“Should we dig in?”
Cosima touched her finger to the range of dates on the page with the photograph. “If this guest book starts as long ago as this, my parents will be in here.”
“Then wehaveto dig in. It’s what Phoebe Frank wanted.”
“Stop calling her ‘Phoebe Frank.’” Cosima sounded distracted, trailing her finger down the edge of the paper. She turned to the first page, revealing a long column of signatures on one side. There were pairs of printed lines on the facing page for guests to write something to the proprietor or for future guests to read.
“Let’s find out whyPhoebethought this inn was magic.” Edie leaned in and moved the battery-operated candle closer, lighting up the page.
Her shoulder touched Cosima’s, and she didn’t move away.
She tried to resist the protective feeling that came over her with the lowering of Cosima’s walls, but it was useless. As her mother liked to say, Edie had to be Edie.
If Cosima needed to drop her guard to let a little magic in, Edie would keep her safe. It wasn’t the smartest impulse to follow. Edie was no longer able to deny that shehadmanifested an unfortunate crush on Phoebe Frank’s daughter, despite her best intentions. But she could keep a lid on it. They could spend what was left of this dark and stormy night traveling through the pages of this guest book together. Cosima could play.
Edie would worry about her relentlessly optimistic heart in the morning.
Chapter Five
“Wait, did it say the one with the crook or the shepherdess?” Cosima sat on the piano bench in the lounge, holding a dusty Royal Doulton bone china figurine in each hand so that she could compare them more closely. One had a wide-brimmed hat and held a big shepherd’s crook, and the other sported a bonnet and cradled a lamb in her arms.
“It doesn’t say. It just says, ‘Gregory’s blushing shepherdess keeps a secret.’” Edie was reading off the Notes app on Cosima’s phone, where Cosima had translated the message they found in the guest book.
Her mother’s message.
It had been easy enough to find the record of Phoebe’s visit. The guest book entries were in chronological order, and even if they hadn’t been, at some point Morag had protected Phoebe’s signature with a long strip of clear tape over the top of it.
In the two lines for guest messages, her mother had written a message in the code she’d taught Cosima when she was a girlso they could leave notes to each other without the staff leaking their whereabouts or plans. She called it “Phoebe language,” but Cosima had later learned that it was a simple Caesar cipher, with each letter of the alphabet substituted by the one that came six letters before it.
Because my name has six letters, she’d told Cosima.And so does yours.
Edie had pointed out that the existence of this code, and particularly the reason for its existence, gave Cosima a solid point in their game. Cosima had laughed and told her that she and her mother and Duncan all enjoyed codes. Duncan’s mother had been a codebreaker in the Second World War, and he’d taught her and Phoebe quite a few of the tricks he’d learned as a child.
Cosima only realized after she’d finished speaking that this was a personal detail she’d never told a stranger before.
Edie came up closer to her, blocking the light with her body in a way that rendered Cosima’s attempt at inspection pointless. “So I guess either one of these figurines could be the shepherdess?”
A little irritated, she shoved the two porcelains back onto the piano top. “Bothof these have red cheeks.Bothhave the accessories of a shepherd. You’ve wandered around this inn much more than I have, so you tell me, is there anything else that could be a shepherdess? A painting? A statue?”
The blunt ends of Edie’s dark hair brushed her bare waist where her minisculeEAST DANCE TEAMtee didn’t meet the waistband of her sweatpants.
“I’ve been everywhere except Morag’s kitchen and your room,” Edie said. “As far as I know, you’re holding the only sheep-related items in the place. Which one has a secret? No idea.”
Cosima shook them one at a time near her ear. Nothing.
“So the secret isn’t that your mom filled one of them with diamonds.”
“She thought diamonds were tacky. Her style was more about aggressively buying controlling shares in unwitting companies.” Cosima inspected the statues for any cracks or hidden openings. “And real estate. So much real estate.”
Edie sat down next to Cosima on the piano bench, holding out her hand to take one of the figurines. In the last hour that they’d spent decoding Phoebe’s entry, Cosima had grown more accustomed to Edie’s physical closeness. It wasn’t what she was used to. At the Castle, everyone maintained a bubble of personal space. There were air-kisses. Side-by-side strolls with her mother in the gardens—some of their best times together—or planting out a perennial bed with Duncan while they knelt in the dirt in happy silence, several feet apart.
Cosima couldn’t remember the last time she’d had casual human contact with anyone. In LA, everything was so vast, the margins wide, the rooms and boardrooms capacious and minimally furnished. They were places to breeze in and out of.
There were people who’d made it plain that Cosima could have all the human contact she wanted from them, but the prospect had never appealed. She didn’t want the person who met her eyes at a restaurant to touch her. She couldn’t imagine any of the people who’d pursued her wrapping their arms around her, or putting their mouth on hers in a kiss, or pulling her into bed, skin to skin. Her friends were not people who held hands or piled into cars and brunch booths. They didn’t try on each other’s clothes or braid each other’s hair.
It wasn’t that Cosima didn’twant. She did. But hers was a nonspecific yearning that pulled at her chest and sometimes throbbed between her legs. It felt personal. Quiet. And it had never been called up by her connectiontoany other person.
But Gregory Place was emphatically not the Castle. This inn was an intimate warren of furniture and tight hallways. Every chair and mattress swallowed a person up in cushioning and featherdown.
