10
LUKE
“You weren’t kidding, Bobby,” I say, looking at the piles of boxes. I turn myself sideways, making myself as slight as possible to sneak through a gap between the boxes to follow the saxophonist. “This place is a labyrinth.”
Bobby laughs from somewhere in the attic. I know I’m walking in his general direction, but the way his voice bounces off the rafters makes it impossible to locate exactly where he is unless I have eyes on him. “You should have seen it this morning. Less of a labyrinth and more of a clinch.”
“Must be some amazing artifacts in here,” Eleanor muses, only a few feet ahead of me. She ducks under a beam which means I’m going to have to practically crouch under it.
“Artifacts? I’m not a dinosaur yet, am I?” Bobby scoffs.
She looks back at me with a pursed smile and wide eyes. She’s more relaxed than she’s been the whole time I’ve known her, which I guess is to be expected. The more time you spend with someone, it’s inevitable that you’ll get more comfortable with them. But I think it has something to do with the milieu of this meeting too. The cramped quarters, the threat or promise of hidden treasures. That’s Eleanor’s whole gambit. She does it all day in the basement of the Reeder Music Library. Her curiosity is probably propelling her forward.
Not to mention her newfound inspiration to stick around in Austin.
I had to veil my abject excitement in the car. She’s right that two weeks isn’t really enough to know if you’re in the right place. And two weeks isn’t enough to know you’ve met the right person either.
So why did my whole body get lighter at the thought of her remaining in my city?
Remaining close to me?
Eleanor and I finally reach Bobby at the back of the attic. He’s cleared out a little piece of space for himself back here: a roll top desk which is also filled to the brim with documents, pictures and the like, and a little wooden chair. We’re surrounded by fans plugged into a precariously ancient power strip, making the stuffy attic air moderately tenable. Thank god. When we first climbed up here, I thought I might suffocate by the time the night was over.
Bobby points to a stack of boxes. “These are the boxes with stuff from The Lone Star era.”
Four boxes for a short stint running a nightclub in the ‘90s? Yeesh.
“I think this one is photos and things,” he says, knocking on one of the middle boxes. “But—" He holds up an aged finger, long and strong from years tickling the keys of his saxophone. “I’ll do you one better.”
Bobby turns and begins to scrap through the papers on the desk.
Eleanor and I stand side by side, silent, exchanging a look now and then as he searches . . . and searches . . . and searches.
“Doggone it! I had it a couple hours a—ah! Found it!” He pulls up a big green book and holds it into the air. “This is the Rosetta Stone of my time at The Lone Star. My Book of Kells. My Leningrad Codex. You get it, right?”
Eleanor nods vociferously. “Yes, yes, absolutely.”
I keep my mouth shut and nod though I understood maybe half of what he said.
Bobby holds the book out toward Eleanor. She poises her hands underneath the book to receive it as if it’s sacred. “Hopefully you’ll get some information out of this puppy.”
Eleanor pulls the book into her chest, her eyes bright behind her glasses. “Thank you so much for helping us with this.”
“All I did was move some boxes around. And now, I leave you to it. Too damn hot up here,” he says, waving a hand to dash it all away. “If you need anything else, try not to let me know, huh?”
Bobby shuffles back through the maze of boxes until he disappears.
“Well. Guess we should get started,” Eleanor says.
“Guess so,” I say, sliding my hands into my pockets. “You want to go through the photos or the ledger?”
Her lips twist up at the corner. “I think I’ll take the photos. That’s my realm of expertise, isn’t it?”
“Sounds good,” I say.
She passes the book off to me with the same amount of gravitas she received it with. I can’t believe I’m nervous over touching a godforsaken book that probably has more worthless scribbles and scrabbles than anything of particular interest, but this is Eleanor’s territory. She’s given so much respect to mine. It’s my turn to show her respect in kind.
Eleanor goes to the boxes, navigates to the one full of photos, and plops down on the floor without any qualms for dust and splinters.
I pull out the wooden chair. “You can sit, you know?”
She doesn’t look up, lifting the lid and digging into the first stack of photos. “It’s easier this way.”
I don’t like sitting in a chair while she sits on the floor, but I’m not a floor sitter. I like to keep my jeans clean, especially given the price tag they came with. Being a cowboy isn’t implicit with being a southern boy. I don’t like to get dirty or dusty. I like to be crisp and collected, pressed and polished. Even when I’m trying to look “natural” it’s all been carefully cultivated.
Meanwhile, Eleanor’s bohemian, bookish appearance seems to come naturally to an absurd degree.
I crack open the ledger and force myself not to be distracted by her. It’s not just her beauty. It’s the way she pays attention to each and every photo. It’s like I have an inside look at what she does every day. I wonder what she’s thinking as she sizes up each image. If she’s cataloging them. Wondering if they’d look good in the museum’s collection.
Eventually, though, I pull the book up in front of my face. I have to keep it close to read Bobby’s scrawl. I page through. There’s no method to the madness. On some pages, there are lists of expenses, on others there are phone numbers and birthdays.
I find the rhythm to the book eventually. This ledger was a catchall for everything as he went. I come across a list of acts in January. Not even in chronological order. Just a name next to a date. No wonder Kenny said Bobby did a shit job at taking care of The Lone Star.
Still though, while the acts aren’t in chronological order, the months are. I have to be careful not to overlook the months as I page through detailed incident reports and event capacity notes.
“What was the date on the photo again?”
“May 26, 1993,” Eleanor says, not missing a beat. She knows the photo like it’s a piece of her.
Maybe it is.
I navigate toward a page where Bobby wrote in black marker, “May.” Half the page is waterlogged, the writing having turned into inky splotches. “You’ve gotta be kidding me?”
“What? What is it?” Eleanor asks.
I turn the ledger around to her. “All the dates are gone. Just have names.”
Eleanor crawls over to sit in front of me, her eyes scanning the pages. “Well, that’s better than nothing! Instead of a needle in a haystack, it’s a needle in a tumbleweed, huh?”
Her enthusiasm is contagious. “You’re right about that.”
“Here, you read all of them out and I’ll type them into my phone. Even the band names. Who knows, she could have been a part of a group.”
I flip the ledger back around and clear my throat before reading through the list. “Eve Miller. Rusty and Co.—that’s an all-male band, don’t write that down. Theo Quincy.” I keep reading through the names, sometimes noting if I know the artist. If they’re local. If they still perform. If they’ve passed. I pause on a familiar name. “Diane Bloom.”
I bite my lower lip.
See, the thing is, I know more than I’ve been letting on to Eleanor. I’ve told her that the music of this city is my bread and butter. I know it like the back of my hand.
That doesn’t mean I don’t still have questions, though.
And seeing that name on this list. Knowing the face in the picture.
Each discovery only leads to more questions.
“Is that the end of the list?”
I lift my head, my mouth falling ajar. “Uh. No. Sorry.”
I finish listing out the names on the page until we finish May. I go through the rest of the ledger for posterity’s sake while Eleanor sorts through the pictures. She stacks them in three piles.
First, there’s the not applicable pile—pictures that have nothing to do with the task at hand. Then there’s the interesting pile—pictures that aren’t relevant, but Eleanor sees as potentially interesting to the museum. I’ve offered to ask Bobby if she can take them as a donation.
The final pile only exists in theory because no pictures are stacked there by the time she’s finished with the box. It’s the helpful and relevant pile.
Not a single photo. Not a single further clue.
“That’s it,” Eleanor says with a sigh.
“A bust, huh?” I ask from my place in my chair.
She shrugs and picks up the short stack of interesting. “Not totally.”
There’s frustration in her voice. I can hear it. Annoyance that the mystery has not been solved. Guilt builds in pit of my stomach. I’m helping, but not as much as I could.
If I helped as much as I could, we wouldn’t have gotten beyond that first conversation outside The Yellow Rose. Perhaps I’m tempting fate, though. Perhaps we were never meant to. If I had just been honest . . .
“How are the treasure hunters?” a woman’s voice flicks up through the hatch of the attic.
“Good, Mrs. Sutton,” I say.
The ladder rungs creak as she climbs up. I stand and go to the edge of the alcove, rising on my tiptoes to try and spot her.
“Oh, please, Luke, you know to call me Mandy.”
I can only spy the tight coils of hair at the top of her head.
“You’ve been up here a while in the heat. I’m sure you’re hungry. Dinner is ready when you two are.”
I glance back at Eleanor. She shrugs and then nods.
“Yeah, we’ve got what we needed Mandy. We’ll be down once we can find our way out of this mess.”
“Well, take your time. This double date isn’t going anywhere!”
I freeze before I can wriggle myself through the tunnel out of the alcove. I don’t dare look back at Eleanor for fear that she might have the same shocked look on her face as I do.
“Fried catfish, corn on the cob, red beans . . .” Bobby’s wife starts to rattle off as if she hasn’t just dropped an inconvenient bomb.
“Mandy, we’re not—”
Eleanor places a hand on my arm. Sparks shoot through me. “Don’t bother. It’s fine. One double date won’t kill us,” she says in a playful tone.