“This is a cheap Argentinian Malbec,” Nora said. “If you wake up with a dry mouth and a nasty headache tomorrow, don’t say that I didn’t warn you.”
“Pull the plug on that bad boy,” ordered Bobbie. “I’m going to tell you about that book page now, and for that, we’ll both need liquid courage.”
Nora opened the bottle and decanted the wine into a glass vessel. She then picked up the vessel by the neck and swirled the wine around and around, hoping an infusion of oxygen would improve its taste and finish. She told Bobbie to pour while she washed a pint of strawberries and transferred them to a bowl.
Bobbie carried their glasses to the kitchen table and sat down.
“It’s your turn to toast.”
Nora put the bowl of strawberries on the table and said, “ ‘High and fine literature is wine.’”
Bobbie nodded in approval. “Mark Twain. Nice. I’ll pair your Twain with Virginia Woolf. ‘Language is wine upon the lips.’”
After touching rims, they each took a sip of the Malbec. Because Nora was already feeling buzzed, she barely moistened her lips with her initial taste. Bobbie’s was more of a gulp—a telltale sign that she was nervous.
“Do you remember that lecture we attended at NYU when we were in grad school?” she asked. “On the history of religious texts?”
“I remember that our professor hadn’t expected the lecturer to include books on mysticism.” Nora leaned forward eagerly. “Is the book page from an old mystical text?”
Bobbie took two strawberries from the bowl. She dropped one in Nora’s hand and popped the other into her mouth. “Here’s how this is going to go. I’m going to tell you things, and you’re going to tell me things. We’ll start with you. What’s your connection to that page?”
“I can’t answer that in a single sentence.”
“Do I look like I’m in a rush? I’m staying at the Inn of Mist and Roses, and I already love the place. If my library didn’t need me, I might never leave.”
Nora ate her strawberry, took a deep breath, and told Bobbie about Celeste and Bren. She left nothing out, even though McCabe would probably disapprove of her sharing details of an open investigation with a stranger.
Except that Bobbie wasn’t a stranger. She’d appeared like a Dickensian Christmas Carol spirit. The very sight of her had driven Nora to drink. She was on her third glass of wine. If she didn’t put the brakes on, she’d soon cross the line from tipsy to flat-out drunkenness.
When she finished her story, Nora expected an immediate reaction from Bobbie. Her verbose librarian friend had never been at a loss for words, but she had nothing to say now. In fact, she seemed miles away.
Nora waved her hands. “Hello? Ground control to Major Bobbie. Your turn.”
“Saint Juliana,” Bobbie murmured in a trance-like state. She shook her head and gestured at Nora’s laptop. “Fire that thing up, would you? It’s time for a historical show-and-tell.”
Nora pushed the laptop closer to Bobbie.
Her hands hovered over the keyboard as she said, “The robed figures on that book page are similar to others I’ve seen in thirteenth-century herbals, prayer books, and Bibles. But I’ve never seen that writing. I would have expected Latin or Greek. What are those symbols? A cipher? Maybe. But without the key, decoding the message would be like translating the Rosetta Stone blindfolded.”
“Going back to the question I asked twenty strawberries ago—is the page from a mystical text?”
Bobbie started typing. “I told the sheriff that all I could give him from an emailed image was an educated guess. Without physically seeing the page—without testing the ink and looking at the paper under a microscope—all I could tell him was that it reminded me of an unusual old text. Unusual and very rare.”
Nora was losing patience. “Stop stalling, Bobbie.”
“Grimoires.” Bobbie practically spat out the word. “The robed figures and the undecipherable language remind me of a book of spells. Years ago, I was in London for a conference, and there was an exhibit on magic and folklore at the British Library. I saw two fourteenth-century grimoires with drawings, incantations, astronomical charts, and more. I’m not a superstitious woman, and I’ve never met a book, manuscript, codex, or folio I didn’t like, but I didn’t like those grimoires. They smelled like rotten meat, and the air around their case was ice cold, even though the rest of the area was toasty warm. I couldn’t wait to get away from them.”