The Last Little Blue Envelope (8 page)

“As it turns out . . . ,” he said.

Oliver was right behind him, running hard. His height gave him a strange, hopping gait, making the ends of his coat flap up and down. For a moment, Ginny was transfixed by the sight.

“Get in, get in, get in,” he said briskly, pushing her into the back with the tabletop. He squeezed in right behind her and just about got the door closed. They were still in a tangle when Ellis hit the gas and they took off.

To Belgium!

The scene inside the car had become much more complex in the last few moments. For a start, the tabletop made a wall between the front and backseats, with just four or five inches at the top left open for communication. Ginny and Oliver now had their own little room—a room that definitely couldn’t hold both of them. There was double as much Oliver as there was Ginny. His knees were tucked up into their torso space, his arm span was much wider than the backseat. He was wedged in place. Meanwhile, the car itself was careening down a Parisian street as Ellis got used to the opposite-side driving. Ginny was bounced around in the tiny bit of remaining space, hitting Oliver, then the door, over and over. Most of the contact was of the shoulder-to-face and elbow-to-abdomen kind . . . with the occasional full-body slam.

On the good-news front, it didn’t appear that anyone was after them.

“If I could just move this,” Oliver said, trying to lift the tabletop enough to get his legs down and his feet under it. Keith peered over the tabletop and into the strange little world of backseat land.

“That looks really uncomfortable,” he observed, leaning his chin and hands on the tabletop, crushing it down a bit on Oliver’s toes.

“Do you mind?”

“You stole my patter from this morning. You’re a bastard.”

“And I saved your arse.”

“I could have gotten us out of there. All we had to do was wait it out.”

“Where am I going?” Ellis called. “Is anyone going to give me directions?”

“Do you think you could manage one of your little readings so we have some idea of what the hell is happening?” Keith asked. “Where does the letter send us next, oh knobular one?”

“Just get out of the city.”

“We need a
bit
more than that,” Keith said.

“I can’t exactly reach my phone right now to look up directions.”

“So tell us what our next stop is,” Keith said. “We don’t need you playing
Flight of the Navigator
back there.”

“I’ll tell you where we need to go for the night,” Oliver said. “You can hear the rest tomorrow. And stop
leaning on the table.
”

Keith released the table and retreated. Oliver continued his efforts to lift the table and get into a normal seated position. Through a lot of jerking and bumping around, he managed this. Further jerking and bumping allowed him to get his phone free. He was looking up directions.

“Why won’t you just
say
?” Ginny asked, as her head knocked against his shoulder.

“Because I don’t want to end up shoved out on the side of the road. The longer I know things, the longer I can put that off.”

She had to admit, there was some sense in that. Actually, everything suddenly made a kind of sense. A minor euphoria came over Ginny, along with a fit of hiccupping. They had
done
it. They had made it to Paris and gotten this table. And though the circumstances were not ideal, Paris was still Paris, and success was still success.

They were on the Champs-Élysées, one of the grand boulevards of Paris. Ginny recognized it from her French textbook, specifically, from a dialogue called, “On the Avenue des Champs-Élysées.” It was one of many dialogues in the book between Véronique and Sylvie, two girls who primarily spent their time reading menus out loud and reciting long strings of phone numbers. In “On the Avenue des Champs-Élysées,” however, they stepped out of their comfort zone and took a walk and said how
formidable
everything on the Champs-Élysées was. They had a point. And now Ginny really understood why they called Paris the “City of Light.” The Champs-Élysées during the holidays was nothing but light. Lights dripped off the trees. At the speed they were going (which was keeping up with traffic, which meant probably
way too fast
), all the lights blurred together into one wondrous streak. Aunt Peg was right. Paris wasn’t a place you could get after one visit. A place this wonderful would take a lifetime.

“Oh no,” Ellis said.

“Ah,” Keith added as a follow-up.

“‘Ah?’ ” Ginny said, shaking out of her trance. “‘Oh no?’ What does ‘ah’ mean? ‘Oh no’ what?”

They had stopped briefly. Directly ahead of them, bathed in light in a great ocean of light, was one of Paris’s great landmarks, the Arc de Triomphe—the massive white arch, so large that a small plane could be flown under it. And around that arch-circled traffic—lots and lots of traffic . . . hundreds, thousands, perhaps
millions
of cars, just going around and around and around. There had to be eight or ten lanes worth, but there were no lanes. Nothing bound the cars into any particular position.

“What am I doing?” Ellis yelled. “Where am I going?”

“Hang on a moment,” Oliver said, still working his phone.

“I can’t hang on a moment!”

“Know what I heard once?” Keith said grimly, as the light changed. “Insurance is invalid in the circle around the Arc de Triomphe.”

The little white car screeched into the melee and began going around the monument, cars merging in from all directions, peeling off, coming in front, slipping up behind. Cars were coming at them
sideways
.

“All right,” Oliver said. “All right. You want the third junction. The one for the Place de la Porte Maillot . . .”

“What third junction? There are no junctions!”

A motorcycle buzzed by, just inches from Ginny’s door. Ellis must have hit the gas, because the whole car lurched and shuddered.

“You want to play?” Ellis yelled. “All right, then! I played
a lot of video games
as a kid, bitches!”

“There!” Oliver yelled. “That way! Toward Boulevard Périphérique. There! There!”

The car swerved abruptly to the right. Ginny heard Keith swear for a solid ten seconds.

“Sorry!” Ellis called, merging farther and farther right with insane determination. She jerked the car off the roundabout in one final, bold turn.

“Turn right!” Oliver yelled. “Take the A-One toward Lille!”

“Where?”

“LILLE.”

“A-1?”

“YES!”

With one last screeching turn, they began the run out of Paris.

The A1 was just a highway, and the night was a wintry blank. It was colder than ever now. Ginny and Oliver had worked together to create some kind of peace with the tabletop, but the end result was that it sat on both of their feet and completely blocked any heat coming from the front. So they had two things making them go numb. They both went into a hibernation mode, silent, burrowing inside their coats. The one advantage to their closeness was that they got a little warmth from each other. Suddenly, there was a little burst of excitement from the front seat, and Ginny saw that they were pulling into a gas station.

“Petrol stop!” Ellis called.

Oliver and Ginny couldn’t just get out of the car—they needed to be extracted from under the tabletop. Keith and Ellis worked from either side, one pushing and one pulling, to get it out of the car. Ginny and Oliver stumbled out, Oliver making an uneven path away from the car to smoke. Ginny’s feet were completely pins and needles. It would be several minutes before she could walk at all. She leaned against the car, while Ellis went inside to find a restroom, and Keith filled the tank. She watched the little counter on the pump spinning what seemed like an incredible number of Euros. Gas was expensive here.

“I need to give you money,” she said.

“I’ll use his for now. How do you feel, by the way? Being a proper thief?”

“Queasy.”

“That’s a sign you’re doing it right. You did good back there.”

“I still can’t believe we did it,” she said.

“Oh, you know how these things go,” Keith replied. “You go to Paris, steal part of a table, and then spend all night driving to Belgium. God, when will they stop making this movie?”

“Belgium?” Ginny asked.

“That’s where we’ll be if we keep going on this road. Bet you’ve always wanted to go to Belgium.”

Ginny looked around for any mental files she had on Belgium, but came up with nothing, except a tiny memo about chocolate. Also, she hadn’t called Richard. She had to do that now, before it got any later and they actually
left France
.

“I have to make a call,” she said, holding up her phone. Keith nodded and continued filling the tank. Ginny endured the pain of walking on her dead feet and tried to keep her gait even and smooth as she walked over to the side of the station. Richard picked up on the very first ring.

“Hi,” she said, trying to sound casual. “It’s me. We’re here in France. . . .”

“How’s Paris?” he asked.

“Really . . . busy.”

There was a lot of noise in the background wherever Richard was.

“Are you still at work?” she asked.

“Sadly, yes. Did you get into the same hostel?”

“Oh . . . we were just out. We’re going to get a room now.” Not a lie. Certainly the intention.

“You don’t have a place yet? Isn’t it after nine?”

“Yeah . . . but it’s fine. We’re going now. Really.”

“I’m sure it is, just . . .text me to let me know you’re safely in the hostel, all right?”

“Okay,” she said. “I will.”

When she got off the phone, Ginny looked up at the stars. The view here was incredible for that—black and clear. The only things around besides this gas station were a dark clump of houses up the road and a wind turbine in the distance. From here she could see about twice as many stars as she could at home, maybe three times as many. The sky was littered with them.

Ellis was over with Keith at the car. They were talking in low voice, laughing quietly. Even though they were probably talking about what they had just pulled off, Ginny felt a rush of jealousy. She hurried back to join them.

“Hey, tosser!” Keith yelled to Oliver. “Get in the car or we leave you here!”

Oliver threw his cigarette into the road and came over to them.

“Look how his coat snaps in the wind as he walks,” Keith said. “Very dashing. He’s like Batman.”

The thing was, it actually
was
kind of dashing. The coat was extremely long and would have dwarfed a lot of guys, but it looked right on Oliver, and it
did
snap around his calves as he walked over.

“Are you taking us to Belgium?” Keith asked tiredly. “I need to know. It’s late. We need to stop soon—we’ve been going all day now.”

“We can stop in Ghent for the night,” Oliver replied. “It’s not too far. Maybe an hour. Keep going on this road.”

“Fine. Time to pack the two of you back in the car. In you get.”

Ginny took one last look at the sky, shivered under the size of it, and got back in the car where the world was smaller, though no easier to comprehend.

A Feeling of Shed

As they drove north toward Ghent, the clear skies gradually became more milky and pink, and a light snow started to fall. It was right around ten when they came into the city proper, and it was quite a contrast from the bleakness of the highway or the magnificent sprawl of Paris. Ghent looked like a congregation of cathedrals. Every building in the center was ornate, with a thousand little details and hooks and spires and miraculous accents carved into stone or made out of brick. A warm yellow light bathed the streets, which were now covered in a light dusting of snow. The city was situated around a river, which glowed under the lights.

“Well, it looks like we found Hogwarts,” Keith said. “Now where do we go?”

“We try to find a place that’s open,” Oliver said. “It’s late, and it’s a holiday, so there’s no guarantee that we’ll find anything. I did have a place for us in Paris. . . .”

“So
why didn’t you say that
?”

“Because we were escaping the police. I thought even you could work that one out. I had a plan. My plan would have worked. You changed my plan. Not my fault.”

“God, no,” Keith said. “None of this is
your
fault.”

“What I’m saying . . .”

“Boys!” Ellis yelled. “Tired now! Bed! Sleep!”

“I
did
look up some places just now,” Oliver went on. “I’ve looked up a few hostels and small hotels. There’s a student area that should be loaded with them. We should try there first. I suggest we park and try it on foot. It might be easier to go door to door than try to drive around endlessly.”

Keith stopped the car along one of the back streets, in something that may or may not have been a parking space. Again, Ginny and Oliver were extracted from their storage place. They stepped into the lightly falling snow—heavy, ornate flakes that already dusted the bridges and the sidewalks. The cold had permeated Ginny now—it was deep in her bones. But at least she was upright. She could move.

Ghent was pretty, and Ghent was also closed. In the center of town, every ivy-decked door looked locked, and every window wound with Christmas lights was dark. They walked through an empty central market full of small green stalls, all shuttered. They walked past a small castle with a spiderweb statue next to it. They found the street of hotels, which were all shut or full. They passed a hostel, but it had closed in October. They tried the surrounding streets, but found much of the same. After a while, they had clearly wandered off the tourist path into a residential area. Inside of the cozy houses and apartments, Ginny could see televisions and computers and people reclining on sofas. All she wanted now was somewhere to sleep. Anywhere.

“I feel like we’re reenacting the Nativity story,” Keith said, pulling his hat down over his ears. “No room at the inn, nowhere to lay our tabletop.”

“What about this?” Oliver pointed at a sign in a window, which was written in several languages. In English it read: “Rooms for students or travelers, inexpensive and clean, ring bell.” The building looked like a normal house—one of the more modern ones on the street. The windows upstairs were all dark, but there were lights on the ground floor, and a light on by the door.

“Is this actually a bed-and-breakfast?” Ellis asked. “It’s not really marked or anything.”

“It has this sign,” Oliver said.

“Nothing to lose.” Keith stepped forward and rung the bell. A minute later, an older man in a cardigan opened the door. Once their general purpose there was explained to him, and he adjusted to English, there was a lot of nodding.

“Are you . . .
allergic
. . . to cats?”

A quick poll was taken. None of them were allergic to cats. The door was opened wider.

“Come in,” he said, “come in, but be quick.”

They were ushered into a warm and cluttered living room. This was not a hostel. It was a house. A house that smelled like cat.

“I run a cat shelter,” the man explained. “And with the cold, I have many more than normal. Today, I have . . . twenty-six.”

“Twenty-six cats?” Keith repeated.

“Mostly it is a cat shelter,” the man went on. “But sometimes I rent the rooms. Sometimes. How many do you need? I have two. They are forty Euros each.”

It seemed fairly obvious that they would need at least that many, since there were four of them.

“We’ll take both of them,” Ginny said.

“Oh, good.” The man nodded and picked one of the cats off the counter, where it was enjoying a nibble of a plant on the windowsill. “Please wait a moment. I will get them ready. If I had known you were coming, I would have had breakfast for you. Still . . .”

He gestured for them to wait and went upstairs.

“We’re going to die,” Keith said, the moment he was gone. “This man is a serial killer. We’re going to die, and he’s going to bury us in his garden and build a shed on us.”

The place was weird, and yes, it smelled like cat—like so much cat—but they all seemed to be nice cats. And they were better off in here than out in the snow. Ginny reached down and picked up a little cat who had come over to rub her ankles. The cat was barely out of kittenhood, long and lean and wide-eyed, happily batting at her hair as he cuddled on her shoulder. Oliver didn’t look happy about this at all. Two cats sat at his feet and just stared up at him. He looked at them warily.

“Who runs a combination
cat shelter and hostel
?” Keith asked. “With the cat shelter being the primary function? Only people who want to kill you with an axe and then put you in the garden and build a shed on you, that’s who.”

“They are ready!” the man called, a moment later.

“That was fast,” Ellis said quietly.

The bedrooms looked like normal bedrooms. They didn’t have that anonymity that you found in hostels or hotels. And they had cats in them. Little golden eyes peered at them through the dark.

“Now,” the man said, opening the doors, “I have one with two beds, and one with one large bed.”

“We’ll take this one,” Oliver said, going into the two-bed room.

“I see how this works,” Keith said grimly. “I drew the short straw.”

“It’s fine,” Ellis said, nodding to Ginny. “We’ll share the one bed. That all right, Gin?”

Ginny caught some little snatch of nonverbal communication that rippled between Ellis and Keith. It took her a second to decode it, and it came out a little garbled, but the essence was, “That could have been our room. We could have shared the one bed. But we have these two with us.” They were sparing her having to share with Oliver.

They stepped into their respective rooms and set their things down. The rooms were just a few feet apart. She could see Oliver setting his things up on one of the beds, while Keith flopped on another. Their host lingered in the hall, in the patch of light between their rooms. Cats swarmed the general area, poking their heads inside to see who had come to visit. One large orange cat immediately hopped onto Ginny’s bag when she set it down. Another scurried under the bed.

Ginny got out her phone to send Richard a text, letting him know they were safely in for the night. She glanced between their host, the cats, and her phone.

Here and safe for the night. Everything is fine!
she wrote.

That was a relief. The only thing still on her mind was the tabletop. It was out there somewhere, on the snowy streets of Ghent.

“Would it be all right if I went and got the tabletop from the car?” she called over to Keith. “I’d feel better if it wasn’t out there.”

“Car?” This instantly interested their host. “You have a car? You must bring it here. You may put it behind the house. Go get your car, put it behind the house.”

“It’s fine,” Keith said, getting up and coming to their door. “We just need the tabletop. . . .”

“You must get your car and move it here now. You do not want to leave it on the street when you can put it here. Go and get it and put it here.”

“Right,” Keith said. “Gin and I will go get the car and the tabletop. We’ll be right back.”

For the second time that night, Ginny and Keith set out on their own, this time in a different city. Their footsteps crunched gently in the snow as they walked to the car.

“Didn’t blink an eye,” he said, when they were a street away. “Did
not blink an eye
. You would think that most people would ask, ‘What do you mean, tabletop? Why do you have a tabletop?’ But no.”

“Maybe he didn’t understand the English?”

“What he wants,” Keith said, “is for us to move the car behind his house so no one will see it sitting vacant after he murders us. In fact, he will probably build the shed on the spot where the car was. Plus, he’ll need the car, for his murdering.”

“Stop talking about murder,” Ginny said. “And sheds.”

“I can’t help it. This place fills me with . . . shed.”

It was incredibly stupid, but Ginny couldn’t help but laugh. He looked over and smiled, pleased.

They’d wandered fairly far in search of lodgings, and it took them a good twenty minutes to find their way back to where they had parked. It was a gorgeous walk, though. There was such a fairyland quality to the city. Brick buildings grew directly out of cobbled streets. The snow had gotten stuck in every crevice of the buildings, had dusted the ground. In the distance, there appeared to be a castle with a great square turret, topped by four flags at the corners. In short, pretty romantic.

Worse yet, Keith had never looked so good—the snow settling on his coat, his face flushed from the cold. He pulled off his hat, and his hair stuck up a bit. At that moment, Ginny loved him so much, she felt like her ribs were going to crack from the pressure.

“Keith Dobson,” he said, skidding along in the snow, “a promising actor and playwright, considered by many to be one of the best of his generation, cut off in his prime, murdered by Belgians. It’s just not how I wanted to go. I foresaw something else—drowned in pudding, eaten by werewolf, smothered by adoring fans. Not this. Not this. Ah, the auto. Did you miss me, girl?”

He unlocked the passenger’s door and held it open for her, then got in next to her. He put the key in the ignition and put his hand on the gear, but nothing happened. It made a horrible screech, then died. He tried again and got the same result. He gave up trying and turned in his seat to face her.

“She doesn’t like the cold,” he said. “Or the snow. Or rain. Or damp. She doesn’t like moisture. Or . . . temperature.” He stroked the dashboard lovingly.

“So what do we do?”

“Give her a few minutes. Do you have Monopoly in your pocket, by any chance?”

“I forgot it,” she said.

“Too bad. Guess we’ll just wait it out.”

The snow dusting the windows made the car into a little cocoon. He rubbed his hands together for warmth.

“This trip certainly hasn’t been boring,” he said. “But then, it never is with you. That’s twice we’ve had to run from the law in Paris, you realize that? The last time we almost got busted the circumstances were different, still . . .”

This was the first time he’d made any direct reference to what had happened before, and it didn’t feel accidental. In fact, the way he had positioned himself so that he was straight on, facing her.

“I didn’t think I’d come back,” she said. “It’s weird.”

“You’re weird. It’s only to be expected.”

“
You
weren’t expecting me.”

“No,” he replied, after a beat. “I can honestly say I wasn’t.”

He did what he always did when he was uncertain—he started wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, as if trying to wipe the words away or keep something in.

“I should try again,” he said, “shouldn’t I?”

This could mean a lot of things, but in this particular case, it probably meant the ignition.
Probably
.

“I guess,” she said.

He scratched his head thoughtfully, shifted back and straightened himself in the seat, and turned the key. This time, the car started.

“Look at that,” he said. “She always comes through.”

He flicked on the wipers and cleared the snow from the windshield, flooding the car with street and moonlight. It skidded a bit as he first got it into the road, but within minutes, they were safely back at the House of Cats.

Inside, Ellis had already gotten into her pajamas and was tucked into bed, reading some kind of life-affirming book called
Villages
.

“There you are!” she said, as Keith and Ginny came into the room with the tabletop. “I was worried that you really had been killed.”

“Car wouldn’t start,” Keith said, as they set the tabletop down. “I don’t think she likes the snow.”

Keith took a final look at the bed Ellis and Ginny would be sharing and sighed.

“Guess I’ll go,” he said. “My roommate is waiting.”

“Have a good night!” Ellis said, giving him a wiggle-fingered wave and a laugh.

“I hate you both,” he said, smiling back and shutting the door.

Even though she had done nothing wrong, Ginny felt guilty. She quietly sorted through her bag, pulling out sweatpants and T-shirt. You had to be fully dressed when sharing a bed with the girlfriend of the guy you loved.

“I got the cats out,” Ellis said. “We had about ten of them in here. I wasn’t sure how you felt about sleeping with them. I like them, but . . .”

“I like them too,” Ginny said. “But it’s okay. I guess that’s better.”

Ellis slipped out of bed and squatted down in front of the tabletop to have a better look.

“So, this is it,” she said. “Does it look like art to you? I don’t have an artistic bone in my body. You’re the expert.”

That was an incredibly generous assessment. She had picked a tabletop in a dark restaurant and stolen it. She was able to detect small swirls in the paint, the markings of a tiny brush. And though it appeared to be one solid yellow, it was darker in some places and lighter in others. The wineglasses marks generally were in the center, with little drips and shadows at the edges.

“I think it’s the right one,” Ginny said.

Ellis traced her finger along one of the wineglass rings, the strange orbs that floated all over the surface. Shivering, she hopped back up into the bed and pulled the blanket over herself. Ginny deliberated for a moment whether to go down the hall to change, before deciding that was stupid. She was about to get to know Ellis one way or another. She unhooked her bra under her shirt and pulled it through her sleeve, then took off her clothes and pulled the sweats on as quickly as she could.