by K. Ryan
Huh. Wasn't expecting that. I guess she's smarter than I gave her credit for.
"Anyway," she bats a hand like it's no big deal. "I found all those postcards in the bottom drawer of his desk. It was locked, so I'm pretty sure it means something. I'm just not sure what yet."
Right. You don't lock up something if it doesn't have value.
"Any ideas?" she asks softly. "Father Lindsay wasn't much help when we tried to talk to him yesterday."
My whole body stills.
"He wouldn't talk to you?"
Both Rae and Bennett shake their heads.
"He pretty much ran out of there as fast as he could," Bennett explains and he frowns at the memory, as if he can't reconcile Father Lindsay's actions with the man we both know either.
"You know him though, don't you?" Rae leans forward in her seat, that conviction creeping in again. "If we went back there with you, I don't think he'd run away again."
I shake my head. "No, he wouldn't."
Because I wouldn't let him. I'd hunt him down and tie him up if I had to until he explained himself and those postcards. I don't think I'd be sitting here if it weren't for him and I can't tear my eyes away from the screen if I tried.
"That's what I figured," Rae nods softly and now I understand why she agreed to meet me. She finally knows she needs me just as much as I need her.
But before we move forward, we have to figure out what these postcards mean. If we're going to go back to Father Lindsay with this, I want ammunition. I want to know exactly what these messages point to so he can't run away as easily.
"This means April in Irish," I point to the word, Aibrean, on her screen. Anyone from Southie worth their salt knows at least a little bit of Irish.
"Yeah, I figured that out already," Rae shrugs and when my eyebrows dip into a frown, she just lifts a shoulder again. "All I had to do was pop it into Google translate. It doesn't take a genius to figure it out, you know."
My hands lift up in the air in defense and Bennett chuckles softly next to her. He's proud of her, that much I can tell. My feelings don't quite round that particular corner, but at the very least, I can appreciate her resourcefulness. That's the kind of thing that got us these postcards in the first place and probably the thing that's going to help us find more like them.
"Alright, alright, you win," I allow easily and blow out an exasperated breath. "So, this is all we've got right now, right?"
Bennett nods empathically from across the table and Rae, to her credit, nods instead of firing off some smart-ass comment.
"There was a safe in his office too," she adds softly. "I didn't get a chance to really try to open it, but it can't be any different than that locked drawer in his desk. Whatever he's got in there is obviously something he doesn't want anyone to see."
"Maybe we just take it one step at a time? Figure out why your dad has those postcards and see where that takes us."
Common sense tells me that getting into that safe is what we need to focus on. Pure, unadulterated curiosity, confusion, and frustration are pointing me in another direction. Rae and Bennett might be able to move on to that safe now, but I doubt I'm even going to sleep until I know why Father Lindsay sent me hurtling back toward Rae and these postcards. I'm not the only one who's been acting out of character lately...running away from Rae? Turning around and telling me to find her? That's some serious two-faced bullshit and I expected better of him.
"There's something else, too," Rae sighs and for the first time I see something other than hostility and frustration in her eyes. "He didn't admit it, but...I think Father Lindsay knew my mom."
Once I've gotten a handle on that particular bomb, my mind sifts through everything I've ever heard about Jillian Moretti. I don't remember any of it, but I do know the press had a field day with the story—the boozy, pill-popping wife of the budding mayor/mobster who succumbed to her both addiction and postpartum, leaving an infant daughter behind. A juicy story by any definition.
Never once did Father Lindsay ever utter a word about Rae's mom or anyone else in her family. No indications that they were anything to him at all. And that thought has my stomach swimming in uneasiness and jittery alarm.
"Yeah," Bennett nods soberly like he read my mind. "Shit just got real."
And so, my shaky alliance with the devil began.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rae
PR6037T617D7
241
Aibrean 8
PR6037T617D7
448
Fiedfath 22
PR5818L2
15
Marta 13
And so on and so on...
Each postcard is addressed to the same person and the message has the same structure: a series of nonsensical letters and numbers followed by a month in Irish and yet another number. Some of the top sequences are exactly the same, others have a similar variation, and I just want to bang my head into the counter until something starts to make sense.
At least I've got the last lines mostly figured out. Aibrean 8 has to mean April 8th. Fiedfath 22 is May 22nd. Marta 13, March 13th. Thank you, Google.
But that's it. That's all I've got.
After almost two hours of attempting to decode these enigmas, the three of us had to part ways at the coffeehouse because I had to get to the store, but that wasn't before breaking out that list-creation app on my iPad, much to Bennett's delight. All that had gotten us was dead-end after dead-end and frustration after frustration. Conspiracy theories revolving around nuclear codes, the Freedom Trail, the security passwords for Fenway Park, and how to steal tickets to see Hamilton—any ticket, according to Bennett—just aren't going to help us.
I'm finished eating, but still have a good 15 minutes left of my break before I have to head back out to the floor. Nobody will notice if I get a little work done and start a new, more plausible list of possible postcard explanations. My fingers grope inside the folds of my purse, but come up empty.
"Shit," I mutter under my breath.
I know I didn't forget it at the coffeehouse. The problem is that my purse is too spacious and I've got way too much junk in it. Finally, I give in and start taking all those unnecessary items out of my bag as I find them. My sunglasses find the break table first, then my overstuffed makeup bag. Next I toss The Age of Innocence on the table and lean down again to dig in my purse, but my movements still.
My gaze locks on the barcode taped into the corner of my library book. Right above it, lies the following sequence: PS3545.H16 A7.
I can't move. My entire body is on pause, frozen in disbelief and an awareness that still doesn't make sense.
Now I lunge for my phone, flipping through picture after picture and it's all right there. Right in front of my face. Even at the coffeehouse, this stupid library book sat facedown the entire time we sat at the table trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
I want to laugh, but I don't have time for that.
Now that the clutter is cleared from my purse, my iPad easily slips into my hand and I open up a web search to get me to the Boston Public Library's homepage. The first code I type in is the one written on the first postcard, PR6037T617D7. And sure enough, it takes me to exactly what I didn't know I was looking for.
It's actually PR6037.T617 D7, but that particular detail doesn't seem too important right now. What has me riveted is the title attached to it.
Dracula.
The next one, PR5818L2, takes me to Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde. Some of them aren't in circulation anymore, but before long, I have the rest all sorted out by their respective call numbers: The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, a collection of poems by W.B. Yeats, Ulysses, Little Women, Walden, The Scarlet Letter, a book of poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay, some short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, a few plays by George Bernard Shaw, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, and some essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson—and every single one of them is housed at the central library in Back Bay.
One mystery gives
way to another.
My hands tremble and I have to set the iPad down. What else am I supposed to do but sit here and stare at the screen, fixated on yet another riddle...this doesn't exactly point to Sean's ticket out of prison and what any of these books in the Boston Public Library have to do with one another is just another piece to unravel.
And there's a sense of foreboding settling over my shoulders that doesn't sit well. These postcards were no accident and no coincidence. They were addressed to Father Lindsay, who stared at me with such horror, such disbelief, that no amount of justification will ever be enough to explain away. He knew my mom and judging by the postmarked dates on each postcard, he knew her long before she died.
But what about the other numbers and the dates?
I have an idea, but I could be completely—
"Hey, Rae?" My sister's voice calls out to me and my eyes snap up at the sound. Her head sticks halfway inside our makeshift break room with her dark hair spilling out around the door.
"Yeah?"
"Do you think you could come out here for a second? The girl in the fitting room—"
"Abby."
Lucy frowns at me like I've just started reciting Shakespeare in pig Latin. This really isn't rocket science; I asked the customer her name before I let her into a fitting room and wrote it on the little white board on the door. Super hard, right? Unfortunately for my sister, those tiny, yet vital details tend to escape her more often than not and that's exactly why Chic to Chic is struggling.
"Right," Lucy says slowly. "Anyway, she's asking me if those jeans you gave her are the right size."
"Can't you do it? I'm still on break."
"I know, but she's asking for you."
Even though I can hear Bennett's voice in my head screaming at me to grow a backbone already, I slip my iPad back into my purse and head for the door. This is my fault—I know that, but it's like I just have this compulsive, knee-jerk reaction to just do whatever she asks and to an embarrassing extent, whatever my dad asks too. I've just stumbled on something of a breakthrough, at least I think it is, but here I am, dutifully playing my well-practiced role of family doormat.
After I scrutinize the jeans Abby's trying on and decide she needs the next size down just to compare, I turn to head back to the break room only to skid to a stop. My sister leans up against the wall closest to the registers with her phone in hand, happily tapping away like she didn't just completely defer store responsibility to me.
Something just snaps. I'm done with this today and I have better things to do with my time than do her job for her.
"Hey, Luce?"
She can't even pull her eyes away from the screen long enough to look at me. "Yeah?"
"I'm going to take off for the rest of the day. Something came up that I need to take care of."
That gets her attention and her brown eyes snap up from her phone. "Wait, what? You can't just leave—you're scheduled until 6."
"Yeah, well," I shrug. "Like I said, something came up. I gotta go."
Adrenaline spikes through me. This is a rush I'm not used to—this feeling like I can put my sister in her place because she deserves it, like I can leave early because she basically does it every day, like I can leave the store in her care for one whole day. Maybe it'll burn down. Maybe it won't. Today I just don't care.
"But..." she trails off.
"How many times have I covered for you, Luce? You can handle your business for the rest of the day."
Her eyes widen at the pointed words, your business, but at the end of the day, that's exactly what it is: hers. She just hasn't really figured that part out yet.
"What's going on?" Lucy asks, taking a few careful steps closer to me like she's approaching a wild animal. "Are you okay? This is weird..."
Oh, so now it's weird that I have a life? That I have something important I need to do and I can't sit here all day and run her store for her while she spends our dad's money like it's going out of style?
I wish I could actually say that to her. But I just can't.
"Look, I'll explain...sometime, but I really have to get going."
She just gapes at me as I backpedal toward the break room. If I tell her the real reason I'm practically sprinting out of here today, she'd tattle to my dad before I even got out of the parking lot. That's just the way my sister is wired and my dad's as much to blame for that as her. I just can't spill something like this to her and expect any kind of respect in return.
So before I give her a chance to barricade the door or give my conscience a chance to talk me out of it, I sweep my purse up and hightail to my car without another word.
"TELL ME WHY," Bennett sings along to the radio, strumming his thumbs on the steering wheel. "Ain't nothing but a heartache...tell me why..."
Jack's head slowly turns in the passenger seat to glance at Bennett with grim annoyance lining his face.
"Ain't nothing but a mistake," Bennett keeps singing, none the wiser that his music choices are making his co-pilot's lips curl up in disgust. "Tell me why...I never wanna hear you say I want it that way."
I think I might have heard Jack growl and I bite down on my bottom lip to keep from laughing out loud.
"You know," Bennet muses thoughtfully and glances at me in the rearview mirror. "I've never understood what they're talking about in this song. What, exactly, do they not want that way? And why can't someone say it? I don't get it."
"I guess that's just one of life's great mysteries," Jack retorts from the front seat. "I won't be able to sleep tonight until I know."
"Not a BSB fan?" Bennett looks at him from raised eyebrows. When Jack just frowns at the acronym, Bennett sighs and glances at me as if to say, What is our world coming to?
"Backstreet Boys," he clarifies.
Jack just huffs out a harsh breath and turns his head to stare out the window without another word. Bennett shrugs, happily carefree as he swivels his shoulders a little to the beat.
"I wish I could've seen Zero's face when you told her off," Bennett sighs and glances at me through the rearview mirror again with big, brown, puppy-dog eyes. "Please tell me you'll do it again next time I stop in. Pretty please."
"I didn't exactly tell her off," I clarify. "I just left—that's all."
"Who's Zero?" Jack spares me a brief glance over his shoulder. This is the first time he's even really acknowledged I'm in the car with them and now I wish he'd just kept pretending I wasn't here.
"Rae's sister, Lucy," Bennett tells him, spitting out my sister's name like it's poison.
"So...?"
It's a fair question and the devious smile that spreads across Bennett's face is enough to force me to interject, if anything just to spare us all from Bennett's gleeful hatred.
"Benn has a tendency to take something he finds..." I trail off, searching for the most accurate description for his quirk. "Distasteful about someone and turn it into a nickname. I can't remember the last time you called her by her actual name, Benn, just so you know."
"And that's exactly how it's going to stay," he nods firmly.
My eyes roll up to the ceiling.
"So you call her Zero because..."
Again, Jack's confusion is fair. Bennett's never really been one for subtlety, so I jump in once again to defend my sister's honor.
"Because she wears a size zero."
Now Jack's forehead just crinkles and he cocks an eyebrow at my best friend.
"Never, ever, and I mean ever, trust a woman who doesn't eat, my friend," Bennett wags a finger at him as we roll up to a stop sign. "Those women are shifty and bitchy. Not to mention two-faced. And cranky. Really, really cranky."
Jack mulls it over, scratching underneath his chin in thought before nodding in agreement. "Yeah, I think you're right about that. You called her Clamato at the coffeehouse." He jerks a thumb behind him in my direction. "Is that because of the hair?"
Her has a name, but I bite my tongue. I don't want to draw attention to the real reason Bennett
chose that particular nickname for me any more than necessary.
Bennett's eyes gleam wickedly at me from the rearview mirror. "Rae wishes."
"Don't. You. Dare," I push out through clenched teeth. "I will kill you."
"Is she always so violent?" Jack wonders out loud.
"Pretty much," Bennett shoots me a grin over his shoulder and then shrugs at Jack. "I like my balls where they are, thank you very much. Maybe someday when you're in the inner circle, I'll let you in on that little secret."
Jack just bats a hand in the air. "I'm good."
Easily side-stepping that last comment, Bennett turns the volume down a little and glances at me through the rear-view mirror again. "This is gonna work, right?"
All I can do is shrug. I don't really have a better answer.
"Probably a waste of time," Jack adds from the front seat and I twist my hands in my lap to keep myself from pouncing. "But it's all we have."
"I don't see anyone else with a better idea," I bite out through clenched teeth. That's it—I can't stand less than two minutes in this guy's presence without wanting to resort to physical violence.
Jack lifts his hands in the air in defense. "Hey, don't get me wrong. I never would've thought of this. I'm just still having a hard time wrapping my head around it all, especially since I can't exactly see Father Lindsay coming to the library and tracking down all those call numbers."
None of us have asked the big, glaringly-obvious, really uncomfortable question yet: what, exactly, was the nature of Father Lindsay's relationship to my mom? It would open up a whole can of worms that I don't think any of us are ready to tackle yet.
"Hey," Jack gestures to his side of the car. "Bang a right here."
"Nuh uh," Bennett counters. "That'll take us all the way around. We wanna get to Bolyston, not Dorchester."
Jack jerks a thumb toward his window. "This way is faster."
"Says the guy who's probably never stepped foot in the library his entire life," I grumble under my breath. "Sure. Let's take your advice."