Chapter Fifteen #3
The eight-foot-tall wall ran uninterrupted by windows along the entire back of the café.
There had to be thousands of letters tacked up, folded into thirds or tucked into envelopes and layered like shingles.
A wooden ladder leaned against the wall, presumably so that customers could climb it to post their writings higher up or study what they found there.
Some of the letters were new, the paper stiff and the ink vivid, while others were brittle with age.
Each of them had a name written large along its margin to identify the intended recipient, making the wall look like a giant illustration made up of names in different inks on every color of paper—though the overall effect was not of chaos, but a Gallic tidiness.
“I’m hoping it will be easy to find the general era that Agatha wrote her letter in.” Edie sat down at a table next to the wall, her eyes on its contents. “All of these look like they could’ve been left yesterday. The names are in Sharpie and glitter pen.”
A server came around. Cosima informed her that Edie was vegan so the server could tell her Edie’s options and Cosima could translate.
“I’ll have the potato gratin and sparkling mineral water,” Edie said. “Can you also ask her about the letters and where we might find one from the seventies?”
Cosima ordered for herself, then asked, “Pourriez-vous m’indiquer où je pourrais trouver une lettre rédigée dans les années soixante-dix?
Une dame plus agée de notre entourage nous a demandé de la chercher.
” It wasn’t strictly true that Morag had sent them here to get Agatha’s letter, but true enough.
“Je demanderai à la propriétaire de venir à votre table dès que possible. Elle saura vous aider.” The server set down utensils and wove back to the bar through the tables.
“The owner is going to help us when she gets a chance.” Cosima pushed her chair away from the table to make more room for her legs.
“It isn’t terrible watching you speak French in France,” Edie said with a smile.
“Although if you didn’t speak French, I would be absolutely scandalized by the quality of Swiss boarding schools.
” Edie put her elbows on the table and leaned closer.
“Speaking not at all of Swiss boarding schools, I have a feeling the phone call you took wasn’t the kind that was great, and then I started thinking about what time it is in California, and now I’m worried.
This is actually a reason I may never have a phone again by choice.
It means I’m unable to look up news about Phoebe Frank or you, and so I can’t blow a fan on my mental spirals until they’re spinning so fast I can’t think.
I’m serene now, I’m sure you’ve noticed.
Anyway, you don’t have to share with me what may or may not be going on, but I’m interested to listen if you want me to. ”
Cosima surveyed the letters on the wall, thinking about her mother’s note that she and Edie had found in the wallpaper.
You’re impossible, her mother had written, and right now, made only of stars and hopes I didn’t know I had.
Sitting in a French café with the side of her boot touching Edie’s black Converse sneaker gave her a glimmer of what her mother had been trying to express.
All of this—Edie, and Cosima’s feelings, and the wall full of wishes and dreams and broken hopes beside them—had been, just a few short weeks ago, impossible.
A petite woman with a steel-gray pixie and heavy horn-rimmed glasses came to their table. “Vous cherchez une lettre?”
Cosima turned and smiled, grateful to be saved by the bell, so to speak. “Oui,” she said. “Nous recherchons une lettre que nous pensons être de 1977 ayant été, laissée par une femme. Une écrivaine.”
The woman’s dark eyebrows lifted to her hairline, and she pulled a chair from a neighboring table and sat down. “You’re looking for a letter from a writer you think wrote one in seventy-seven.” Her English was clipped, only slightly blurred by her accent.
“We are.” Edie leaned forward. “A mystery writer. Agatha—”
“—Llewellyn,” the woman finished. “Of course. But a lot of people ask me to read that letter. Especially English people. Australians. Americans.”
“They do?” Edie scooted closer. The café was getting loud. “Why? None of these letters have the letter-writer’s name written on them. How would anyone know she wrote one? Is there a name connected to Agatha on the letter?”
“You ask a lot of questions at once.”
“I like to get them out before I forget I thought of them.”
The owner’s appreciative smirk made Cosima reach for Edie’s hand, a reaction that should have embarrassed her, theoretically, but was the only way she could think of to unlock her back teeth, clenched in unnecessary jealousy.
“I wouldn’t have done it,” the woman said.
“It was my aunt, who owned this café before I did. She recognized Madame Llewellyn when she asked to pin up the letter. My aunt pinned it up under Madame Llewellyn’s supervision, but as soon as she left, she took it down and framed it.
She displayed it in the hall on the way to the toilets. ”
“Holy fuck, that’s bold,” Edie breathed. “Is that where it still is?”
“No. I did not like that she did that. Tacky, and the kind of thing that may discourage someone who does have a profile from leaving a letter.” She raised an eyebrow at Cosima. “I am very sorry for the loss of your mother.”
Cosima swallowed. “Thank you.”
The woman nodded. “I took down the letter. I tried to remove it from the frame, but the glass had adhered to the envelope, to the ink, so I decided to keep it framed until the rightful recipient came. Then we could, as they say, break the glass in the event of an emergency.” She looked at Edie.
“If you are the rightful recipient, you can tell me now, who is the letter for?”
Cosima got out her phone. “It’s intended as a clue, we believe, for whoever is searching for a treasure in a hunt that Agatha devised. If you look here, you can see the pictures from where it began, in this guest book, and where it took us in England. We found the treasure map in the church.”
Edie turned around and fished the map from her jacket pocket, spreading it out on the table while Cosima showed the café owner her pictures.
“Then we went to a manor house, a castle, and finally here.” She finished flipping through the album, ending on the picture of the mummified cat. “We have reason to believe she left the next clue in that letter.”
The woman looked at the map, tracing over the details. “This is fantastic. But what gave you the right to start the hunt?”
“The owner of the inn, where the guest book is kept. Morag. She’s known about the hunt since Agatha stayed at the inn back in the seventies, but she hasn’t let anyone look for the treasure until us, though I have no idea why.”
The café owner stared at Edie for a long moment. Then she looked at Edie and Cosima’s joined hands. Uncertainty prickled along Cosima’s hairline.
“You don’t?” the woman asked.
“No,” Edie said. “Morag keeps her own counsel.”
The woman shook her head, letting out a chuckle, and Cosima couldn’t work out the source of her amusement or her wry knowledge. Annoying. “Could we read the letter, then?” She hadn’t meant for the question to come out so sharp, but she rarely did.
“I will allow this. One moment.” She stood up and disappeared into the crowded café.
“She is so cool,” Edie whispered. “Might also be a witch.”
“I think she was a little dramatic.”
“Hmm.” Edie nodded. “You, of course, would know.”
“Says the woman who considered finishing off her outfit with a child’s sword and sheath that was printed with ‘Sainte Jeanne d’Arc’ in neon pink.”
“I might still buy that. My niece would love it, and in the meantime, I’d have a sword.”
“Voila.” The woman appeared in front of them again, startling them both. She held an outsize dark wooden frame, which she set on the table. Its sticky, yellowed glass held an envelope, which read, “For the seeker from Gregory Place.”
“That’s us!” Edie pointed at the phrase.
“And this is definitely Agatha’s handwriting.
” She started to lift the frame, but the woman put her finger up to stop her.
She grabbed Edie’s water carafe, held it over the glass, then brought it down sharply.
The glass dissolved into thousands of sparkling cigarette-smoked amber pieces, contained by the frame.
“Jesus!” Edie laughed. “No turning back now. Cosima, do you want to do the honors?”
Cosima picked up a corner of the heavy white envelope, the same as the envelope the map had been sealed into, and gently shook off the pieces of glass.
She turned it over, broke what was left of the dry glue holding the seal, and pulled out the paper, which held several lines of Agatha’s bold, stylized cursive.
Minnie,
If you’ve made it all the way here again and you’re reading this letter, maybe you’ve already walked through the city, searching out the dark corners and cobbled alleyways we found to steal kisses, to sigh into the other’s neck, and to otherwise believe in the magic of someplace far away from any other place you’ve been, where any kind of love is possible.
Isn’t it possible? Isn’t it? If you’re reading this, I have to think you’ve decided that it is.
Minnie, my darling girl, I don’t care if you didn’t know right when I wanted you to, and I don’t believe I ever will. I believe I will only ever care that you eventually decided to come to me. I hope you know that. I hope you never thought that I left you. I didn’t, I didn’t.
I’m crying writing this, half-afraid you’ll never read it, sick with excitement that you will. Love is not impossible. Not in any place, any language, and not any kind of love, even ours. If you’re not yet convinced, go back to the sacred family, go back to the Gaudí, and I’ll try again.
I’ll never stop trying.
Yours yours yours,
Bronwyn A. Llewellyn
Cosima looked at Edie, who was so excited, so expectant.
She had no way of knowing that this letter had given Cosima a glimpse of their future, and it looked a lot like the pile of broken glass inside the frame.