Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [124]
I took a shower and threw on my clothes, ignoring my headache. A minute later I was banging on Costas’s door. He appeared, his face sagging with sleep.
“What is it?” he asked. “Tessa, are you okay?” He reached down and touched my cheek with his fingertips.
“I’m fine,” I said, stepping back. “I just want to get started. I need to know what happened here, why her presence is so strong, why it’s all so sad. Do you want to come with me or not?”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “But what’s your rush? We’re here now. We have all the time in the world.”
I looked at him in surprise. “I don’t have all the time in the world,” I said. “I have a life to get back to. We need to find out what happened here, Costas. That’s why we came. Why I came.”
“Yes,” he said, dreamily, watching me, and it occurred to me then that he planned to stay in Rain Village, that he would never return to his wife and son.
“This isn’t home,” I said, carefully. Lollie’s words echoed in me: Don’t mistake her past for your own future.
He nodded but didn’t seem to be listening. His eyes bored into me, made me feel strange and exposed. “Just give me a few minutes to get ready.”
I went to wait for him in the lobby. I was so anxious to get started I could barely stand still, and kept shifting from one foot to the other, clenching my fists and teeth. The wall was covered in old photographs. I walked up, studying them, all the sepia-toned faces staring back at me. One photo caught my eye: a young girl holding a dog, a black ribbon hanging down her hair, which was swept to the side. There was a haunting, lost quality to the image that was unsettling.
“Good morning,” I heard.
I turned to the man behind the desk. I hadn’t seen him when I’d walked in. I noticed a book lying on the desk beside him. Shakespeare. “Good morning,” I said.
“Light rain today,” he said, gesturing to the window. I looked out and was struck by the gentle sunlight, the rain like mist.
“It’s lovely,” I said, then pointed to the photo. “Who is this girl?”
“Her name was Lena.”
“Was?”
“She died a few years after that was taken. A fire. That must have been forty years ago.”
“How terrible.” I stared at the girl’s face, thought what an odd thing, to have been captured during this one moment in her life, sitting with a dog on her lap and a bow in her hair. I thought of Mary in the brochures, forever caught in that moment of flight. “Do you know of a girl named Isabel Finn, by chance? She had two sisters, Mary and Katerina.”
“Sure,” he said. “Isabel lives in a house in the woods. We don’t see her around much in town, but she’s out there.”
“Do you know how we can find her?”
He looked at me curiously. “Now, what could you two want with Isabel?”
“Oh,” I said. “My friend who came here with me. She’s his aunt. He’s come here to find her. And I knew her sister Mary, a long time ago.”
“You knew Mary?” he asked. I noticed then that his whole face shifted, grew light. “Mary Finn?”
“Yes,” I said. “She was the librarian in my town, when I was growing up. A little town in Kansas.”
“Kansas,” he repeated slowly. “Is that right?”
“You knew her?” I looked at him more carefully, realized he was probably her age. The age she’d be now.
“We lived not too far from the Finns when I was a boy,” he said. “I had the biggest crush on Mary for years and years.”
“You did?” I asked. I felt a strange uneasiness move through me, a sense of no longer knowing where I was. I tried to shake it off.
“Do you find that hard to believe?” he asked, laughing. “We all had crushes on her, but she only had eyes for William Jameson. We were all sorry when she disappeared.” He looked at me, studying me. “Most of us just thought she up and died after William did. You say you knew her?”
“Yes,” I said, hesitating. “She joined the