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Frasier stopped on his way to his office, a paper cup of coffee in one hand and an old-fashioned metal lunch box in the other. He also had a brown envelope tucked under his arm. He looked up at her on her balcony. Morning sunshine winked off his large glasses.
“They had a flashlight,” she added at his confused expression.
“Ah,” he said. “You probably saw headlights. Sometimes cars from Trade Street make a wrong turn down the alley.”
She quickly walked down the steps as he spoke. “No, you don’t understand. It was definitely a person.”
“Did the birds wake up?” A few of the dellawisps had landed on the sidewalk in front of his office. They hopped around impatiently, as if they had something better to do.
“No.”
“If they didn’t stir, then it was nothing. They’re a fairly reliable alarm system.”
“Or it was someone who knew enough not to walkthroughthe garden, and instead to take the longer way around it,” she pointed out.
Someone, she’d concluded, like Lucy Lime.
Frasier studied her with his cloudy eyes. “What are you doing this summer, Zoey?”
She hesitated, feeling suddenly emotional. It seemed a lot to unload on him, how she’d always imagined her mother’s condo to be like a time capsule andthatwas what she thought she’d be doing this summer—falling into the soft, comforting history of her dead mother. She was still trying to process the fact that what she knew might be all she would ever know, and there would be no guidance on where she came from or where she should go from here. “I can’t do much of anything until my car gets here,” she said. “And school doesn’t start until August.”
“How would you like a job?” he asked.
She’d quit her after-school job at Kello’s used bookstore to come here. That job had been her escape from long evenings spent alone in her bedroom in Tulsa. She’d never fit in with the family created by her father, Tina, and Tina’s children. And it had made everyone happier, including Zoey herself, when she’d finally stopped trying. But she hadn’t thought she would need that kind of refuge here. She’d been wrong. “What kind of job?”
Frasier unlocked his office door and set his coffee and lunch box inside. He also set inside the mysterious brown envelope he had tucked under his arm.
“Follow me,” he said as he walked away. The dellawisps immediately flew behind him, trailing so closely they made him look like he was giving off turquoise exhaust. Zoey brought up the rear, not entirely sure if Frasier had been talking to her or the birds.
He went straight to Lizbeth’s door. The birds stopped just short of the patio, as if they’d been chased away from it often enough to be wary. Zoey caught up with him as he produced a key from his jeans pocket. He touched the key to Lizbeth’s lock, but the doors creaked open on their own, as if the handles hadn’t caught.
“That’s strange,” he said. “I thought I locked up before I went home yesterday.”
“I bet it was the person I saw last night,” Zoey whispered, a tad more dramatically than she intended.
Frasier shook his head patiently. “No one in their right mind would want to be in Lizbeth’s place.” He pushed the doors open the rest of the way. “Come. I’ll show you why.”
She followed him in. The place was absolutely packed with cardboard boxes, stacks and stacks of them, going all the way to the ceiling. A single trail snaked between them into a dense, ominous recess. And thesmell.An unwashed odor hit her like a physical force.
It was hard to imagine someplace this small holding this much stuff. It gave Zoey a panicky feeling, as if left alone she might never find her way out of this maze of floor-to-ceiling belongings. Sweat popped onto her skin. It was almost like Lizbeth could still be in here somewhere, lost.
She felt Pigeon zoom in and land on her shoulder. She bit Zoey’s ear, hard, wanting her to leave. Zoey shrugged and Pigeon flew away, landing somewhere high on a box and causing some papers to float down like leaves.
“Roscoe Avanger is the executor of Lizbeth’s estate, such as it is,” Frasier said, turning to watch the papers flutter down. “At first he was going to have the whole place gutted at once, but then decided to see if there was a story, or story notes, orsomethingin here.”
“Roscoe Avanger,” Zoey repeated. “The writer?”Sweet Mallow,his legendary and only book, written fifty years ago, was set on Mallow Island.
Frasier nodded. “Lizbeth worked for him.”
“Are you saying he wrote something new? And it’s inhere?”
“No,” Frasier said as he walked back out to the patio. “Not exactly.”
“What do you mean?” she said, close at his heels, grateful to escape the claustrophobic feeling Lizbeth’s condo was giving her. The sweat on her skin evaporated in the sunlight and made her shiver.
“It’s a story Lizbeth always said she wanted him to write. It probably doesn’t exist, but it’s important to her. Itwasimportant to her. Was,” he said, flustered that he’d just referred to her in the present tense, as if she were still here. “It shouldn’t take more than a week or so, depending on how much you want to work on it every day. Do you want the job?”
There was no use thinking it over. Of course she wanted it. “Yes,” she said, and immediately wanted to tell someone. But the only person she knew who would be remotely interested in this Roscoe Avanger connection was her old boss at the used bookstore, Kello, and he was ridiculously anti-technology. He didn’t even have a phone at the store.
