Ramona looked as though she was going to refuse, but finally, she hurried back to the counter and ducked behind it. Nell heard the sound of a dial turning and a heavy safe door swinging slowly open.
The older woman stood back up at last, holding a single envelope in her hands. “This.” She paused, then handed it over to Nell. “I shouldn’t give it to you, but . . . once someone’s gone, I know how much even the smallest tokens can mean.”
Nell looked down at the package in her grip. It was a typical manila envelope, plain and common. And just like her father’s portfolio, it felt light enough to likely contain only one sheet of paper. On the front, there was a short scrawl in a messy hand—she glimpsed her father’s name quickly, likely a note from the seller to him.
“You really do have to go now,” Ramona said quickly, before Nell could read the writing or open the flap, with a desperation bordering on terror.
“Whatever my father owed you for this,” Nell started to say. “Once his accounts are transferred to me—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Ramona cut her off. “Consider it a gift.”
Nell nodded. “Well, thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” Ramona said, but it didn’t come out like a conversational pleasantry. More like a warning. “Just hurry. You’ve already been here too long.”
She had gone to the door and was holding it cracked open. She gestured for Nell to tuck the envelope into her bag, and Nell obliged, hiding it away. Ramona’s eyes combed the street outside like a deer scanning the woods for wolves at night, darting and desperate.
“Don’t ever come back here. For your own safety,” she said as Nell stepped out.
Nell shook her head. “I can’t promise that.” How could she, after finding out that Ramona knew both of her parents? “People say I’m even more stubborn than my father was. And you knew him well, apparently.”
She expected Ramona to insist further, but instead, the thin pink line of Ramona’s lips quirked into a shadow of a smile—the first one Nell had seen since she’d been there. “It wasn’t a request. It was a statement of fact,” Ramona said as she began to swing the door shut.
Just as the door closed, the click of the latch echoing heavily as it locked, Nell caught Ramona’s last words.
“You can’t find a place that doesn’t exist.”
What?
Nell put her hand up on instinct to shield her eyes from the sudden glare of morning light caught in the door’s glass panel and then moved closer to peer inside. “Ramona?” she called softly.
You can’t find a place that doesn’t exist?
What could that mean? Nell knew where the shop was. She was standing right there in front of it. Of course it existed.
She knocked lightly, hoping to ask Ramona what she’d meant by that last line, but the dealer was already gone from the front of the shop.
Nell took a step back, hesitant. She’s probably just busy, Nell thought. Right? But everything—Ramona’s unease, the strange connection she had to Nell’s mother and father, the way she’d checked the street before showing Nell out, as if afraid of something out there—was all too unnerving to ignore.
Slowly, Nell turned around and searched Doyers Street for the black Audi again, trying to look casual.
The road was empty. She let out a relieved breath. But it caught halfway in her throat as she looked farther down the way.
At the next intersection, there was a dark car parallel parked against the curb, with a person sitting inside.
Shit.
Her eyes darted to the wheel wells, to see if there was rust, but she couldn’t get a clear view from where she was.