, Max-Ernest, it’s Daniel.”

“Who?”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then, through gritted teeth,
“Daniel-not-Danielle.”

“Oh! Uh, hi.”

Daniel-not-Danielle spoke in a rush.
“I didn’t know who else to call. I didn’t want to call the principal or anybody—just in case, well, Glob said he ditched the
camera obscura and I didn’t want to get him into more trouble.”

“You’re calling ’cause he ditched?”

“No, no, it’s ’cause of what he wrote on his blog.”

“I thought you were at that comic book thing,” said Max-Ernest, confused.

“I was. I got home early and went online.”

Daniel-not-Danielle proceeded to tell Max-Ernest all about Glob’s blog posts (omitting the part where Glob makes fun of Daniel-not-Danielle
as well as the part where he complains about Max-Ernest), right up to the part where Glob sees what looks like a ghost drinking
from a cup.

Max-Ernest put his hand over the phone and whispered to the others: “Glob saw Lord Pharaoh—I think the Midnight Sun might
have him!”

Into the phone, he asked: “Where’s the last place he said he was?”

Then, to the others: “He crossed some dry river-bed and he’s supposedly hiding in a cave now. Unless
they got him… There’s no riverbed around here, is there?”

While Max-Ernest was speaking, Cass was watching the Jester cross just such a riverbed. In the past, she might have found
the coincidence remarkable, but she was getting very used to seeing the story-lines of her life overlap and converge.

“I know where it is—I think I know where he went,” she said, not mentioning the Jester. She was reluctant to tell her friends
about him, still fearing what would happen if they knew about her visions.

“
If you find him, do me a favor
,” said Daniel-not-Danielle.
“Tell him he shouldn’t call himself ‘the Globster’—it’s embarrassing.”

“I think that’s supposed to be a pun,” said Max-Ernest helpfully. “You know,
lobster/Globster
.”

By the time Max-Ernest got off the phone, his friends were already out the door.

“Are you sure this is where to go?” asked Max-Ernest about ten minutes later. “We’re getting kind of far away from Ren-Faire.”

Cass didn’t answer, just kept leading them farther into the woods. Holding the monocle up to her eye, she looked like a particularly
determined naturalist chasing after a rare species of butterfly.

Max-Ernest and Yo-Yoji were a bit mystified that Cass was so certain about the direction they were heading, but they weren’t
about to let her continue on her own, not with her having woken up so recently from a coma, not with the Midnight Sun and
the ghost of Lord Pharaoh lurking about.

“Is anybody else hungry?” asked Yo-Yoji.

“I am,” said Max-Ernest. “And I’m all out of chocolate!”

Not stopping, Cass felt around in a side pocket of her backpack, pulled out a plastic baggie full of her trademark super-chip
trail mix, and tossed it over her shoulder.

Her friends greedily ransacked the baggie, Max-Ernest extracting as many of the chocolate chips as he could. (Luckily, it
was not a hot day and the chocolate chips hadn’t melted yet.)

“Hey, I think that might be the boulder Glob hid under,” said Max-Ernest. “He said it was shaped like a hamburger.”

Yo-Yoji called out to Cass, who was getting farther and farther ahead. “Wait up, Cass! We found the boulder!”

“You guys check it out, I’ll meet you back there!”