I lift the lid. “Dad’s stuff, my stuff.” I hand her his notebook. “Our stuff.”
Her eyes widen as she peers into the box, a slow smile spreading across her face. “That’s from the letter I found.”
I nod, feeling a pang of bittersweetness.
“Did it help?”
I hesitate, caught between a shrug and a nod. “I couldn’t figure it out in time.”
She lifts the photos, studying each one with care. “Where’s the original?”
“At the museum. Maybe Wren will find a way to display it someday.” My voice falters.
Goldie’s smile fades. “Sorry.”
I take the pictures from her hands, setting them aside. “Yeah. Me too.”
She rummages through the box again. “So, Dad was wrong then? She was a bad guy?”
“I can’t prove she wasn’t,” I say softly, the weight of my summer’s many failures pressing down on me.
I tell her about some of the diary entries Dad transcribed, the letter that seemed to be about nothing, and the map that we can’t explain.
“Dad spent years trying to figure it all out. But I was going to do it all in one summer.” I scoff. What a joke. “Anyway, I thought you might want to see it all before it gets packed away.”
She takes her time looking through everything, then offers me a side glance. “Sorry I couldn’t find anything else at Mrs. Mayhew’s.”
“No, it’s great what you found. It was—” I hesitate. “It was what I needed to realize that I don’t need to find all the answers. And if I never figure it out, then I’m okay with that.”
She nods, then adds more conviction to the gesture. “Dad copied parts of her diary, right? But he stopped too. Do you think he decided he knew enough too?”
I hadn’t thought about it like that before, but it’s a comforting idea. I always assumed he just ran out of time or into the samepotentially damning evidence we did. I like her perspective better. “Yeah, maybe. Maybe he was getting ready to box it all up himself.” I run my fingers over the cover of his notebook, the leather darker and softer than mine. “Maybe he thought forty-three was going to be his year,” I say, thinking about the number he wrote so often. “And he didn’t want to enter a new decade still trying to prove her innocence.” He was forty-nine when he died, but maybe forty-three was how old he’d been when he found Kezia’s diary. Could be that’s all the number ever meant.
Goldie frowns at me. “Forty-three?”
I show her a passage Dad transcribed, pointing to the number scrawled in the margin. “It’s something he repeated a lot in his notebook. We could never figure out what it meant in relation to Kezia, and maybe that’s because it only meant something to him.”
“And Edmund Harrington,” Goldie says, letting her attention wander back to the spiderweb.
“What do you mean?” I say slowly.
“Hey, how come the water doesn’t break the web? Isn’t it heavier than the silk?”
“Hey.” My voice sharpens. “Tell me what you meant. What does the number forty-three have to do with Edmund Harrington?”
She looks at me like I’m the ten-year-old. “That’s how many lines he wrote in his letter.”
Thirty-Six
Wren
Dad is officially calling the time of death for the FeeJee mermaid in the taxidermy lab. He pulled out all his old tricks, and even tried his hand at some new ones, but he finally has to admit there’s no salvaging it.
“You know my great-great-grandfather bought it from P. T. Barnum himself?”
“I thought he wrestled with it for two days,Old Man and the Seastyle, off the coast of Japan and, you know, Fiji.” I helpfully lift the old piece of etched driftwood that used to be mounted beside the mermaid. “Says so right here.”
He makes a dismissive sound in the back of his throat. “Gonna have to find something online for that display before next weekend. I don’t have anything else that’s close to being ready and we are not having an empty exhibit when we introduce Nereus to the world.”
