Chapter Sixteen #3
“You hired the Whippledurn boy?”
“That man is at least fifty.”
“Hmpf.” Morag stepped around Edie and looked at the lounge for a long time.
It was golden hour, and spring had been racing into this part of England all week.
The “bones” did look good. The light showed it off, while a breeze kicked up the smell of beeswax and cleanser. “Seems you got on fine here.”
“That’s all you have to say?”
Morag turned around. “I can supervise one Whippledurn. I’d have expected you away by now.”
Edie couldn’t figure out Morag’s urgency around the treasure hunt after so many years. Her eyes were still all laser, without even a trace of fondness in them. Her posture was straight, but she held her shoulders tight. Something was wrong.
“After the letter in France, it didn’t feel like our business,” Edie said, trying once more to pick her way through this conversational minefield.
“It seemed like this may be not so much of a treasure hunt as a trail of breadcrumbs left behind after a bad breakup between Agatha and somebody else. But I have to believe you would know more about that than I would.”
“Who knows anything about any of that?” Morag huffed. “I keep well and away from the business of my guests.”
“Lies!” Now Edie could feel lasers coming out of her own eyes. So much for careful. “I haven’t had even one moment in this inn without you bossing me.”
“Go to Barcelona, or you won’t polish one more stick of my inn.” Morag turned on her heel and walked out of the lounge, across reception, and disappeared into the kitchen.
Edie passed by Cosima on her way out. “Is everything all right?”
She took a breath to consider. Was everything all right?
Was this particular situation she’d gotten herself into good?
When she booked this trip—this time out for her broken heart—she hadn’t had the slightest inkling that she would be fighting with the village witch, tearing apart an inn, hunting down a treasure across Europe that turned out to be an old and sad love story, and doing it with a woman more likely to step out of one of her dreams than be real.
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. It felt good to give up on being careful and simply tell Cosima the truth.
“It’s not a state of being I’m used to. Most of the time, I switch back and forth between wild hope and black dejection.
More than not knowing anything, I’m worried about the aftermath of fighting a mythical creature disguising herself as an old woman. ”
“You two have been getting into it since the moment you arrived, but I think that’s just how you’re friends. I wouldn’t worry.”
Maybe Cosima wasn’t worried, but Edie was. She liked Morag. She’d thought they had a special connection, but it wasn’t enough of a connection to tell her what to do next. “If I can’t worry about Morag, should I worry about what we managed to get up to on the prep table?”
“Whoa. Do not bring your angst into those absolutely perfect five minutes on that prep table, which we both very much enjoyed and wanted and, I’m certain, would be happy to repeat.
” Cosima slapped her hands on her garden-dirty coveralls thighs.
“I think we should let the map show us what to do. We should let this hunt make our decisions. I admit that I freaked out when I read the letter, but you’re right.
We need to know what happened to this couple, Agatha and her Minnie, and if it’s really as bad as I decided to believe. ”
Edie looked through the dining room at the doorway to the kitchen.
Morag had financed this treasure hunt after years of hiding its first clues from anyone interested.
She’d been cagey about what they discovered in Rouen, and now she was angry they weren’t going to Barcelona.
But her motives weren’t financial. Edie and Cosima had agreed on the train back from France that it seemed unlikely there was a treasure to find. Only a story.
Morag was Edie’s friend. And Morag cared about this story. In any event, there would be no making up with Morag until she was willing, so she could cool off while Edie and Cosima were in Spain.
“I think you’re right that I’m right. But no matter what, you are going back to California, and we are a train flying a hundred miles an hour down a track toward a bridge that’s gone out.”
Cosima straightened, and somehow her coveralls arranged themselves into crisp lines.
The two tails of the scarf she’d knotted to tie her hair back in were precisely the same length, its gold picking up the green and gold of Edie’s Packer’s T-shirt.
“I don’t believe I’m wrong about how I feel about you right now,” she said.
“Or about how much this treasure hunt has already disrupted my life in a good way. And I don’t want you to tell me what to do, ever, any more than I want fear to tell me what to do.
I’m willing to go where the map tells me, and I want you with me. In fact, I insist.”
The vase on the reception desk held Morag’s week-old arrangement, its ferns and blood-dark flowers unwilted, the bird tied to its stick as alive-looking as ever, watching Edie to see if she would take another chance on what she wanted or if she would let a Green Bay vegan cheese shop be the only risk she ever allowed herself.
I want you with me. In fact, I insist. Had anyone ever said such a thing to her?
No. No one ever had.
She hadn’t believed anyone ever would.
“I assume everything I’m excited about will end in failure,” she said, “so you will have to continue to remind me how right about everything we both are.”
“I will.”
“And, to be clear, I’m very excited to go to Barcelona, but I’m deliriously excited about you.”
The princess of Gregory Place pulled herself away from the reception desk to stand in front of Edie. “Do you want to get on a plane to Barcelona with me and see what happens?”
“More than anything,” she admitted. “More than anything, ever, I want to.”
Cosima reached for Edie’s hand and laced their fingers together, pulling Edie close. “This is why Morag didn’t let anyone look at that guest book,” she said, her voice husky. “She knew it was dangerous.”
Edie leaned up on her tiptoes, and Cosima met her mouth halfway.
“Pardon me, ladies.”
They pulled apart, startled, as St. John Whippledurn nodded at them both, holding a ladder and pushing a hand truck stacked with supplies. “I’ll squeeze myself through. No worries at all.”
He brushed past them, and Edie slapped her hand over her mouth to stop the laugh. “Truly nothing goes unwitnessed in this village.”
Cosima shook her head. “I’ll call Tam to have Killian take us to the train. We’ll go to London. You buy the next available plane tickets.”
They left the room to the sound of St. John’s cheerful whistling.