“I learned about similar stuff,” Minerva said as she slipped her camera into her backpack. “Is it possible to look inside?”
“Carolyn would have the keys. We could come back another time.”
“It’s fine,” she said.
They walked back to the car. When they ducked under the fence, she held her hand at the wrong angle and a bit of wire sliced her palm. Minerva let out a loudouch.
“Are you okay?” he asked and turned to look at her.
“I cut myself.”
“Let me look,” he said.
She showed him. He took out a handkerchief from a pocket and tied it around her palm. “That’ll have to do for now.”
“Thanks.”
They jumped inside the car. In a few minutes they were back at her dorm. Minerva opened the back door of the house and motioned for him to come in. In the bathroom she peeled off the impromptu bandage and inspected the cut. She had iodine somewhere.
“If you want a soda there’s Diet Pepsi in the refrigerator, or you can make coffee,” she called out. “There’s a can of Yucatec coffee above the microwave; you don’t have to have my usual shitty cup of Folgers.”
“You’re a coffee snob.”
“Can’t afford to be. But I do have that one can of good coffee.”
“I feel privileged sharing in your bounty.”
“You get one cup. I need to ration it.”
She washed her hands and the shallow cut. When she wasalmost done bandaging it, he leaned against the bathroom’s doorway. “Can’t find your good coffee,” he said with a shrug.
“Hideo must have moved it. Thanks for that. I hope it’s not silk or anything too fancy.” She handed him the handkerchief.
He stuffed it in the pocket of his jacket. “Let me see if I can find the coffee,” she said.
He followed her across the bedroom and back to the dining room but paused to look at the pictures above her dresser. “Is that you?”
Minerva looked at the photo he was pointing at. It was a girl with her hair in two braids. A gray-haired woman sat next to her. “Yeah.”
“Then that’s your great-grandmother.”
She nodded. “Nana Alba. That’s my mom,” she said, pointing at another picture.
“Only child?”
“Yes.”
“Same,” Noah said. His eyes drifted to another photo. “Boyfriend?”
“Hideo, a friend. He works at another dorm. No time for boyfriends.”
He smiled. “There’s always time for a boyfriend or two.”
“How many do you have?”
“One girlfriend, recently turned fiancée. Chelsea. If my grandmother has her way, she’ll be my wife by the end of the year.”
He inspected her bookcase, looking curiously at the titles. She had three collections by Amparo Dávila, Stephen King’s horror compendiumDanse Macabre,a couple of Michael McDowell novels, a Lugosi biography, Carol Clover’sMen, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film,and Faye Ringel’sNew England’s Gothic Literature: History and Folklore of the Supernatural,among other books.
