Chapter 3 The Notebook

Nell would not touch the rose. She stood across the room, arms folded, and watched me pick it up by the stem.

"Put it in water," Nell said.

"Why?"

"You put it in water. You don't throw it away. And you don't ask who left it."

"That's three rules, none on the list."

Nell got into bed with her shoes on. "Some of them aren't," she said.

At one in the morning I was still awake, sitting on the floor with the rose in a mug on the windowsill, the torn slip of paper flattened against my knee, and the taped box unopened in front of me.

I had read it a hundred times in an hour.

Don't unpack the box in a room you don't trust. Don't let them see the king. And whatever they promise you... the winner already lost.

It was his handwriting. I would have known it blind. But the box was still sealed, and the notebook was inside it, and the paper in my hand had been cut from a book I had not opened yet.

I pulled the box between my knees.

My mother had put her hand flat on the lid at the bus station. Not dramatic. Just flat and firm and there a long time.

Leave it here.

It's Dad's.

I know whose it is. My mother had not blinked. That's why.

I cut the tape with my key.

Inside was a folded sweater that still smelled of a house I no longer lived in, three receipts, a broken watch, and a notebook.

Black. Fat with damp. A rubber band that snapped when I touched it and left a gray line across the cover like a scar.

I had seen this notebook a hundred times. On the kitchen table. Under his arm. It had been the most boring object in my childhood.

I opened it.

The first thirty pages were nothing. Interview times. Phone numbers. A shopping list with milk underlined twice.

Then the handwriting changed. Smaller. Faster. It stopped using the lines.

He had started writing in a shorthand I half remembered him inventing at the kitchen table to annoy my mother. Consonants only. Names cut to two letters. Whole sentences I could read the shape of but not the meaning.

I could read the dates, though.

They ran from eleven years ago to nine years ago, then stopped. He had died eight years ago in a stairwell in a city I had never visited, and the police had used the word robbery so gently that I had believed it for six years.

I turned another page.

CORVAIN.

Printed. Capitals. Pressed hard enough to emboss the paper underneath.

I sat very still.

My father had been a reporter who covered city contracts and water bills. He had never once mentioned this place, in any conversation, in any year of my life.

My mother had never mentioned it either.

My mother had put her hand flat on the box.

After that, the notebook was about Corvain the way a fence is about a field. He never said it. He circled it.

Page after page of initials with question marks. Amounts of money with no currency. A list of nine surnames, six crossed out, three left alone. FORD was one of the three.

And in the margins, the same drawing, over and over. A chess king on its side, the crown broken off.

He had drawn it maybe forty times, on the edges, in the corners, the way people doodle when they are trying not to say something out loud.

My father had doodled on everything. Grocery lists. A whole army of stick men on my seventh grade permission slip.

I turned the page.

Three pages further in, there was a stub.

I almost missed it. The notebook was sewn, not glued, and someone had gone in close to the spine with something sharp and taken a page out cleanly, leaving a stub the width of a fingernail.

I ran my thumb along it, then checked the whole book front to back, one page at a time, and my hands were not steady by the end.

Eleven pages were gone.

I held the torn slip to the nearest stub.

The cut matched. The tear on the slip and the tear in the spine were one tear, two halves of a page, and I had been handed one half through a locked door before I ever broke the tape on the box.

Someone had taken these pages out of a sealed book.

And then given me one back.

They had not been ripped in temper. They had been cut. Different sections, spread out, and every single one of them from the part after CORVAIN was written.

Someone had read this book. Someone had decided what I could see.

My mother could not have done it. My mother would not have kept the rest.

I put the notebook down on the floor and sat with my back against the bed and looked at it for a long time, the way you look at a dog you thought you knew.

The last written page was near the back, upside down, as if he had turned the book to hide it fast.

Six lines. Not shorthand. Plain, tired handwriting, the letters getting bigger toward the end, the way they do when someone runs out of time.

I understood one sentence, where he had gone around it three times until the ink went through.

If you're reading this... you're already in danger.

I read it eleven times.

The book was nine years old. He had not written it to my mother, who wanted it burned, or to the police, since he never gave it to them.

He had written you're reading this.

Not someone.

You.

My ears were ringing. Far below, a door closed, and it sounded like another country.

The smart thing was to tape the box shut, mail it home, keep my head down for four years, and leave with a degree and a life.

I thought about my mother's flat hand.

I know whose it is. That's why.

I set the notebook on my knees and started copying the shorthand into the back of my chemistry pad, letter by letter, because I had watched him invent it, and somewhere under eight years of dust I still had the key.

I worked until my fingers cramped.

At some point I turned the desk lamp so it pointed at the page. Which put the light behind me. Which turned the window into a mirror.

I noticed it the way you notice a spider. All at once, with your whole body, before your brain gets a vote.

There was a shape in the glass.

Not in the room. Through it. Down in the courtyard, three floors below, on the grass between the lamps, a person was standing with their face turned up toward my window.

They were not walking. They were not hiding behind anything. They were just standing there, perfectly still, in the middle of the lawn at two in the morning, looking directly at the notebook open in my lap.

I did not move.

Neither did they.