‘Was one of those buddies Alexandra Powell?’ I clutched my locket as she sat down on the edge of my bed.
‘You could say that,’ she replied with a smirk. ‘I never could understand how come they all stayed such good friends. Alex had been in love with Paul since they were little kids, but then your mom came around and all three of them were as thick as thieves. What’s got you asking all these questions?’
‘Just something Lydia said.’ I tapped my fingers against the bundled-up computer. ‘She wants to throw me a birthday party.’
‘Must be nice.’
‘I could throw you a party,’ I offered. ‘But I don’t even know when your birthday is.’
‘Born bright and early on the morning of ninth of November 1996,’ my aunt replied. ‘What else do you want to know, my blood type? My social security number?’
She didn’t wait for a response before standing up and storming out, leaving the door wide open. A variation on a classic Ashley combo. At least she didn’t slam it this time. Only when I was certain she wasn’t coming back, I unwrapped my laptop and brought up the lock screen. It had to be worth a go, I’d tried everything else.
11091996. His little sister’s date of birth.
The screen flashed blue and then all of my dad’s files and folders appeared, neatly organized on the desktop. I stared at the array of icons in total shock. It worked. My dad, who had never once in my life mentioned his little sister, used her birthday as his computer password. Ashley was so convinced he never even thought about her but he had typed that specific date into his laptop every single day of his life.
‘Nice work, Dad,’ I muttered, scanning the confusing stack of icons. ‘Super helpful filing system you’ve got here.’
There were dozens of folders filled with hundreds of files, all labelled with a numerical system that made no sense. Little blue icons lined up in neat columns and rows, and when I clicked on one at random, a window opened containing anendless scroll of documents, images, and spreadsheets. I opened the first document in the first folder. No better place to start than at the beginning.
It was a Word doc, full of rough notes about some historical event in France in the nineteenth century and no use to me whatsoever, but seeing his words, following his cadence, I could hear him reading aloud in my head. It was like he was right there with me.
I kept clicking through, searching for his journals. Dad had spent years digitizing them as part of his ongoing quest to get rid of unnecessary physical objects, and I knew they had to be on here somewhere. He had a theory that the more stuff you owned, the more stuff you could lose, and when you lost things you cared about, the more it hurt. It was only now I realized he wasn’t really talking about journals.
Twenty minutes later, I was no closer to finding the journals. There were just so many files. He’d kept digital copies of everything; bills, receipts, invoices. I would never find them at this rate. Closing another Word doc, I swirled my finger around in circles on the touchpad when a spark of inspiration hit. I flicked the cursor over the View tab and reordered the folders by date created. Every single icon switched places, sliding across the screen like they were part of a card trick. I opened the most recent document.
When we moved to Wales, he told me we were going there to research people from local communities who moved to America in the eighteenth century but according to this, he wasn’t telling me the whole truth. It was a list of historical events in England and Wales blamed on supernatural occurrences; floods, crop failures, solar and lunar eclipses, and an equally long corresponding list of people who had been blamed for them. Almost all women, almost all of them executed. But according to his notes, one woman managed to escape andsmuggle herself across the country, ending up in a place called Gravesend where she met and married a man who took her with him to the New World. The next document was a scan of something so old it was almost illegible and if I hadn’t already known what I was looking for, I wouldn’t have been able to work it out at all. A passenger manifest. A list of names of everyone who travelled from Gravesend to Savannah on the good shipAnnein 1732.
Dad wasn’t researching random families that emigrated to the US.
He was researching the first Emma Catherine Bell.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
‘Emily? Are you awake?’
I wasn’t.
My room was dark when I opened my eyes, the only light coming from the open bedroom door, Catherine carved out in silhouette.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. ‘Is it Ashley?’
‘Nothing’s wrong, honey.’
She pulled back my quilt and handed me a pile of clothes. ‘We have somewhere we need to be.’
Ever since I cracked the password, I’d spent as much time as possible in my room, ploughing through Dad’s research. It had been a long, frustrating forty-eight hours. For the first time in days, sleep got the better of me almost as soon as I’d eaten my supper on Thursday night and I was dozy and bleary-eyed when Catherine helped me to my feet.
‘It feels late,’ I said as the room came into focus.
‘It is, which means we don’t have much time. Quickly now, I’ll meet you downstairs. Barnett is waiting.’
‘Barnett … we’re driving someplace?’ I mumbled in a thick voice.
‘Quickly,’ she said again. ‘We don’t want to lose the moon.’
I did as I was told.
