Ruth closed the book, fingering the velvety cover. “It’s not a journal.”
“What do you mean it’s not a journal? It’s old. It’s handwritten. With ink.”
“It’s not her journal. It’s written in the third person. She.”
“Yeah, I know what third person means. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a journal. It could be someone’s journal.”
“But not hers. Annie Oakley didn’t write many letters. She authored only one unfinished autobiography. A more candid, first-person journal would have been a significant find.”
“And this isn’t significant, why?”
“Because,” Ruth said, “it could be someone’s ridiculous novel, handwritten and sandwiched between notes that have no relevance. It could be anything. The sender’s email was [email protected].”
“Ant farm? Kinda weird.”
“The AOL part is weirder. Who on earth still has an AOL address?”
“That’s an excellent question.” Reece’s fingers crawled toward his phone. “First, tell me: What’s AOL?”
Ruth shook her head. Not now.
“Annie’s own words,” Ruth muttered under her breath. These weren’t Annie’s own words. Nieman—if that was even his name—had deceived her.
In graduate school, where digital sleuthing had become all the rage, Ruth had learned about the recent discovery of a lost diary of David Livingstone, the explorer in Africa. Written with berry ink that had faded to illegibility, the old pages were stored away, practically forgotten. Then a scholar from the University of Nebraska—Nebraska!—realized he could use high-tech spectral scanning to render the faded ink visible, revealing a completely unknown side of the explorer.
“People aren’t honest when they’re speaking or writing to others, only when they’re writing for themselves,” Ruth said. “Finding or decoding an authentic diary—something the public was never meant to see—is what a historian dreams about. This isn’t that.”
“It could still be something interesting,” Reece said. “It could be an account—an honest third-person account that Annie Oakley gave to someone, like a reputable newspaper reporter.”
“And that would be less valuable, but still neat.”
“Just ‘neat’?”
“Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s what this is.”
“That’s just your hunch.”
“Yes. But it’s a highly informed hunch.”
“So you’re not going to read the rest?”
“Of course I will. Even as a complete hoax, it might hold some interest. At the very least, I want to know why this guy Nieman sent it to me.”
“Did he ask for anything in return?”
“Only my time—and not much of it. He’s on some sort of deadline.”
“Hmmm.”
Reece’s phone squawked.
“That would be my dad.”
“He must be expecting you home.”
“No, it’s all right.” He looked down at his phone. “A friend stopped by the house. Well, not a friend, really. This guy, a new Rockets member. Hopefully not coming by to quit.” Reece looked up. “Can I use your bathroom? The laptop should be ready to restart soon.”
“Sounds good. Down the hallway on the left.”
In the kitchen ten minutes later, Ruth wrote out a check as Reece closed the laptop lid.
“If it ever takes more than ninety seconds to boot up, just give me a call.” He nodded toward her phone and read his number aloud, watching as she punched in the numbers. “Aren’t you going to give me yours?”
Ruth hesitated. “That isn’t weird?”
“No. How else am I supposed to find out any news you have on the journal?”
“There may never be news.”
“Come on, you promised I’d learn something interesting. Are you a historian or a member of the overprotective parents’ committee?” Reece reached into his jacket pocket for something—oh yes, that nasty cigarette habit. But he didn’t light up yet. “Hey, why did you lie about Mr. Webb?”
“Lie?”
“You told the guard he was your fiancé. But everybody knows Mr. Webb is single. Last year, he joked about not having a date for the prom.”
“I misspoke. We were engaged a long time ago. Anyway, Reece, please don’t mention that or the journal to anyone.”
“I won’t,” he said, holding out his phone to her. It was a deal, evidently. She entered her details and pressed “save.”
5
Reece
The sophomore they’d been calling Kale, like the vegetable, was on the porch and just about to leave when Reece got home. Another few minutes and they would have missed each other completely.
“How’s it going, Kale?”
“Caleb.”
“Sorry,” Reece said. “I didn’t know the nickname bothered you.”
“It was a freshman thing.”
Reece held the door open, but Caleb refused to enter first, following only after Reece passed him into the house and down the hall toward his bedroom. For his part, Reece was still distracted, mulling over his discussion with Ruth. He hadn’t told her everything. He’d tried to muster the nerve, right at the end, but faltered and failed to tell her he recognized her, and not because they’d ever met.
He’d also given her that line about zinc, and she’d bought it. Just from the look of her house with its untended yard and all those boxes inside, along with the dust and the gloom, he could tell Ruth was a fellow depressive.
In the bathroom—first stop for any snoop—he’d opened her dark-wood, apothecary-style cabinet with its twenty or so tiny drawers. He’d found some interesting items, not only single keys and fortune cookie slips, but prescriptions filled and not taken. (Fill date from over a year ago, expiration date passed, and yet the bottle of lemon-yellow pills was three-quarters full. Bad patient.)
Reminder to self, Reece thought. If you ever stop taking your meds, don’t be so obvious about it.
He’d also found three white bar-shaped pills—Xanax—in a separate drawer. They were nestled against the dark, sweet-smelling wood like eggs in a nest. The lemon-yellow pills hadn’t called to him, but these did. The only other thing he’d ever stolen was eyeliner in fifth grade, because he’d wanted to try it out but was too embarrassed to pay the cashier. Just one. Or two. But leaving a lone pill would only call attention to its missing partners. Reece pocketed all three.