I look from the totes back to Charlotte. “Okay. Would you maybe like to give me a hand? Or some tips?”
“I don’t know, Opal. Would you maybe like to tell me why you’ve been working so much you can’t stop by to say hi, and now you turn up wearing a man’s coat and asking about the Starlings?” Charlotte is so sweet that I sometimes forget she’s smart.
I consider. “No?”
Charlotte stares back at me, and for a short middle-aged librarian wearing glasses with salmon frames it’s remarkable how much she resembles a concrete wall. “Then good luck.” She edges around me. “Put everything back when you’re done.”
Within the first five minutes, I know I’m not going to find anything. The first tote appears to contain the entire contents of an old man’s desk, only haphazardly gathered into folders. There are a lot of bills and letters between lawyers and accountants. There are stray buttons and family photo albums and corks that still smell faintly of Wild Turkey. There’s a few framed photos of various Gravelys cutting ribbons and shaking hands with mayors, men with hair the color of raw meat and women with mean smiles. None of them include a pale girl with wild black eyes.
The second tote is the same, and so is the third. I don’t even bother with the fourth. I’m shoveling everything back, feeling stupid and hungry, when I see it out of the corner of my eye: a wisp of paper poking out from between the pages of a Bible. It’s a receipt from the Elizabethtown Liquor Barn. I hold it with my head tilted, wondering why the sight of it sent a jolt of electricity through my entire body. Then I focus on the phone number written across the top in shaky pen: 242–0888.
I know that number.
My own breath rushes in my ears. It sounds a little like a river.
I fold the receipt in neat thirds and slide it into my back pocket. Then, very suddenly, as if I just remembered an important appointment, I leave. I shove out of the storage closet, leaving the totes open and messy behind me, fumbling with the doorknob to the break room. My hands feel numb and very cold, as if they’ve been submerged in ice water.
“Done already?” Charlotte is standing in the break room, pressing buttons on the microwave. Her eyebrows draw together as she looks me over; I feel like an animal caught clawing out of a trap, wild-eyed. “Opal, baby, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” The air is tastes thick and wet in my mouth. I can’t seem to get enough of it into my lungs.
“It doesn’t seem like nothi—” The microwave dings behind her, and I startle violently. We stare at each other for a long, taut moment before Charlotte says, even more gently, “Sit down.”
I sit. I stare fixedly at the Reading Rainbow posters while Charlotte microwaves a second cup of coffee. It’s all so normal—the clink of her spoon against the sugar jar, the slight stickiness of the tabletop—that I feel myself returning to my own skin. She sets a mug in front of me and I wrap both hands around it. The heat scalds the pads of my fingers.
Charlotte settles across from me. She watches me with her soft gray eyes. “Listen. I’ve written a whole chapter about Starling House. I can tell you anything you want to know. I’d just like to know what’s going on.”
I give her my best rueful, you-got-me-smile, but I can tell it comes out a little shaky. “The truth is that I’ve been taking a couple of online classes, too, and I want to write my final architecture paper on Starling House, and I need your help.” It’s a good lie because it’s the one Charlotte wants to hear; she’s always bugging me to get my GED or take some college classes.
Her eyebrows go very flat and her accent goes more eastern Kentucky than usual. “Oh, are we both telling stories now?”
“No, ma’am, I really—”
She holds up a single warning finger, the way she did when she caught me stealing out of the break room fridge as a kid. It means: Last chance, bud.
I scrub the heels of my hands into my forehead, but—for once—no better lie occurs to me. “Okay. So I got a job housekeeping at Starling House, which is a pretty freaky place, but that’s none of my business because I’m just in it for the money, except now there’s somebody asking questions about it”—Charlotte’s eyes are widening with every comma—”and I want to know what exactly I’ve signed myself up for.” I’m not used to telling the truth, the way it just comes pouring out of your mouth, unedited, unrefined. I could keep going. I could tell her that Arthur Starling gave me his coat, that he has strange signs tattooed all down his arms and I wonder sometimes where they end, that Elizabeth Baine knew my name.