Sitting in a French café with the side of her boot touching Edie’s black Converse sneaker gave her a glimmer of what her mother had been trying to express. All of this—Edie, and Cosima’s feelings, and the wall full of wishes and dreams and broken hopes beside them—had been, just a few short weeks ago, impossible.
A petite woman with a steel-gray pixie and heavy horn-rimmed glasses came to their table. “Vous cherchez une lettre?”
Cosima turned and smiled, grateful to be saved by the bell, so to speak. “Oui,” she said. “Nous recherchons une lettre que nous pensons être de 1977 ayant été, laissée par une femme. Une écrivaine.”
The woman’s dark eyebrows lifted to her hairline, and she pulled a chair from a neighboring table and sat down. “You’re looking for a letter from a writer you think wrote one in seventy-seven.” Her English was clipped, only slightly blurred by her accent.
“We are.” Edie leaned forward. “A mystery writer. Agatha—”
“—Llewellyn,” the woman finished. “Of course. But a lot of people ask me to read that letter. Especially English people. Australians. Americans.”
“They do?” Edie scooted closer. The café was getting loud. “Why? None of these letters have the letter-writer’s name written on them. How would anyone know she wrote one? Is there a name connected to Agatha on the letter?”
“You ask a lot of questions at once.”
“I like to get them out before I forget I thought of them.”
The owner’s appreciative smirk made Cosima reach for Edie’s hand, a reaction that should have embarrassed her, theoretically, but was the only way she could think of to unlock her back teeth, clenched in unnecessary jealousy.
“I wouldn’t have done it,” the woman said. “It was my aunt, who owned this café before I did. She recognized Madame Llewellyn when she asked to pin up the letter. My aunt pinned it up under Madame Llewellyn’s supervision, but as soon as she left, she took it down and framed it. She displayed it in the hall on the way to the toilets.”
“Holy fuck, that’s bold,” Edie breathed. “Is that where it still is?”
“No. I did not like that she did that. Tacky, and the kind of thing that may discourage someone who does have a profile from leaving a letter.” She raised an eyebrow at Cosima. “I am very sorry for the loss of your mother.”
Cosima swallowed. “Thank you.”
The woman nodded. “I took down the letter. I tried to remove it from the frame, but the glass had adhered to the envelope, to the ink, so I decided to keep it framed until the rightful recipient came. Then we could, as they say, break the glass in the event of an emergency.” She looked at Edie. “If you are the rightful recipient, you can tell me now, who is the letter for?”
Cosima got out her phone. “It’s intended as a clue, we believe, for whoever is searching for a treasure in a hunt that Agatha devised. If you look here, you can see the pictures from where it began, in this guest book, and where it took us in England. We found the treasure map in the church.”
Edie turned around and fished the map from her jacketpocket, spreading it out on the table while Cosima showed the café owner her pictures.
“Then we went to a manor house, a castle, and finally here.” She finished flipping through the album, ending on the picture of the mummified cat. “We have reason to believe she left the next clue in that letter.”
The woman looked at the map, tracing over the details. “This is fantastic. But what gave you the right to start the hunt?”
“The owner of the inn, where the guest book is kept. Morag. She’s known about the hunt since Agatha stayed at the inn back in the seventies, but she hasn’t let anyone look for the treasure until us, though I have no idea why.”
The café owner stared at Edie for a long moment. Then she looked at Edie and Cosima’s joined hands. Uncertainty prickled along Cosima’s hairline.
“You don’t?” the woman asked.
“No,” Edie said. “Morag keeps her own counsel.”
The woman shook her head, letting out a chuckle, and Cosima couldn’t work out the source of her amusementorher wry knowledge. Annoying. “Could we read the letter, then?” She hadn’t meant for the question to come out so sharp, but she rarely did.
“I will allow this. One moment.” She stood up and disappeared into the crowded café.
“She isso cool,” Edie whispered. “Might also be a witch.”
“I think she was a little dramatic.”
“Hmm.” Edie nodded. “You, of course, would know.”
“Says the woman who considered finishing off her outfit with a child’s sword and sheath that was printed with ‘Sainte Jeanne d’Arc’ in neon pink.”
“I might still buy that. My niece would love it, and in the meantime, I’d have asword.”
