His finger moves across line after blurry line of grey handwriting, all the way to the top. And there it is.
My dearest Issy,
“Issy? Who’s that?” I look up from the letter. I can’t ignore the rising feeling of excitement buzzing along my fingers, itching its way into my hands.
“I don’t know. I’m hoping the answer’s somewhere in here.” He waves at the room.
“That’s a lot of somewhere to go through.” I peer at the letter. “I can’t even read most of it, can you?”
“Not much.” He squints at it, wrinkling his nose as he tries to read the faded letters. “Something about the weather…about a cake, maybe?” His lips move silently as he pieces together fragments of words, fractions of sentences, and then: “Albie.”
“Albie?”
“There’s something here.” He taps a finger on a line right at the bottom of the page, directly above the tear. “I’m sure that’s an A – you see it?
I don’t. Even when I squint.
“Look.” He holds his index finger above the page like a pen. His hands are perfectly long and slender – except for the way this one finger is crooked, the tip at a distinct angle to the rest of it. It’s so out of line that I find myself staring, and, of course, he notices.
“What?” But he knows, instinctively curling his hand into a ball.
“What happened to your finger?”
“Nothing. It got broken.” He clears his throat uncomfortably, his eyes darting from the table to the door and back again.
“Ah.” I nod. “It just looks like my brother’s, that’s all.”
He stares at me blankly.
“My brother, Charlie. He’s a gardener. His finger does that exact same thing, from where he broke it moving some rocks a couple of years ago. One fell and trapped his hand. You weren’t moving rocks, were you?” The words come out like a landslide.
Slow down, Flora.
Be normal.
“I wasn’t.” Hal shakes his head…but he uncurls his hand.
“Figures. Because why would you be landscaping, right?”
You need to stop now.
I gulp down the urge to keep talking, to let Manic Flora run her mouth – my mouth – and I swallow all the words piling up on my tongue. The silence between us stretches so thin I can see straight through it…and then, finally, he presses his hand against the page again, tracing the shapes of the letters he thinks he sees.
“Here. A…L…B…I…E.”
It all looks like browny-grey smudges to me, but then he sighs and holds out his hand, nodding towards my own where it rests on the table.
“Can I?”
“Umm…?”
And then – slowly, as though he’s reaching for a wild animal, something that might bite – he places his hand over mine, lifting it up and straightening my index finger. At first, I nearly pull away, but the gentleness of his touch and the warmth of his fingers make something catch in my stomach as together we trace the loops of the letters.
“A…L…B…I…E,” he says again. Reaching the end of the line, he suddenly drops my hand like a dead fish, pulling his own away and folding it under his other hand on the edge of the table.
Did I do something wrong? Is my hand weird? Is it too hot? Too cold? Too clammy?
I kick the chattering, panicked voice inside my head into a mental cupboard, closing my eyes.
When I open them again, Hal is studying me from beneath his fringe, but he immediately pretends he wasn’t.
“Sorry. Headache,” I mumble. I peer under the table, looking for the notebook I left in here yesterday. There it is, tucked beside one of the legs, just where I left it. Grabbing it, I let it fall onto the tabletop with a slap.
“So there’s a Jane, an Issy and an Albie.” I write their names on a blank page.
Now what?
I draw a circle around each name.
Better.
Hal sits back in his seat, making the wood creak. “Jane knows Issy,” he says. “She’s writing to her.
“And there’s this,” he says, reaching for something. “I thought it looked interesting.”
The book that he puts on the table is – like just about everything else – old and dusty. It’s a big journal, bound in leather that has cracked and pulled away in places, leaving tatty old boards visible underneath. It’s a murky grey colour – but judging by the clear brownish marks left where he’s touched it, that’s mostly dirt. It makes a cracking sound as he opens it, and the smell…
“Wow.”
Clamping my hand over my face, I realize he’s reacted exactly the same way – ducking his nose into the neck of his T-shirt. The book absolutely reeks of mould and dust and…time, I guess.
“It must have got damp,” I say, peering at it (with my nose still safely covered by my hand). “That’s water-staining.” I poke at the edge of a page, where a brown swirly mark has seeped across the paper. “Careful when you turn the pages – they’re probably stuck together.”
Something flickers deep inside my head – a tiny light at the far end of a long tunnel. I remember this. Digging through the past, looking for clues. I remember I liked this. Maybe I actually was good at it, not just manic and thinking I was good at it – in the same way I’d have thought I could fly, or speak Dutch, or pass my exams, or a hundred other things I literally can’t do, but why let a little thing like reality get in the way of a good manic episode?
Hal peels the two pages apart. Just as I thought, they’ve glued themselves together as they’ve dried, and they make a sticky tearing sound as they separate. The number 1913 is printed in neat, clear handwriting on the next page.
“Is that a year?”
“I think so.” Hal leans closer over the book, then away again as he tries to dodge a fresh waft of that mouldy smell.
He turns another stuck-together page…and the open book in front of us is full of columns in the same tight black ink as the date on the first page. It looks very familiar.
In fact, it looks like Mrs Tilney’s shift book.
I think I know what this is.
“This is a housekeeping book. It has to be.” I peer at the columns. “It’s a housekeeping book from 1913.”
“That’s what I thought when I found it. These must be staff names.” He runs a finger down a column full of different initials. “And this looks like pay.”
“And these are their duties – the rooms some of them are assigned to clean.” Scanning the pairs of capital letters, I hit on something. “There’s someone with the initial I here.” Halfway down the page is a tiny I.C. “There should be a staff list or register or something.” Without thinking, I grab the book and spin it towards me, leafing through the pages. Luckily, the first few seem to have taken the worst of whatever it was and the smell is nowhere as bad now.
“Are you sure you want to touch that?” Hal asks, watching me riffle through it.
“I’ve been cleaning other people’s hotel rooms for a while now. You’d be amazed at the stuff I’ve had to touch.” I stop and think about this for a second. “And you would definitely be grossed out by it. Here you go.”