Maybe he didn’t like being touched. Or maybe he was just a weird kid. In a swift, martial arts-like motion, he flipped her hand over—not roughly, but with firm intent—and held her wrist—still gently—and tugged her arm to his knee. He pulled off the Sharpie lid with his teeth. He set the tip of the black marker on the soft underside of her forearm.
When she didn’t yank her arm back, he started drawing. In less time than it took to breathe, she had an infinity loop matching his own.
When he’d lifted the pen, she withdrew her arm and rubbed her wrist.
“Why did you do that?”
“I don’t know.” He looked as surprised as she did. “Because you told me to.”
“Just now?”
“No, before. Or . . . later?”
“What do you mean, ‘later’?”
“I’m not sure.”
She tried to summon indignation—it wasn’t right for a guy to reach out and grab a girl or woman. But this had felt more like another tic than a real attempt to subdue her, and besides, his own alarm had preempted hers. He was rattled, and whether or not it made any sense, she wasn’t. Almost as if she’d expected it.
She pulled her arm into her sleeve. “Okay.”
“Sorry.”
“Let’s forget about it.”
“Yeah.”
She really wasn’t the teen-mentoring type.
“Just don’t do that again.”
Ruth opened the journal gently, her fingers barely touching the edges.
The first page was written in German: heavily slanted cursive; ink faded to a light brownish-purple.
“What is it?” Reece asked.
Her reading of German, a grad school requirement, was serviceable but rusty. The first words that jumped out at her referred to ears and eyes, myopia and mild deafness, and beyond that, problems breathing. She’d have to use a dictionary to confirm, but not until she’d had a chance to skim further. The writing was hard to read, penned in a consistent hand, but dense and embellished, with long tails on the letters.
She skimmed five or six pages, turned another page, and sat up straight.
Two capital letters were written at the top of the first page: “ZN,” followed by compact paragraphs of handwriting—in English this time.
With effort, Ruth started to read aloud.
The mind . . . has an uncanny way . . . of saving us from unendurable pain.
Sometime after three in the morning, there is a sound of screaming brakes, and then the two locomotives collide, sending her flying across the narrow train compartment.
Ruth could picture: North Carolina. And the time: 3:20 a.m.
Nightclothes billowing, she seems to float: the pink- and gold-striped wallpaper gleaming behind her, her gown and the wallpaper and the entire railcar glowing as the train topples.
Reece’s breath was loud in Ruth’s ear. “You can’t go any faster?”
“No.” She returned to the script.
One car topples off the tracks, dragging the next in apparent slow motion, resisting gravity, like feathers drifting, falling slowly, light shining between each perfect white barb.
There. Hovering. Luminous. There.
She is lost for a moment in the memory . . .
“What is it?” Reece asked.
“It looks like an account of the train crash, 1901.”
“Annie Oakley’s train crash?”
Ruth hadn’t explained anything to him prior to opening the journal. “How’d you figure that out?”
“Holloway told us you were going to be talking to our class about Annie Oakley. We had to read her Wikipedia page.”
Ruth continued studying the slanted letters, which closely adhered to the ruled lines, also handwritten: a ledger that could have started out bound or as loose sheets, bound later.
She didn’t need to grab her phone or a file or a book off the shelf to make the comparison. She was already sure, because she had seen Annie Oakley’s rounded, inelegant scrawl enough times. The sharpshooter was deprived of an education in her early years, a fact that shamed her. Ruth knew that this dense and formal cursive wasn’t Annie’s.
That was a problem. But only the first.
Ruth looked at the handwriting again: in places it looked more like hand-penned classical music than like handwritten prose. The little a's and e's and o's were so small and tight that they were completely filled in with ink. The d’s looked like quarter notes. No one wrote like that anymore. To Ruth, it seemed elegantly European.
“It looks old,” Reece said.
“Possibly.”
“How would you know for sure? Test the paper? The ink?”
“Both. And you can also study the text itself, looking for individual words or phrasings that give hints about culture and time period. If you have an author in mind, someone who has left behind other indisputable works—”
“You can analyze the handwriting,” he interrupted, excited.
“—but it’s easier than ever to fake handwriting digitally, so you shouldn’t rely on that. And you can use stylometric analysis to search for patterns in punctuation or a preference for particular words, but only if you have a known sample for comparison.”
He started to drum his fingers on his thighs, restlessly awaiting more information. “I don’t really get that word: uncanny.”
“It means strange.”
“Sure it does. Uncanny valley. That’s a term used in robotics. But who says that? Uncanny? Did anyone say that back in Annie Oakley’s time?”
Reece’s phone sat on his thigh, the screen darkened, but she could feel his fingers wanting to go to it again, not used to delaying gratification or tolerating uncertainty. Ruth had stopped reading.
“Head-on train collision. Ouch,” Reece said. “Did she die?”
“I thought you read her Wikipedia entry.”
“Skimmed. Maybe not to the end.”
Ruth fought the urge to scoff. “No, she didn’t die. She lived twenty-five more years. But it was a devastating accident. It led to the Wild West show’s eventual downfall. A hundred and ten horses killed. Injuries to performers. Huge financial loss.” Silently, Ruth reread the page from the top. “Fuck.”
Reece was smiling, amused by her profanity. There was nothing to smile about.
“She,” Ruth said.
“Yes?”