13 Little Blue Envelopes (27 page)

The crates and boards that made up his old furnishings had given way to exploded boxes full of papers, bits of scripts, piles of books with titles like
The Theatre of Suffering
. Keith tucked the toothbrush behind his ear and started gathering up some of the papers on the sofa, clearing a spot.

“Did you just get back from Amsterdam? Or did you end up somewhere else?”

“I went to Denmark,” she said. It seemed like it was so long ago, but it had been two, maybe three days? It was hard to tell anymore.

“How was that?” he asked. “Rotten? And how did you get tan there?”

“Oh.” She looked down her arms. They were tan, actually.

“Then I went to Greece.”

“Well, why not? They’re right next to each other, aren’t they?”

She dropped onto the seat he had cleared. Nothing held this sofa up but some cheap foam, and that was so worn out that she sank almost all the way to the floor.

“What happened to you?” he said, kicking some books out of the way to make a seat for himself on the floor. “You look like you’ve just been airlifted out of some international tragedy.”

“Someone stole my bag off the beach. This is all I have left.”

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All the energy that had propelled her for days across land and sea and air had been spent, with no result. And now she was empty, tired, with no direction left to go in. Nothing telling her where to go, and nothing keeping her from going.

“Can I just stay here for a while?” she asked. “Can I just sleep here?”

“Yeah,” he said, his face clouding over. “Sure. You all right?”

“I’ll just sleep on the floor or something,” she said.

“No. Stay there.”

Ginny lay back and pulled the pile of Keith’s Star Wars comforter from its resting place on the back of the sofa. She closed her eyes and listened to him moving his papers around.

She could tell he was watching her.

“The letters are gone,” she said.

“Gone?”

“They were in the bag. They took the last one.”

His brow wrinkled in appreciation of this fact. Ginny pulled the comforter over her nose. It smelled surprisingly clean and fresh. Maybe everything smelled that way when compared to her.

“When did you get back?” he asked. “And how?”

“Pretty much just now. Richard got me a plane ticket.”

“Richard? Is that your aunt’s friend that you’ve been staying with?”

“Kind of more than that,” she said.

“Meaning?”

She shifted a bit deeper into the sofa.

“He’s my uncle.

“You didn’t say that before.”

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“I didn’t know.”

Keith sat down on the floor next to the sofa and stared at her.

“You didn’t know?” he asked.

“I just found out. They were married, but just for health insurance or something, because she was sick. But they also liked each other. It’s complicated. . . .”

“You just found out? Now?”

“Richard just told me. And then I kind of ran away.”

She tried to bury those last few words in the fabric, but he seemed to catch them.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked.

It was a good question.

“Don’t,” he said, pulling the blanket down. “You have to go back there.”

“Why?”

“Look,” he said, “this guy Richard cared enough to get you a plane ticket. He married your mad aunt because she was sick.

And that is not fake. This whole thing is weird, granted, but that at least is real.”

“You don’t get it,” she said, sitting up. “She wasn’t dead before. She was just gone. I knew she was dead. They told me she was dead. But I never saw her get sick. I never saw her die.

Now she’s dead.”

Now she had done it. Now she had said it. Now her voice was starting to crack. Ginny dug her fingers into the blanket.

Keith sighed, then sat down next to her.

“Oh,” he said.

Ginny clenched a fistful of Death Star.

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“All right,” he said. “You can sleep here, but in the morning I’m driving you back to Richard’s. Deal?”

“I guess,” Ginny said. She rolled over toward the back of the sofa and felt Keith’s hand slowly rest on the back of her head and slowly stroke her hair as she broke into sobs.

290

The Green Slippers and the

Lady on the Trapeze

The spare key to Richard’s house was there in the crack of the stair, waiting for her. On the table, there was a note that read:
Ginny, If you’re reading this, you’ve come back, and I’m happy
about that. Please stay until this evening so that we can talk some
more.

“See?” Keith said, spying a loose piece of breakfast cereal and popping it into his mouth. “He knew you’d be back.”

He drifted out of the kitchen and looked around the rest of the house, stopping at the door to Ginny’s room.

“This is my . . .” Ginny began. “My . . . it was my aunt’s room. I know it’s a little . . .”

“You aunt painted all of this?” he said, running his hand along the trail of cartoons that decorated the wall, then stooping to look at the patchwork on the blankets. “It’s bloody amazing.”

“Yeah, well . . . this is what she was like.”

“It looks a bit like Mari’s place,” he said.

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He circled the room, taking in all of the details. He walked over to the Manet poster.

“This is her favorite painting?” he asked.

“She loved it,” Ginny said. “She had a copy of it in her apartment in New York, too.”

She’d stared at this poster so many times before . . . but like Piet, she’d never noticed much about it. Aunt Peg had explained it, but she’d never
gotten
it. Now the girl’s flat expression in the midst of all the activity, all the color . . . it made a lot more sense. It was a lot more tragic. All of that activity in front of her and the girl wasn’t seeing it, wasn’t enjoying it.

“When you look at it,” she said, “you’re standing where the artist is supposed to be. The thing that she loved about it, though, was that nobody ever notices the green slippers in the corner. It’s a reflection of a woman standing on a trapeze, but you can only see her feet. Aunt Peg always wondered about her.

She was always talking about her green slippers. See? Right here.”

Ginny stepped on the bed and poked at the upper left corner, where the little green slippers dangled their way into the picture. As she touched the poster, she felt a lump under the corner, right where the green slippers were. She ran her fingers along the surface. It was all smooth except for this point. She pulled on the corner. The poster was attached to the wall with sticky blue putty, which gave way easily when Ginny peeled it back. Under the corner, there was a larger lump of this blue stuff.

“What are you doing?” Keith asked.

“Something’s under here.”

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She pulled the entire corner of the poster down. They both stared at the glop of blue putty and the small key that was pressed into it.

The key sat between them on the kitchen table. They’d tried it in all of the door locks to the house. Then they’d looked all through Ginny’s room, trying to find anything that it might fit into. Nothing.

So now there was nothing to do but drink tea and stare at it.

“I should have known to look there,” Ginny said, putting her chin on the table and getting a close-up view of the crumbs.

“Was there anything in any of the letters telling you to open something?”

“No.”

“Did she ever give you anything else?” Keith asked, flicking the key across the table with his finger. “Besides the letters.”

“Just the bank card.” She reached into her pocket and set the Barclaycard on the table. “It’s useless now. There’s nothing left in the account.”

Keith picked up the card and flicked it to the edge of the table.

“All right,” he said. “What now?”

Ginny thought this one over.

“I guess I should take a bath,” she said.

Richard had anticipated this need as well. Sitting on the floor by the bathroom door were some of his smaller clothes, some running pants and a rugby shirt. She soaked herself until she pruned. She hadn’t had this luxury in a while—really hot water, towels, the time to actually get clean.

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When she emerged, Keith was watching the tiny round window of the under-the-counter washing machine.

“Put your clothes in for a wash,” he said. “They were disgusting.”

Ginny always thought that the only way of getting clothes clean was by drowning them in scalding water and then whipping them around in a violent centrifugal motion that caused the entire washing machine to vibrate and the floor to shake. You beat them clean. You made them suffer. This machine used about half a cup of water and was about as violent as a toaster, plus it stopped every few minutes, as if it were exhausted from the effort of turning itself.

Sluff, sluff, sluff, sluff. Rest. Rest. Rest.

Click.

Sluff, sluff, sluff, sluff. Rest. Rest. Rest.

“Who thought to put a window on a washing machine?”

Keith asked. “Does anyone just sit and watch their wash?”

“You mean, besides us?”

“Well,” he said, “yeah. Is there any coffee?”

Ginny got up, tripped over the long running pants, and went to the cabinet for the jar of Harrods instant coffee. She set it on the table in front of Keith.

“Harrods,” Keith said, picking up the jar.

There was a nearly-audible click in Ginny’s head.

“Harrods,” she repeated.

“Harrods, indeed.”

“No. The key. It’s for Harrods.”

“Harrods?” Keith said. “You’re telling me your aunt had the magical key to Harrods?”

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“Maybe. Her studio was there.”

“Inside
Harrods
?”

“Yes.”

“Where was her bedroom? Inside Parliament? Top of Big Ben?”

“Richard works at Harrods,” Ginny said. “He found her a space to work in. She kept everything in a cabinet there. A cabinet would have a small key, like this one.”

Keith shook his head.

“Why does this surprise me?” he asked. “Come on, then.

Let’s go.”

295

The Magical Key to Harrods

Ginny had switched off the “what am I wearing?” impulse in her brain several hours before as a means of survival. It wasn’t until she caught her reflection in the window at Harrods that she suddenly remembered how she was dressed and that she was accompanied by someone wearing a shirt that said, CORPORATE SWINE

ATE MY BALLS.

Keith looked equally distressed as he peered in through the door that the Harrods doorman was holding open for them.

“Cor,” he said, his jaw dropping at the sight of the oozing mass of humanity that completely filled every square foot of space. “I am
not
going in there.”

Ginny grabbed his arm and pulled him inside, leading him down the now-familiar path to the chocolate counter. The expression on the chocolate woman’s face said that she was not impressed with either of their outfits. But it also said that she 297

was a professional and that she had seen every kind of insane person pass through Harrods’ doors.

“Just a moment,” she said, “Murphy, yes?”

“How did she know that?” Keith asked as the woman walked to the phone. “How do you have all of these strange connections inside Harrods?
Who are you?
”

Ginny realized that she was biting at her cuticles. She never did that. She was suddenly very nervous about seeing Richard.

Her uncle. The one she’d run from.

“My mum used to drag me here whenever we came down to London at Christmas,” he went on, bending down low and scanning the contents of the chocolate counter. “It’s even worse than I remember.”

She had to move away from Keith, from the chocolate lady . . .

and she had to fight the desire to slip into the crowd and disappear. She almost lost the battle but caught sight of Richard’s short curls and his silvery tie and dark shirt coming at her through the crowd. She couldn’t look up at him as he approached. Instead, she simply opened her hand and stuck it forward, revealing the tiny key that had imbedded itself in her palm.

“I found this,” she said. “It was in Aunt Peg’s room, behind a poster. I think she left it there for me, and I think it’s for something here.”

“Here?” he asked.

“The cabinet. Is it still here?”

“It’s in a storage closet upstairs. But there’s nothing in it.

She brought her paints home.”

“Could this be the key for it?”

Richard took the key and looked it over.

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“It could be,” he said.

Ginny snuck a quick look at him. He didn’t look angry.

“Come on,” he said. “I have a minute. Let’s go have a look.”

Aunt Peg’s Harrods studio was not a glamorous place. It was a very small room on a top floor with a bunch of deformed man-nequins and discarded hangers. There was a cloudy window that pushed open and revealed only gray sky.

“It’s one of these,” Richard said, pointing to a clump of large, brown metal cabinets in the corner.

It wasn’t any of the front ones, so Keith and Richard were forced to start pushing the cabinets around so that Ginny could squeeze between the row and try the other locks. The fifth one was a perfect fit. The inside of the cabinet was completely hollow. There was plenty of room for the pile of rolled canvases at the bottom.

“The dead Harrods scrolls,” Keith said.

“It’s strange that she would take her paints home but leave the paintings here,” Richard said. “I never would have found them. They would have been thrown away.”

Ginny unrolled a few of the canvases and spread them out on the floor. The work was clearly Aunt Peg’s: bright, almost cartoonish representations of now-familiar sights. There were the Vestal Virgins, the Eiffel Tower, the white-paved paths of Greece, the London streets, Harrods itself. A few were almost direct copies of the pictures on the envelopes. There was the girl at the base of the mountain under the castle from the fourth letter, the rising sea monster island from number twelve. Ginny had seen lots of amateur painters painting these sights on her travels to sell as souvenirs to tourists. These 299