There was a somber silence.
“If the Tripps did have a piece of the time touch, I’m sure they kept it on them at all times, and it likely broke in the rubble of the plane accident,” sniffed Marlene. She clanked her empty mug on the counter. “So for all we know, the piece of time is out there, floating free again. And we know there are other pieces of the time touch out there, too. We’ll keep looking. We won’t give up.” Then she looked at her backpack and sighed. “Although, I won’t lie, sometimes I feel like giving up.”
“What’s meant to be will be,” replied Claudia, folding her ancient hands together. “I’ve always said if you aren’t meant to own something, it won’t come to you. Same with the time touch. Something that magical must have a mind of its own, almost.” She smiled at her friends. “Besides, what adventures we’ve had on the hunt, eh?”
The others murmured in agreement. At that point, the newcomer spoke up and quietly asked what the object the Tripps had been seen carrying looked like.
“It was a glass ball,” answered the tipsy traveler. “A snow globe, wasn’t it?”
To the dubious credit of the notorious Barons, each son had possessed a sharp memory, which was necessary for keeping track of all their blackmailing and legal loopholes. The last Baron, Robert Baron IV, used this ability to his advantage as he tracked down the elusive snow globe.
By the time he’d run into the trio of travelers, he’d been painstakingly following clues for almost thirty years. He’d trailed people, asked questions, pursued leads, snuffed out dead ends. In an old antique shop, he’d devoured the tale of an oddly dressed boy with “glowing shoes” that was chronicled in a butcher’s diary from the 1930s. In a recently published journal of unexplained phenomena, he’d come across a quote from an elderly fellow claiming to have witnessed a lad vanish in front of a Midtown pretzel cart sometime in the 1960s. Robert Baron IV latched on to these leads like a tick on to thick hair. He adopted a new moniker as he followed the trail: M for Mysterious—partly to conceal his identity, partly because it suited the nature of his secretive research, and partly because he lacked the imagination to come up with anything better.
When he’d found the Biscuit Basket, he almost laughed out loud. How ironic that the world’s most valuable possession lay inside that shack of a place.
His first attempt at obtaining the item hadn’t worked. He’d meant to bribe the wretched child for the snow globe, but the kid was stubborn. Horrible creatures, children were—he never understood why people wanted them. Maybe that was why his own father had never given him the time of day.
His second attempt hadn’t worked either. Theft was harder than people made it out to be, especially when one must navigate a rickety bakery surrounded by dozens of customers.
So he had one option left. He would do what any self-respecting Baron would do, and what every self-respecting Baron had done to get what he wanted: he would put everything on the line. He needed that snow globe, no matter the cost.
The baker was still on high alert, he knew. He needed to lie low and wait. Then, when the right time came, he would strike like a serpent.
CHAPTER NINETEENTHE FUTURE FRANCINE
On Friday evening after dinner, Adam checked the snow globe again for what seemed like the millionth time (but was actually the fifty-eighth) since his last visit to Candlewick.
Adam was prepared this time. He had gone to the library and scanned copies of the newspaper articles about the burned-down factory. He’d arranged the printouts neatly in a folder on his desk.
He’d also printed an article he found of his parents’ plane accident.
That evening, when he opened his dresser drawer and peered hopefully inside, he was finally rewarded. Earlier that day, the snow globe had been blank. Now, a snowy cityscape of New York stood inside the glass. Adam’s heart plummeted.
It’s peculiar how sometimes the one thing we want badly makes us second-guess it once it’s finally within our reach. Adam stared at the tiny skyscrapers. Fear rose in his stomach.
It’s time, he decided. For whatever’s next.
Adam grabbed his files and put them in his backpack. He glanced at the music box on his bed and grabbed the device too, just in case he was to meet Jack again. He took a deep breath, then shook the snow globe.
The next moment, he found himself in the middle of Central Park. The ground was covered with a sheet of snow; the bare tree branches along the trails crackled with brittle ice. Above him, the sky was an endless white.
Adam looked around. He didn’t recognize anybody, nor did he know where to go. He read a sign nearby that said he was near Belvedere Castle, the miniature stone fortress that overlooked the surrounding treetops. As a biting wind picked up, Adam instinctively clutched the snow globe tighter and headed down the path toward the castle.
Belvedere Castle had been his father and Uncle Henry’s favorite spot as children. Uncle Henry once recounted how the two brothers used to race up its stone steps and reenact plays, wars, and other games, bound only by the limits of their imaginations. They’d pretend to be kings of a fairy-tale land, and make believe the sun was a pot of gold, the clouds silver, and the park their kingdom.
“Those were the special days,” Uncle Henry had told Adam. “Your father and I, we didn’t have a care in the world. We would be late coming home for dinner because we’d lose track of time. Always felt as if time stopped
