A Whisper in Time (11 page)

Susanna set her hand near mine. It meant she wanted to have her hand held, but she wouldn’t come right out and do it herself.
Most improper
.

When I linked my fingers through hers, she gripped them tightly.

“I cannot wait to find my sister’s journals.”

It made me smile to hear the excitement in her voice. It had been too long.

“What makes you sure they’ll be there?”

“Because I want it to be true.”

Even with my favorite shortcuts, it took forever to arrive in the general vicinity of the Archives, and parking was even harder. The main lot was full. I circled the building three times before giving up and had to settle for a parking space between the Governor’s Mansion and the Avery-Eton House. It would be a bit of a hike.

She didn’t wait for me to open the truck door. By the time I reached the sidewalk, she stood there, nearly hopping from impatience.

“It’s three fifty-five. Will we have time?”

I nodded confidently. “Come on. Let’s go.”

We ran down the sidewalk, but between Susanna’s long skirt and traffic lights that hated us, it was after four when we entered the lobby.

“Hey,” I said to the security guard. “We have an appointment in the warehouse.”

“Sign the register, and I’ll need to check your IDs.”

Holy shit. How could I have forgotten something so important? I’d been here often in the weeks preceding Susanna’s escape, scouring through ancient contracts and wills. I’d been through the security here enough to know that the Archives staff carded visitors every chance they got.

“I don’t have one,” she said, her eyes wide with panic.

The guard shrugged. “We can’t admit you without ID. You’ll have to come back another day.”

“But I can’t—”

I pulled her away from the desk and over to a bench in the corner. “We need to think this through.”

“What is there to think about? I don’t have identification. What am I to do?” The excitement died in her eyes, like someone had snuffed out a light.

I wanted to kick something. Why hadn’t I thought about this? I knew we had to have ID. It was such a common thing that I hadn’t thought about it at all. “I’ll go down there and see what I can find.”

“You don’t know her handwriting.”

“Maybe she wrote her name on the cover.”

“What if she did not? What if there are hundreds of journals?”

“There won’t be hundreds.” I pulled out my phone. “I have a camera. I’ll take photos of the pages and show them to you.”

She took a deep breath and averted her face to stare out the window. “It will take a long time.”

“We’ll come back as often as we need to find Phoebe’s journals.” I didn’t wait for her to respond. I showed my ID at the guard and slammed down the stairs.

The girl with pigtails, the one who’d helped me do research earlier in the summer, waited behind the desk. “You?”

“Yeah. Me.”

“What do you want this time?”

“I’m looking for diaries, letters, journals, anything from the last years of the eighteenth century.”

“Is there a specific range?”

“1796-1802.”

She nodded and disappeared behind a row of metal cabinets. When she returned, she carried a tray of beat-up, crumbling, musty books and papers. “Here are the artifacts we have from the 1790s through 1810.”

There were about a dozen or more items to choose from.

“Can I open them?”

“No, I’ll do it for you.” She snapped on a pair of gloves and picked up the best book of the bunch. “This one was written by a printer’s apprentice.”

“Can you tell whether it was written by a guy or a girl?”

“A printer’s apprentice would be a guy.”

“I only want to look at stuff by girls.”

“Okay.” She set it down and picked up a tattered pile of pages, barely held together by something that looked like string. “This one was written by a housemaid, and there is a second journal that we’re confident she wrote as well.”

Anticipation feathered down my spine. The helper carefully drew back the top page. Inside, row after row of text had been jammed onto every square millimeter of paper. There were loops and lines in faded ink. Impossible for me to read.

I felt a prickle of hope. “I have a friend waiting in the lobby to see this, but she doesn’t have ID. Can I take some photos with my phone?”

“Sure, but don’t use the flash.”

“Do we have enough time?”

She nodded. “I lock the doors at five-thirty.”

Ten minutes later, I emerged from the basement with shots of handwriting from both journals by the housemaid and a few samples from letters by a tavern keeper and a dry goods merchant.

Susanna sat on the end of the bench, hands clasped tightly in her lap, nothing moving on her face but her eyes. They tracked me across the floor, never wavering.

“Do you have news?” she asked, her tone husky, her face stiff with the effort to keep hope at bay.

“I think so.” I dropped onto the bench beside her and held up the photo gallery on my phone, trying not to shake. I wanted this to be right for her sake.
Please let the writing be Phoebe’s
.

As she stared at the image, she choked back a sob. “It’s hers.”

I swiped. “How about this one?”

She nodded, biting her lip.

I jumped to my feet, grabbed her into a hug, and spun her around, right there in the middle of the lobby. She laughed and clung to me, arms locked tightly about my neck.

When the spontaneous celebration ended seconds later, I set her back on her feet. “I’ll go back down there and see what I can do about getting access for you.”

“Oh, indeed.” Her eyes clouded. “What will happen if I cannot visit that special room?”

“Don’t worry. If I have to snap every page, I will.” I dropped a light kiss on her forehead and raced back downstairs.

It was quarter after five when I made it back to the special area. That was calling it close. “My girlfriend is interested in the books by the housemaid. Do I have enough time to photograph every page?”

The girl shook her head. “No need to. All pages have been recorded as digital images. For twenty bucks, I can burn you a DVD.”

“Deal.”

“Cool.” She scowled at me a moment and then nodded her head, as if reaching a decision. “It’ll be hard for your girlfriend to read the text. These documents are in worse condition than most of the collection, and the way they wrote in the eighteenth century is different from the way we do.”

“Susanna is good at transcription.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

The girl’s eyes widened. “Ask her to capture the transcriptions. We’d love to have the help.”

* * *

Susanna bounced on the passenger seat all the way home. Her hand kept straying to the DVD, as if she could feel her sister’s presence on its surface.

We didn’t even discuss what to do when we reached my house—just ran up the stairs to her apartment and placed the DVD in the old laptop’s drive. I pulled up the first page of the first diary from the Archives.

Susanna shook with excitement. “Here, let me,” she said, pushing my hand aside.

“Sure.”

She paged through the images, her lips moving as she read the scrawled text. I could hardly make out anything.

“Can you read this stuff?”

“Of course.” Her voice had that hollow ring that meant she was only half-listening.

It didn’t take long for the silence—and being ignored—to get old. “Do you want me to stay?”

“It isn’t necessary.”

That stung. Not sure why, except that she wouldn’t have gotten this far without my help.

Yeah, I did know why. I didn’t like being dismissed.

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

C
HAOTIC
A
SSORTMENT

Most of my sister’s first journal—the one we purchased at the Eton House gift shop—had had little of an exciting nature. My sister had delighted in recording the most boring details of her life. Naturally, it would be better to have a boring life instead of a miserable one.

Yet I had hopes that the next two journals would be more interesting.

Mark had passed along the request from the young lady at the Archives. I was confident about transcribing Phoebe’s words and would be glad to provide this small service. Although it might not be their expectation, the Archives staff would receive a report prepared in my most careful and modern handwriting, since I had no desire to use a keyboard for anything other than the unavoidable requirements of searching on the internet.

I gathered paper and pen, preparing to do my best. With great anticipation, I opened my sister’s second journal and prepared to transcribe the first entry, which began six days after the housekeeper beat Phoebe’s hands for breaking a vase.

The next few entries showed Phoebe’s interest in the new objects of art that the Etons had brought with them from their plantation near New Bern. She described them in fascinated detail. Lacing through her narratives was a chaotic assortment of chores as she poured out the calamities of a household without a housekeeper.

Her awe at her mistress continued unabated.

The next few entries documented the search for a housekeeper. After meeting with many candidates, Mrs. Eton had finally found someone who promised to meet her exacting standards. Mrs. Jasper, “tall of body and strong of limb,” arrived with great energy and skill. A widow without children, she made her mark quickly.

The next four pages were either torn or crumbled. I read as much as I could but soon grew frustrated by sentences and paragraphs only partially decipherable.

It was truly unfortunate, for the damaged pages covered what, for me, would’ve been the most interesting time of the year. The effort to support a large household in the dead of winter would make for entertaining reading. I should very much like to know how many food stores they had put up or if they continued to serve meat. In Mark’s world, the effort to eat had become so very easy. Fresh food, in bewildering quantities and varieties, was no more than a short car ride from the house—any time of day or year.

Numerous months were lost on the damaged pages, for I reached the spring of 1798 before the journal became readable again.