The Last Little Blue Envelope (10 page)

The Stain on the Page

When she opened her eyes next, Ginny found that her face was pressed up against the window, hard. Just outside the window was the gentle, constant tinkling of bicycle bells.

“We’re in Amsterdam,” she said groggily, her lips rubbing against the cold glass.

“Have a nice kip?” Keith called from the front.

Something was weighing her down. Ginny turned to find the sleeping form of Oliver slumped against her, using her as a pillow. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant to have him there. He was warm, and not overly heavy. She had probably slept so well because of the body heat he was giving off. Still, he had to go. Ginny straightened herself up, and Oliver fell senselessly in the other direction, toward his door. This woke him up, and he reflexively rubbed his face and looked around.

“Are we there?” he asked.

“We’re
almost
there,” Keith said. “Not that we have any idea where we are supposed to go. Where are we going, precisely?”

“We should leave the car outside the city and ride the tram in,” Oliver replied. “There should be a car park coming up in a few minutes.”

“Not actually an answer,” Keith said. “Give us the next bit. Recite, freak.”

Oliver was still waking up. He yawned hard, pressed his hand to his temple, and began.

“‘From Paris, it’s time . . .’ Hang on.”

He blinked a few times and stared at the car ceiling, moving his lips silently.

“He’s forgotten it, hasn’t he?” Keith said.

“Shut it. ‘From Paris, it’s time to return to Amsterdam, the city of canals, bicycles, and delicious, delicious cheese. The Dutch are famous for their open windows. No curtains. No blinds. Their houses are on display. Walk along the canal streets, Gin. You’ll be right at eye level with every variety of human life. You can see into a thousand different worlds.

“ ‘But here’s the thing: You aren’t supposed to look. This is an understood Dutch custom. Everything will be laid bare for you, but you can’t ever turn your head and gawk. This is both elegant and incredibly perverse. The idea, I think . . .’ ”

He paused again.

“This is really much better than just bringing the letter,” Keith said.

“ ‘. . . is that whatever you are doing in your house, however you choose to live, is fine. You have nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to hide. But at the same time, you have to respect your neighbors enough not to stare.

“ ‘I don’t know. I’m making this up. I don’t even know if the Dutch know why this is the way of things. There’s probably some complicated historical precedent involving the curtain makers’ union or something. Also, I looked. I peeked in every window where anything even remotely interesting was going on. You can’t put something in front of me and expect me not to look.

“ ‘So, for the next layer of the painting, I decided to make a Dutch window, except you ARE supposed to look through it. Charlie has it. I am sure you have already seen it. You just need to go back and collect it. I realize that it’s difficult to carry around a tabletop, Gin. And now I’m asking you to carry around a tabletop and a window. That’s why I didn’t have you get these things the first time around. Once you’ve done that, take the ferry back to England. Head back home, to Richard’s.’

“There. That’s the whole section. We go back to where you started last time.”

“So we’re done after this?” Ginny asked.

“Not exactly,” Oliver said.

“More riddles,” Keith said, pulling off the motorway toward the parking lot. “Wonderful.”

A half hour later, they knocked on the door of 60 Westerstraat. The person who answered this time was not the same person Ginny met over the summer. This person also didn’t know a Charlie.

“So, we just start asking, I guess?” Ginny said, looking up and down the street. Westerstraat was one of the non-canal streets, full of fairly modern buildings.

“Do you know anything else about him?” Ellis asked. “A last name. A job. Anything?”

“The letter just gave his first name and address.”

“Right,” Ellis said. “So, we just start asking people if they know Charlie. We can do that.”

There weren’t many people around, and knocking on the doors to either side of number 60 produced no result. They spread the search farther down on either side, Keith and Ellis going to the left, and Ginny and Oliver going to the right. No one knew Charlie.

They stopped briefly to get some sandwiches.

“I don’t think this is working,” Keith said, examining a mysterious salad on his.

“Maybe Charlie is an English version of his name or something,” Ginny replied. “What’s important is the window. My aunt’s paintings . . . they’re kind of weird. Maybe we’re asking the wrong question. Maybe we need to ask about the painting itself.”

So they tried it again, this time asking about the window. This brought a result from the woman who worked at the flower shop.

“Oh, you mean the jungle window?” she said.

Ginny looked to Oliver, to see if he had any idea if a “jungle window” was the kind of thing they were supposed to be looking for.

“That could be it,” he said, nodding. “The man with the jungle window, do you know where he went?”

“I didn’t know his name, but I think he works at De Bevlekte Pagina. It is a bookshop. He is a . . . he is a very strange . . .”

“That’s him,” Ginny said. The label “very strange” fit most of Aunt Peg’s friends.

De Bevlekte Pagina was a tiny place, just a few streets over. It was some kind of medieval nook, uneven in every respect, from the strange lean of the walls, the odd shape of the room, the slope of the floor, the step in the corner that lead to a tiny door halfway up the wall. Ginny had never seen such a small store, or imagined you could get so much into it. It had one employee—a girl in a crushed red velvet jacket and a bob dyed to match. Her shirt was low-cut enough to reveal a glimpse of a large cartoon heart tattooed over her actual heart.

“Hi,” Ginny said, approaching her. “We’re looking for someone named Charlie.” “Are you readers?” the girl asked, barely lifting her head.

“Readers?”

The girl offered no other information.

“Does he work here?” Ellis asked.

“Work here?” The girl was contemptuous now. “He is not an
employee
.”

“Can you please get him if he’s here?” Oliver said briskly. The girl didn’t look happy about offering any other information, but she did seem to like the sight of Oliver. She smiled flirtatiously before leaving the counter and went to the back of the store and pushed aside a velvet curtain that blocked off a passage.

“Charlie,
er zijn wat mensen hier voor jou
.”

A voice came from the depths.

“Wie zijn het?”

“Geen flauw idee.”
The girl turned to give them all another appraising look.
“Ze zijn Engels.”

“Engelse?”

“Ze zien er uit als studenten.”

She dropped the curtain, came back to the counter, and continued reading her book.

“Is he . . . coming?” Ginny asked.

“When he is finished,” she said, not looking up. “Did you bring books for him to sign or do you want to buy them?”

“Books? No.”

The girl sighed and shook her head. They were a terrible disappointment to her. Even her interest in Oliver fizzled out, just like that.

Nothing happened for several minutes. They wandered around the shop as much as they could, but it was barely bigger than their rooms at the hostel. The books were a mix of Dutch, English, French, and German, mostly used. Oliver got bored and went outside to smoke. Keith and Ellis had a low conversation in the corner. Ginny sat in the single spot of sun in an open windowsill. The window was original, with uneven, warped panes of glass. Finally, the curtain was pushed back. A guy appeared from the darkness. He was shorter than Ginny, maybe in his mid-twenties, and absolutely emaciated. What he lacked in height and body mass he made up for in hair—straggly beard, untamed locks sticking up in all directions. He wore a heavy red plaid lumberjack shirt, completely unbuttoned and exposing even more chest hair. Three or four silver necklaces glinted just under this layer. He wore black leather pants that were cracked and worn from use, and no shoes. His fingernails and toenails were colored ink black—it looked more like pen than nail polish. He was like something you found on a nature preserve, if they made nature preserves where you could look at artistic frenzy in the wild.

This was definitely the right guy.

“Hi,” Ginny said. “I’m Ginny. Peg’s niece?”

He leaned forward. Ginny couldn’t tell if he couldn’t understand her English, or if he was sniffing her. “I’m Peg’s niece,” she tried again. “Margaret Bannister? The painter?”

This hit a note of recognition. His eyebrows went up and he leaned back against a bookcase and folded his arms across his chest. He exposed the underside of his arm in the process, and Ginny could see words written there, a whole screed of some kind.

“Do you speak English?” she said slowly.

“Of
course
I speak English.”

Ginny had discovered this during her first time in the Netherlands—all Dutch people seemed to speak flawless English. He nodded and turned to the girl at the counter.

“Margaret is
een Amerikaanse schilderes. Ze
is
erg goed. Maar ik kan niet geloven dat deze meid haar nichtje
is.”

Ginny had no idea what he was saying, but assumed it probably wasn’t too complimentary.

“My aunt wrote me a letter. She said I was supposed to come see you. I was here over the summer, but I went to your old address. You have something my aunt gave to you. Something she asked me to come get. A window . . .”

Charlie picked up a pen and began cleaning under his nails with the writing tip.

“The window is on the boat,” he said matter-of-factly.

“The boat?”

“I have a boat,” he said. “It is on a canal.”

That thought kept him occupied for a moment or two.

“A good place for it,” Keith said quietly.

“The boat is gone,” Charlie went on. He almost sounded happy about this, like the boat had finally sought freedom and was now living a happier life somewhere else. “I hire the boat out. Someone has hired the boat today. The boat will be back tomorrow. You can have the window then. Or . . . is it the next day?”

This last question was to the girl behind the counter, who looked up and shrugged.

“We’re not here that long,” Ginny said nervously. “I don’t want to bother you, but we really need it today.”

“Well, today it is gone. Come back later. Say hello to Margaret for me.”

Charlie seemed to be done talking and, with a wave of his hand, headed back to the curtain.

“She’s dead,” Ginny said.

This wasn’t something she’d had to say out loud in a while, and she didn’t like breaking the news to anyone. Charlie’s demeanor changed completely. Even the girl put her book down and looked up in confusion.

“Margaret? Is dead? But, how? She is so young. Did she have an accident?”

“She didn’t tell you she was sick?” Ginny asked.

“Sick? Sick with what?”

“She had cancer,” Ginny said.

It was like she had sucked all the air out of the room with a straw. Charlie sat down on the floor, in the tiny space between the bookcases.

“The window,” he said.

That was all he could manage for a moment.

“I met her in New York,” he said finally. “She came here to learn more about Dutch painting, about the use of light. About still life. She stayed with me, and I showed her my boat. She loved it. She was painting a picture of it. It’s a very distinctive boat. It is pink. Very bright pink. She said she wanted to make something for the boat—a view you could look through, both ways. She mounted the glass in the window of my flat and painted it while standing on a box, on the pavement.”

Ginny could picture it perfectly. Aunt Peg, so tiny, so graceful—her long brown hair tied back in a knot, probably standing on her toes. She moved like a ballerina, even though she never took a dance class in her life and couldn’t keep time to music.

“I’m a poet,” Charlie said. “Maybe you know my work?”

“No,” Ginny said quietly. “Sorry.”

“The name of this shop—it means, ‘the stain on the page.’ We both loved that idea. Painting, writing. Both just stains on the page.”

Charlie took a long breath and stared at the shelf of books in front of them, drew a long, jagged line on his bare foot, then put his head down on his knees. The girl behind the counter reached down and touched his head. While Ginny understood that other people were entitled to mourn her aunt as much as she was, it still irritated her that Charlie was allowed this little display. He didn’t even know she was dead, hadn’t been involved in any way. But then, Aunt Peg had hidden her illness from a lot of people, including her family. Only Richard was there for the worst of it.

Finally, Charlie roused himself.

“The boat, I hire it to tourists and for parties. Someone has hired it for this week, but they return it tomorrow. Come in the morning. I will take you to it.”

Once they were outside, Oliver was the first to speak.

“I booked a place to stay here,” he said. “Two rooms. Perhaps we should go there.”

For the first time, Keith made no comment about one of Oliver’s plans.

The Koekoeksklok

The hostel Oliver had found was by far the nicest Ginny had encountered on any of her travels. It occupied an entire canal house, narrow and tall, with one massive window at the front and back of each floor. The windows had red shutters, large as doors. At the very top, near the roof, there was a clock, and all down the front, tiny paintings of blue birds. It was called the Koekoeksklok. Ginny didn’t need a Dutch-to-English dictionary to figure out that meant “cuckoo clock.”

The theme continued on the inside, which featured a large common room paneled in dark wood, with cuckoo clocks all over the walls.

“I hope these don’t work,” Ellis said, looking around.

The Koekoeksklok was staffed by students—no murderers with dozens of cats. The hostel had one central wooden stairway that wound up and through the skinny building, with just a few deafeningly creaky steps from floor to floor. Oliver and Keith were shown to a room on the third floor, and Ellis and Ginny got the room above them, at the top, facing front. The ceiling of their room was peaked, and high as the roof, maybe sixteen feet. The decorations were basic, but very clean, and the beds were loaded down with a multicolor pile of blankets.

They had a massive window—the cuckoo hole—which faced the canal. Ginny looked out at the skyline. All the roofs were different heights, and almost every canal house had a little ornate peak at the top. Many of the houses had a hook sticking out of the front. Ginny had learned all about these hooks last time. Because the houses were so narrow, you couldn’t get furniture up the stairs. Things had to be hoisted up by rope and brought in through the windows. Windows were really key here.

Below, there was a steady stream of boats drifting along the canal, and on the sidewalks and roads, hundreds of people on bikes. Amsterdam was one constant, steady flow of energy—not manic, just as fast as a bike wheel or the chug of a canal boat. Ginny really loved this city, maybe more than Paris or London. It wasn’t overwhelming. It was practical and beautiful and lively.

“There’s not much we can do tonight,” Keith said, dropping down on Ellis’s bed. “What now?”

Inertia was starting to take over. Ellis was sprawled on the floor. Keith was looking at her, not in any particular
way—
he wasn’t drooling or anything—but his gaze fell on her and stayed there. It made Ginny uncomfortable.

“I guess we should eat,” Ellis said to the ceiling. “We should go out.”

Ginny got up to use the bathroom and get herself ready to go. She was only in there for a minute or two, but when she came back, Ellis was sitting up, her back against the side of the bed. Keith had repositioned himself so that he was at her shoulder, just at her ear. Again, they weren’t
doing
anything, but Ginny was pretty sure this was only because she was here.

“I can’t move,” Keith replied. “I think I have to sleep.”

“Me too,” Ellis said.

It was entirely possible they were just tired. Ginny was kind of tired. But there was something incredibly awkward about being around the two of them right now. Escape. It was the only way.

“I have to go call Richard,” she said. “I’ll be outside. I might take a walk.”

Keith yawned and lifted a hand in farewell.

Over the summer, Ginny had to spend a lot of time by herself—time alone with no internet, no television, no music, nothing to numb her from the experience of being on her own. This wasn’t by choice. The first letter spelled out the rules. She couldn’t bring a computer, a phone, even a journal . . . nothing that could distract her from the experience of
being in Europe
on her own. At first, it had been unpleasant and weird, but over time, she had adjusted. It was okay just to be by herself, with herself.

Now, of course, she had lots of company to think about.

Ellis was . . . extraordinarily pretty, and spontaneous, and sweet. She matched the sharpness in Keith’s personality. She didn’t need to be coaxed into climbing over the fence and through the window—she wouldn’t need to be boosted up and shoved over. Ellis would make the climb herself. And she was English. She fit in. She had London style and that understated London swagger. Sure, Ginny had lost the braids, but the fake red in her hair was already fading, and that newfound courage of hers was just a thin outer coating. She was the American—a little louder, a little out of step. Given the choice, she would have dated Ellis. It only made sense.

She sat down on a bench along the canal and pulled out her phone to call Richard. He answered on the first ring.

“Hi . . . sorry. Is this a bad time?” she asked.

“No, you caught me at a good moment. I’m hiding in my office. How are you? Where are you?”

“Amsterdam,” she said.

“Amsterdam? When did you get there?”

“A few hours ago. We’re in a really nice hostel. It’s sort of like a cuckoo clock.”

“I see. What are you doing there?”

“We need to get a window,” Ginny said. “I guess part of the piece is a glass panel. It’s on a boat, and someone rented it out. So when it comes back, we’ll get it.”

“And where do you go then?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “We sort of have to figure that out.”

She heard his other line ringing, and the sound of him shuffling things around on his desk.

“Let me think what I’m supposed to ask . . . have you engaged in any exceedingly foolish behavior while under the influence of alcohol?”

She hadn’t been drunk when she stole the tabletop, so she had a pass on that one. “Nope,” she said.

“Are you wandering the streets alone in a haze of legal marijuana?”

“No.”

“Do you have any intention of entering the prostitution business, which is also legal in Amsterdam?”

“Probably not today.”

“Good, good. Is there anything I didn’t cover? I’m new to this.”

“You were pretty thorough,” she said.

“You know I trust you, Gin,” Richard said, almost sounding embarrassed. “I know you can do as you like. You’re eighteen. I certainly did plenty of things. . . .”

The door to the Koekoeksklok opened, and Oliver stepped out. He brushed off his still-damp coat and looked around. As soon as he spotted Ginny, he headed straight for her.

“No,” Ginny said quickly. “I’m good. And thanks. For everything.”

“Well, you know I’m here.”

Oliver lingered a few feet off until she had wrapped up her call. He may not have been respectful of personal property, but he was all about giving people their personal space.

“Where are the others?” he asked.

“They’re tired. I think they’re napping.”

They probably weren’t napping. Well,
maybe
they were. Probably not. She was not going to think about what they were doing.

“I was going to go look for the boat,” he said. “Care to join me?”

They stared at each other for a moment, sizing up the situation. They were here, there was a job to be done. More importantly, it would give her something to do while Keith and Ellis did whatever they were going to do . . . which was nap, of course.

“Fine,” she said.

“I’ve got some directions,” he said, pulling out both his phone and a tourist map. “The canals surround the—”

“I know the city pretty well,” she said, cutting him off. “I mean, the tourist parts.”

“I thought it all went wrong.”

“It did,” she said. “But I didn’t leave. I ended up in this really horrible hostel. So I ran away from that and ended up meeting this family called the Knapps, from America. They took me in for the week. They were nice, but they were super tourists. It was like they were competing for the Most-Touristy-Tourists-of-the-Year award. They wanted to see it, have their picture taken in front of it, get the T-shirt, and move on. They used to have these
printed schedules
for each day. . . .”

Ginny started walking, and Oliver fell into step behind her.

“So why didn’t you just leave if they were so annoying?” he asked.

“They weren’t mean people,” Ginny said. “They just wanted to check everything off their checklists. Lots of people probably travel like that.”

“Lots of people
live
like that. . . .”

That was the kind of thing Aunt Peg would have said. Was he doing that on purpose? She glanced over at him suspiciously.

“It still doesn’t explain why you didn’t just leave.”

“I was just sick of being by myself,” she said. “I don’t know. I just did.”

He took the hint and let it go.

“Anyway,” she said, “the center bit of the city is pretty small, and the main canals are around it in layers, a bunch of half circles. It won’t take that long to look around the main tourist areas. Maybe a few hours. I mean, we’re looking for a big pink boat. How many of those can there be?”

“This is Amsterdam. There could be a small fleet of pink boats here, for all we know. But I take your point. Should we start this way? We’re pretty much at the top of this street, anyway.”

They began to stroll down the canal, under the bare trees. The lights and the moon reflected off the canal in a way that would have been romantic if she had been with just about anyone else.

“You couldn’t bring anything the last time you came over,” he said. “No guidebooks. No maps. No computer or phone or anything. Those rules, they were a bit mental. Did you follow them?”

“Yes,” Ginny said, scanning the boats along the canal. It was getting darker by the second, and harder to determine exactly what color they were.

“Why? I mean, who would have known if you hadn’t?”

“I would have known.”

“Yeah, but . . . all that time on planes and trains with nothing to listen to. No internet. Nothing. It sounds like torture. I would have brought everything.”

“You’re not me,” Ginny said.

“Did you ever think that she
expected
you to break some of them?”

Remarkably, that thought hadn’t occurred to Ginny before. She stepped out of the way of a bicyclist and directly into the path of another bicyclist, who expertly steered around her.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you like all the rules, the backtracking, the games. I think it’s annoying.”

“This isn’t
for
you.”

“I think it’s annoying in general. She should have just given you the paintings. This traipsing back and forth is such a pointless exercise.”

“Look,” Ginny said. “We’re not discussing her, okay?
You
do not talk about her, or what she did.”

“I’m just saying, it seems like she was a rule breaker, so maybe she expected you to break the rules.”

“So,” she said, “is this how you justify what you’re doing?”

“What I’m doing is maybe a little unethical. . . .”

“Maybe a
little
? You’re stealing.”

“I’m not stealing,” Oliver said firmly.

Ginny stopped. They were on the unguarded edge of one of the canals. The water was high, and two swans and a few ducks drifted past and regarded them curiously.

“How is this not stealing?” she said, mostly to the swans.

“Someone stole your bag,” he said. “Not me. I purchased the bag, not knowing it was stolen. Inside, I found some property. I used my time and resources to track you down to return your property to you. In return, I asked for a percentage. You agreed.”

“Or you were going to walk away with my stuff,” Ginny said. “My stolen stuff. Don’t you legally have to return that to me anyway?”

“I’m not an expert on Greek law, and neither, as far as I know, are you. All I have of yours, anyway, is a bag . . . which I did offer to return . . . and a few pieces of paper. The paper wasn’t in any kind of sealed envelope delivered by Royal Mail, which
would
be illegal to tamper with, so there’s no problem there. And I have agreed to return these pieces of paper to you on completion of our agreement. Do you want to take me to court for a few pieces of paper worth less than a pound?”

“How come,” she said, mostly to herself, “I only know two English guys and both of you are . . . well, one was a thief and the other is you.”

“I think it says more about you than it says about us.”

“About me?”

“About the people you attract.”

“It’s not me,” she said. “It’s my aunt.”

“It is you,” he said. “She’s not here, in case you haven’t noticed. You are the common denominator in all of this. And don’t lump me in with him. I’ve never lied to you. I’ve been very careful about that. I hate lying. I’m not a thief, and I’m not a liar.”

This was the first time Ginny had heard anything that might have been considered an emotion in Oliver’s voice.

“So what
are
you?”

“An opportunist.”

“What does that even mean?” she asked.

“I saw an opportunity, and I took it. That’s what it means. I’ve been completely up front about it, and I’ll continue to be up front about it.”

“You’re delusional.”

“I’m not. I know what I’m doing doesn’t make me a great person, but I don’t tell lies.”

“Well I guess that makes it okay,” she said. “I mean, as long as you’re being
honest
.”

Oliver got the stupid cigarettes out again. He had a new lighter. It was just cheap and plastic, not like the fancy Zippo he had before. He drew in and exhaled slowly, blowing the smoke to the side, away from her. Now that she thought about it, he was the only person she knew who smoked. It was just such a ridiculous habit. The cigarettes were his prop, his way of avoiding anything he didn’t feel like dealing with, putting distance between himself and other people.

She was being too deep about that, probably.

“You hate my smoking,” he said.

“Does it matter? Are you going to stop because I don’t like it?”

They were coming up a few steps leading down into the canal. Oliver stepped down to the very edge of the water and dipped in the tip of the cigarette, extinguishing it. He held it up to show her.

“I’m not unreasonable,” he said.

“Of course not,” she replied.