Cosima sunk the heels of her hands into her eyes. “You stop. If you start with that kind of thing, I’ll lose my edge.” She smiled and rolled on her back and turned her head to Edie. “You know, the only time anyone ever tells me I look like her is when I’m with her. On my own, I’m just me.” Her stomach gurgled. “Oh, no.”
They’d left the door to the balcony open a crack, and Edie could hear noise from the street—traffic, someone shouting, faraway church bells. The city waking up.
It made her wish for a different life. For real magic that would let her stay in this moment, where they could pull the covers up over them and she could fall back asleep with her head on this woman’s shoulder, breathing in the scent of her, wrapped in her arms.
But she didn’t resent the busy day ahead of them, any more than she could regret what they’d done. For the first time in weeks, Edie found herself looking forward to whatever came next.
“We’re hungry,” she said. “We need to buy a couple of sweatshirts with Joan of Arc on them. The bathroom is stocked with a pharmacy’s worth of toiletries that look better than anything I’ve ever paid for, so we’re set there and only need to shower. Should we get ready, then take the map to a café to figure out where we might go?”
“Yes, let’s do that.” Cosima moved to a sitting position, giving Edie aftershocks between her legs. This woman’s beauty was a lot to take in at once. “But I might have already figured it out.”
“Really? When?”
“You fell asleep first.” She gathered her hair in her hands.
“I’m absolutely positive thatyoufell asleep first.”
“I had a nap in the car that took the edge off. You were snoring almost as soon as your head hit your single, sad pillow.” Cosima had begun sifting her fingertips through her hair, searching out tangles and gently pulling them apart.
“I heard your breathing change!”
Her shoulders dropped, and even in a cross-legged positionon the bed, Cosima appeared to gain a few inches in height. Imperious again, but not intimidating. Not in the least. She tugged at a particularly stubborn tangle. “I was probably just relaxed, because you one hundred percent fell asleep first, and I got bored. Then I got out the map and my phone.”
With a sigh, Edie sat up, too. “Well, I don’t remember that, so you must be right,” she grumbled.
Cosima leaned over to grab the hotel notepad and pen that was on Edie’s bedside, giving Edie a glorious glimpse down the cup of her bra, which Edie now regretted having failed to remove.
“I’m going to write that down,” she said, tapping the pen against the notepad. “‘Cosima is right.’ I’ll put the date and time, and you can sign it for me.”
“I take it back. You fell asleep first and then got out the map in a fugue state of sleepwalking.”
“Shush.” Cosima flashed her a killing smile, one filigreed eyebrow arched. “I used one ofyourmethods of research.”
“What’s that?”
“A tourist brochure. I’d grabbed one from the front desk when we got the room. And it turns out there’s a one-for-one connection between a location in Rouen and one of Agatha’s illustrations on the map.”
“Tell me.” Edie felt her brain spinning back up to its usual state of hyper-awareness. It made her notice again howgoodshe felt, like Cosima had poured syrupy light over her body.
“The illustration looks like a skull and crossbones, which we had both thought was very treasure-hunting pirate-like. But when I was looking at it more closely, I realized it’s not a human skull. I’m fairly sure it’s a cat’s skull. I took a picture and reverse image searched it.”
“What does acatskull mean?”
“Right, so, Rouen was hit by the plague hard, twice. The first time, in the thirteen hundreds, at least half the people died. They couldn’t give them all proper burials. They dug a mass grave near the church of Saint Maclou.”
“Grim.”
“Very. Over the years, the area around the pit was built up, but they didn’t disturb the pit itself because the church said those people were going to need their full set of bones in the resurrection. But then, two hundred years later, the plague came back. Time to dig another pit.”
“Bam!” Edie was getting too excited. She had done a fourth-grade project on the Black Plague.
“Again, more than half the population’s dead. They wanted to put the bodies in the same spot, but they couldn’t destroy the old bones, so they dug them up first and put them in an ossuary that circles around the pit in the middle.”
Edie rubbed her hands together. “Here is where I confess that I love stories that explain how something completely out of pocket happened like it’s normal. Yes, of course, the two plagues killing basically everyone meant the survivors had to make an enormous warehouse to store thousands of bones in. Perfectly regular.”
One of her knees had begun to bounce. Cosima smiled at it. “Unlike a lot of medieval landmarks, this one survived the centuries and even the blitzes of World War II. It’s been archaeologically studied and excavated. There are fascinating examples of medieval carving and statuary.”
“Which sounds amazing, but you were telling me something about a cat skull.”
