by Mara Webb
“I doubt that.”
“Well, whatever. I would bring it up with Gloria at your next session and maybe also tell her that you are super lucky to have a cool friend like me,” Kate laughed.
“The coolest person she knows is clearly me, you are a dork and the whole world knows it,” Effie yelled from the other room.
“Don’t you have a jewelry store to get to?” I reminded Kate. At that she shuffled out of the room and then I heard the front door closing behind her. I looked at the family tree again for a moment, alarmed at how easy it seemed to be to mess with my brain.
“Okay, so I’m thinking that we start off by making a display box for the front of the café, so people know what is inside them,” Effie said, drawing my attention back into the present. I walked back into the living room and found that she had food on the coffee table; pastries, small bread rolls and mini-jam jars.
“Am I going crazy?” I asked.
“Er… yeah,” Effie replied nonchalantly. “We’re all mad here, it’s part of the charm of the place. If you and Miller were eating breakfast together, would you rather have two croissants and two pain au chocolat each, or like, four croissants and no pain au chocolat?”
“I need more coffee,” I groaned, before sitting down beside her. A knock at the front door prompted me to stand up again almost immediately. When I got there and pulled the door open, I was staring at the face of the mail man with a stack of letters in his hands. “Jeff?”
“Morning, Sadie,” he sighed, stepping into the house as if he had been invited. There was no point fighting it, everyone seemed to think my home was public property. “Have you got a minute?”
“Sure, what’s up?”
“I was hoping that you might be able to tell me what this is?” he said, holding up a letter to the sun that was still shining through the front door and causing the envelope to be slightly transparent. Inside was a small piece of card that appeared to have no writing, but just a symbol. “I was told to bring strange things like this to you and I only happened to see it by accident. We’ve had a sudden uptick in the number of letters people are sending and it’s been crazy at the post office.”
“Symbol?” Effie barked, leaping from the living room and snatching the envelope out of Jeff’s hand.
“Yes. It makes no sense to me but—” Jeff began, Effie suddenly clapping her hands excitedly and causing him to stop talking.
“Runes,” she said. “Someone is learning runes! That’s really sweet in a way because it’s a dying language and a fun way to send secret notes to people because, literally, who knows runes at this point?”
“Do you know runes?” I asked.
“A little, I mean, I get by,” she said.
“And?” I pressed.
“Oh, well this one looks like an ‘N’ but that top bit is longer, see?” she said. “If I had to guess I’d say this one is from the oldest alphabet, I think it’s German?” Effie was clearly having a lot of fun being the expert in the room and was dragging out the moment instead of getting to the point. “Anyway, this means surrender.”
“Surrender? Who would write the word surrender on a note and post it?” I scoffed. “It sounds like a threat, but it doesn’t really work if nobody can read it.”
“Well I can read it,” Effie muttered to herself. She turned the letter over and looked at the address on the front. “Ah.”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. I mean, it’s probably nothing. We should call Ryder though,” she said.
“Why?”
“This has your name on it… I think this is a threat.”
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