Chapter 3 The Notebook

Nell would not touch the rose. She stood across the room, arms folded, and watched Chris pick it up by the stem.

"Put it in water," Nell said.

"Why?"

"You put it in water. You don't throw it away. And you don't ask who left it."

"That's three rules, none on the list."

Nell got into bed with her shoes on. "Some of them aren't," she said.

At one in the morning Chris was still awake, sitting on the floor with the rose in a mug on the windowsill, the torn slip of paper flattened against her knee, and the taped box unopened in front of her.

She had read it a hundred times in an hour.

Don't unpack the box in a room you don't trust. Don't let them see the king. And whatever they promise you... the winner already lost.

It was his handwriting. She would have known it blind. But the box was still sealed, and the notebook was inside it, and the paper in her hand had been cut from a book she had not opened yet.

She pulled the box between her knees.

Her mother had put her hand flat on the lid at the bus station. Not dramatic. Just flat and firm and there a long time.

Leave it here.

It's Dad's.

I know whose it is. Her mother had not blinked. That's why.

Chris cut the tape with her key.

Inside was a folded sweater that still smelled of a house she no longer lived in, three receipts, a broken watch, and a notebook.

Black. Fat with damp. A rubber band that snapped when she touched it and left a gray line across the cover like a scar.

She had seen this notebook a hundred times. On the kitchen table. Under his arm. It had been the most boring object in her childhood.

She opened it.

The first thirty pages were nothing. Interview times. Phone numbers. A shopping list with milk underlined twice.

Then the handwriting changed. Smaller. Faster. It stopped using the lines.

He had started writing in a shorthand she half remembered him inventing at the kitchen table to annoy her mother. Consonants only. Names cut to two letters. Whole sentences she could read the shape of but not the meaning.

She could read the dates, though.

They ran from eleven years ago to nine years ago, then stopped. He had died eight years ago in a stairwell in a city she had never visited, and the police had used the word robbery so gently that she had believed it for six years.

She turned another page.

CORVAIN.

Printed. Capitals. Pressed hard enough to emboss the paper underneath.

Chris sat very still.

Her father had been a reporter who covered city contracts and water bills. He had never once mentioned this place, in any conversation, in any year of her life.

Her mother had never mentioned it either.

Her mother had put her hand flat on the box.

After that, the notebook was about Corvain the way a fence is about a field. He never said it. He circled it.

Page after page of initials with question marks. Amounts of money with no currency. A list of nine surnames, six crossed out, three left alone. FORD was one of the three.

And in the margins, the same drawing, over and over. A chess king on its side, the crown broken off.

He had drawn it maybe forty times, on the edges, in the corners, the way people doodle when they are trying not to say something out loud.

Her father had doodled on everything. Grocery lists. A whole army of stick men on her seventh grade permission slip.

She turned the page.

Three pages further in, there was a stub.

She almost missed it. The notebook was sewn, not glued, and someone had gone in close to the spine with something sharp and taken a page out cleanly, leaving a stub the width of a fingernail.

She ran her thumb along it, then checked the whole book front to back, one page at a time, and her hands were not steady by the end.

Eleven pages were gone.

She held the torn slip to the nearest stub.

The cut matched. The tear on the slip and the tear in the spine were one tear, two halves of a page, and she had been handed one half through a locked door before she ever broke the tape on the box.

Someone had taken these pages out of a sealed book.

And then given her one back.

They had not been ripped in temper. They had been cut. Different sections, spread out, and every single one of them from the part after CORVAIN was written.

Someone had read this book. Someone had decided what she could see.

Her mother could not have done it. Her mother would not have kept the rest.

Chris put the notebook down on the floor and sat with her back against the bed and looked at it for a long time, the way you look at a dog you thought you knew.

The last written page was near the back, upside down, as if he had turned the book to hide it fast.

Six lines. Not shorthand. Plain, tired handwriting, the letters getting bigger toward the end, the way they do when someone runs out of time.

She understood one sentence, where he had gone around it three times until the ink went through.

If you're reading this... you're already in danger.

Chris read it eleven times.

The book was nine years old. He had not written it to her mother, who wanted it burned, or to the police, since he never gave it to them.

He had written you're reading this.

Not someone.

You.

Her ears were ringing. Far below, a door closed, and it sounded like another country.

The smart thing was to tape the box shut, mail it home, keep her head down for four years, and leave with a degree and a life.

She thought about her mother's flat hand.

I know whose it is. That's why.

Chris set the notebook on her knees and started copying the shorthand into the back of her chemistry pad, letter by letter, because she had watched him invent it, and somewhere under eight years of dust she still had the key.

She worked until her fingers cramped.

At some point she turned the desk lamp so it pointed at the page. Which put the light behind her. Which turned the window into a mirror.

She noticed it the way you notice a spider. All at once, with your whole body, before your brain gets a vote.

There was a shape in the glass.

Not in the room. Through it. Down in the courtyard, three floors below, on the grass between the lamps, a person was standing with their face turned up toward her window.

They were not walking. They were not hiding behind anything. They were just standing there, perfectly still, in the middle of the lawn at two in the morning, looking directly at the notebook open in her lap.

Chris did not move.

Neither did they.