“What in the—?” Adelie couldn’t finish.
Inside the cage before her, a fluffy, white rabbit wearing a red and blue-striped waistcoat sat and wiggled its nose. Its long ears went straight back on alert, and it stared at her with wary, red eyes.
“No way,” Adelie said to herself, pushing to her feet and staring at the transformation. Had she made that happen? She glanced around just to be sure.
“Look,” someone shouted. “Look at that!”
“She did it. That girl—see that lady? She found him.”
“She found the white rabbit!”
Noise exploded. Applause signaled behind her. People gathered faster than kids to an ice cream truck. The handsome, strange man appeared at her side, clapping along with everyone else. The expression on his face was different though. Intuitive. Almost proud, though she wasn’t sure how that could be.
She lifted her hands in surrender and attempted to step back, losing her footing against the stool she’d been sitting on. “I—I didn’t know it would do that; I swear.”
“Something always happens here when those words are spoken,” the man said, sidling close to her and leaning in to be heard over the crowd, which had doubled in size in minutes. “But not many guests know it. I’ve kept it a secret on purpose.”
“You—you kept it secret?”
“Congratulations,” he said, flashing a knee-knocking smile at her. “You’ve won the scavenger hunt.”
The crowd clustered around her. People shouted and whooped exclamations of surprise and amazement.
Adelie’s mouth gaped. Her pulse pounded as the roaring noise around her increased to a deafening din. The good-looking man removed a phone from his pocket and spoke into it with one finger in his left ear, waving over what appeared to be a news crew.
The ground turned to glue. Adelie glanced around in desperation. Where was Suzie? Had she made it out of the fun house? She was the one who wanted to find the rabbit, not Adelie. What was she supposed to do now?
“You look a little shocked,” the man said, putting his arm around her and guiding her away from the tea party table and to the open path between the park’s street and the March Hare’s house. “You’ve just won my contest’s grand prize.”
He handed a letter to her, one in the same midnight-blue cardstock with the now-familiar same gold writing swirling across it. Another quote from the book probably, but Adelie couldn’t bring herself to concentrate enough to read it.
“You—your contest?” She took the folded letter he offered and held it in her hand.
“Sure,” he said. “This is my park. And you’ve just won my challenge. You’ve just won fifty-thousand dollars.”
Adelie couldn’t think. She couldn’t believe it. She’d found the rabbit. And the man who’d been sitting at the table with her? Had been Maddox Hatter.
CHAPTER FIVE
Adelie’s brain had turned to cotton. Cameras flashed. Phones took the place of faces. The rabbit skittered in its cage, and someone pronouncing herself as Wendy Hendricks kept ramming a microphone in Adelie’s face and asking for her name.
“A-Adelie,” she managed.
“Got a last name, Adelie?” Wendy asked, tipping the mic to her. A man in a blue baseball cap appeared, cradling a large, black video camera labeled WV3 on his shoulder and directing it right at her. Was she being recorded?
“Carroll.”
Crowds filtered out from the March Hare’s house, squeezing in as tightly around the area as they could. Maddox waved to them in greeting as though completely thrilled that even more people were attempting to squish into a space that was already packed. Someone else—a woman—barked an announcement over the crowd, shouting her name over and over.
“Adelie Carroll is the winner. Adelie! Adelie Carroll!”
Some clapped. Some folded their arms in disgust. Some shot glares so piercing they might as well have been daggers. Suzie mustered through the crowd, pushing past everyone with a fervent declaration.
“Excuse me, that’s my sister!”
Relief stole over Adelie like a downpour. Suddenly, things were a little easier with her sister there. Suzie gripped her hands and bounced up and down, squealing with delight. She kept repeating the same words over and over before moving on to the next.
“You? You. Did it. You did it!”
Adelie tucked a hair behind her ear. Suzie’s excitement was doing the job, trickling in and injecting her with its own dose of disbelief. This morning, she’d been despondent, frustrated and borderline hopeless. She never in her wildest dreams could have imagined this.
Fifty-thousand dollars for finding a bunny in a cage?
“All this for a scavenger hunt?” she mused, but the crowd around her was so deafening, she could barely hear herself.
“It is hard to believe,” Wendy went on, signaling to quiet the crowd. “When you came here this morning, did you ever think you’d actually win such a grandiose prize?”
“No,” Adelie said, warming up to the newscaster. A smile crept onto her cheeks. “I never thought I would.”
“Mr. Hatter,” Wendy turned to Maddox. Adelie had forgotten he was standing beside her. “Did the challenge take as long as you anticipated?”
“Not at all,” he said. “I thought it would be something swift. The clues weren’t all that challenging, at least not enough to be impossible.” He smiled. “I knew the table would be the trick.”
“So, tell me, Adelie,” Wendy said. “How exactly did you get the rabbit to appear?”
Adelie tried to think back to what had happened. She’d said the riddle aloud; it had served as a verbal password, triggering a change she never expected. Who knew the table would respond to a code like that? It made her wonder what Mr. Hatter usually kept in there.
“I—I just spoke the riddle to the table,” she said.
Wendy’s forehead indicated her confusion.
Mr. Hatter stepped in. “It’s always been something, one of those hidden tricks I never informed people about. A few have discovered it here and there, but anyone who sits and says those exact words, where the trigger can catch them, unlocks the table.”
Wendy’s mouth gaped open. She appeared completely spellbound by his words. Or maybe it was just standing close to someone who looked like he did. His eyes had the effect of a magnet.
“Incredible.” She shook herself before turning back to Adelie. “Tell me, Ms. Carroll. What are you going to do with your winnings?”
Adelie hesitated. She wasn’t sure where this interview would be broadcasted, and she wasn’t about to tell the entire world her problems or about the foreclosure with her house.
“I’ll figure something out,” she hedged with a smile. At this point, she could no longer manage to clear it from her cheeks, and if she was being honest, she didn’t want to. Fifty-thousand dollars. She’d won fifty-thousand dollars.
Wendy turned to the cameraman to give her take on the report, and Mr. Hatter tilted in. “First interview?”
Adelie stared around the park in wonder as if seeing it for the first time. The lightness she’d longed to feel was there now, giving her the impression she was floating. Exhilaration fluttered through her, spiking her adrenaline in a way she hadn’t felt in a long time.