And she wasn’t going to wait around to find out.
Nell turned and walked quickly down the sidewalk in the opposite direction, dodging pedestrians. She made a few random turns, and crossed and recrossed the street, heading deeper into Little Italy, until she was as sure as she could be that no one was following her, either on foot or in a car.
What had the driver looked like? She tried to remember, but the windows had been tinted, and she’d been in too much of a hurry to escape to recall.
On a whim, she ducked into a little coffee shop. There were just a handful of customers, all engrossed in their newspapers or phones, and the barista was chatting with the chef, unbothered that Nell didn’t seem to want to order anything.
She slid into a seat away from the windows, then pulled the envelope Ramona had given her out of her tote bag. Her eyes jumped to the scrawl on the front she’d noticed before.
Daniel,
I’m sorry for the delay. It took us much longer than expected to find a copy.
I hope this helps. Be careful.
Francis
Francis. One of the other friends from Ramona’s story.
The date at the end of the note was yesterday—just a day after her father’s death.
It was too late, Ramona had said.
Nell worked her finger under the taped flap and pried it open.
As she shook the envelope gently to encourage the contents to slide out, there was a hiss of paper on paper, and a small rectangular shape glided smoothly free and landed in her hands.
It was facing backward, but she could tell it was a photograph.
PS: I found this while cleaning out my files a few years ago. I know it might bring up painful memories, but I thought you might want it anyway, Francis had written in the blank space beneath the film development shop’s logo.
Nell turned it over, and gasped at the image with sudden, bittersweet surprise.
It was a picture of their family.
The three of them—her father, her mother, and Nell, no more than a toddler—standing in front of an old station wagon, the doors open, suitcases stacked on the seats, surrounded by a background of lush woods and sun. Nell was dressed in purple overalls, perched in her mother’s arms, and her father had his arms around them both. Her parents were even younger than Nell was now, their faces smooth and unlined, her mother’s hair as curly and wild as her own.
Nell touched her mother’s face with the tip of her finger, transfixed. Everyone always said she looked just like Dr. Young, but here in the picture, she could see how similar she was to the other Dr. Young, as well. Her mother was even draped in an oversized, stretched-out cardigan, much like the ones Nell herself wore, comically huge on her petite frame, so big it looked like she’d stolen it from Nell’s father. They all were grinning widely, as though at the moment the photo had been taken, they had been laughing out loud at something—her father most of all.
He did look so happy, she thought as she stared at him. She had seen her father happy before, of course—when she won her full scholarship to UCLA, when she graduated, when she got her internship at the NYPL—but there was always a painful undercurrent to it all. I wish your mother were here to see this, he’d say with a sigh sometimes, the most he’d ever say about her.
But here, in the photo, that deep wound hadn’t yet been cut into him, then scarred over. Nell could practically feel the intensity of his joy through the faded gloss barrier, so trusting and uncontained. The way Ramona had described him.
“Hi, Dad,” she said softly.
Finally, she set the photograph carefully down on the table and tugged the other page out of the envelope. It was just a single sheet of paper inside of a cardboard folder—an article? Perhaps Francis had been tracking down some research for her father? But what information could he have been after that he couldn’t just download from the academic journal database at a library? He had worked at one of the biggest ones in the world, after all. That seemed much easier than going through a shadowy middleman like Ramona to have someone else hunt it down. Unless he hadn’t wanted the search on his record?