Chapter 12

12

That night, after dinner, I went back to my room and pulled out the copy of The Daughter of Time . I rippled the edge of the pages with my thumb. Why had I bought this book?

Riki. I bought this book because I wanted to share some mental space with Riki.

I decided to acknowledge something, that little tickle in my abdomen. The prickling feeling on my arms. The sensation that my brain was opening itself, demanding to consume the book. Riki. Like a cat in the dark Riki. It wasn't what I felt about Akilah, that overwhelming rush. The breakup made everything more muted. I felt something , though. A soft buzz. Or not as dead inside.

At first I wasn't sure if the book and I would get along, because it opens with a complicated family tree of ancient royals in England. All of them are named Richard, Edward, or Elizabeth. I decided to let this slide and get into the story. It's about a detective in England named Grant who falls through a trapdoor and ends up in the hospital, unable to do anything until he recovers. I related to the stupidity of his circumstances. Trapdoor, scented candle... you fall down the hole or go up in flames.

The story took place in the 1950s, so there was no TV or internet. Grant is stuck in the hospital staring at the cracks in the ceiling, ignoring the pile of books people have brought him. A friend suggests that he try to solve a historical cold case, so he tries to solve the mystery of whether Richard the Third murdered his two nephews in the Tower of London.

Apparently, there were two princes in a tower, two little kids in line to the throne, and they vanished in 1483. Everyone seemed to think—maybe still seems to think, as Wikipedia told me—that their uncle, Richard the Third, murdered them because they somehow messed up his plans to become king. This is a cold, cold case. How do you figure out what may or may not have happened in 1483?

Well, in the book Grant does this by comparing historical accounts and asking over and over who is telling the story. A lot of this involves something called the Wars of the Roses, which I imagined to be people jabbing each other with flowers. Old English history appeared to be a ball of Richards, Elizabeths, and Edwards rolling around various battlefields.

I set the book down.

I had the strange feeling that I was being set up for something. I had taken the place of a dead guy, as Riki had put it. Dr. Henson had hinted at something odd, that I was supposed to be a pair of eyes in this group. Riki was clearly an outcast, and it felt like she was leaving me a trail of crumbs in her looks and pauses, her book suggestions, and her too-casual comment. Like this detective, I was sitting in my bed looking at images, taking in little pieces of some bigger story. Unlike the character in the book, I could do something about this.

Even though it was after nine o'clock, there was still a drape of bluish light hanging over the horizon. Morning House was hunkered down, the stones darkening and the windows blank. The sunrise over the doorway had been extinguished for the night as I entered the door beneath it. The massive dome above created more shadow than illumination, but it was still easy enough to make my way up the stairs.

I didn't know where Riki nested inside this massive house, but I could make a few educated guesses. I tried the door that led to the gift shop. It was locked, but it was unlikely that Riki was sleeping under the table of salad dressing bottles. She had to be somewhere up on the third or fourth floor, where there were a few locked rooms that had already been converted for new use by the owners.

As I crept from the second to the third floor, I noted the light under Dr. Henson's door, and I could hear her on the phone with someone.

"... that's what I thought," she was saying. "I'm not sure it's possible. Not now... No... No, I'm not sure..."

I walked gingerly by, even though there was no rule about my being here after hours.

Just like there had been no rule about me using the cottage.

I checked all the doors on the third floor, getting down to look at the crack for light, listening at the door. All were quiet and still. The fourth floor was the same. This left the tower at the back of the house, the one with the roped-off winding stair. She was nowhere else. She had to be up here. The steps up the tower were extremely steep, and I had to hold on to the rail to steady myself on the way up. There was a tiny landing, maybe just a foot wide, at the door at the top. I took a deep breath and knocked. I had to take a few steps back down, otherwise I would have been about an inch away from Riki when and if she opened the door, which she did. She stood above me in cutoff jeans and a massive black hoodie.

"I was wondering when you'd finally show up," she said. She left the door hanging open. I took the final steps up and went inside.

Being a turret, the room was circular. Circular rooms mess with the mind. We expect corners and angles, flat walls that hang things neatly. Also, this room was massive, and the ceiling high and domed. The area near the door was given over to cardboard boxes, a few stacks of loose shirts, plastic-covered pallets full of Thousand Island dressing, and a clothes rack with a few wind chimes and suncatchers hanging from it.

"This was one of the maids' quarters," she said as she walked past the stock. "Eight people lived here. Now, just me and these fucking wind chimes."

She flicked the nearest wind chime with her finger and it made a muted noise, as if it knew not to annoy her.

The far side of the room, near the other small round window, was her domain, and unlike ours, it was furnished with what looked like original furniture. She had a larger bed with a heavy wooden frame, covered in a purple quilt. There was a desk with a slightly crooked leg and a patterned rug that looked like it had stories to tell. A pile of books snaked up the wall. Next to this area, there were unused bed frames stacked against a wall, along with some threadbare upholstered items and three rickety wooden chairs.

"Not all the furniture was in good shape," she said. "They let me have my pick of some of the rejects. Here..."

She pulled over the least decrepit chair and indicated I should sit in it. The room was drafty, making the wind chimes quiver but not ring out, and causing me to shiver involuntarily.

"It's cold up here," she said. "Notice there's no fireplace. Even though this place was only used in the summer, the other rooms have fireplaces. But this is where they kept the cheap maids, the ones who had the worst jobs. No fire for them. They did get one sink, so that's nice."

She nodded toward a small sink under a window, loaded down with all her toiletries. They spilled onto the floor around it. She had big palettes of eye makeup, a scattering of brushes. The closest window was draped in overlong curtains. They were a wild mishmash of dark velvets—electric blues, deep purples—along with silky bits of what may have been old saris, and touristy dish towels.

"Did you make those?"

"Oh yeah," she said. "Last year, I decided I was going to get into sewing. I bought a used sewing machine off eBay and learned from some videos, but all I ever made were those curtains. I used clothes I found in a thrift shop and cut them up for material. Turns out I didn't like sewing. I just needed something to do. I like those, though."

She dropped into a furry beanbag and looked up at me. We were doing everything at weird angles—me looking up at her from the tight turret stairwell, and now me looking down from my wobbling chair as she sprawled below. "You were in the bookstore," she said. "You bought a copy of The Daughter of Time ."

"Well, you said it was shit and I love pain, so I went for it."

This almost got me half a smile.

"I met your sister," I said.

"You did. Her name is Juhi. It means jasmine in Hindi. My full name is Rikisha, which means rose. My family is into flowers. That's why it's called the Book Garden."

"It's a nice store."

"What it is," she said, leaning back, "is a small bookshop in a tourist town that's empty over half the year—and if people read here at all, they buy stuff online. I had the idea to basically open up a branch here, inside Morning House, because this is where the tourists will be this summer. I'm here to make money, because we need to or the store will close. So I sell wind chimes."

"They say if you do what you love, you never work a day in your life."

I actually got a short laugh for that.

"Did you start the book?" she asked.

"I read a few chapters."

"What do you think of it?"

"I'm not sure," I said. "It's a lot about royal lineage and everybody is named Richard or Elizabeth."

"That's hard the first time," she said, nodding. I was glad she thought that was hard too. I wanted to sound smart about this book that I only partially understood. The truth was, I did like it, even if it was rough going and I couldn't track all the Richards and Edwards and Elizabeths. There was something under all that. I grabbed for the parts I knew.

"The thing I really liked was, he would ask everyone who came into his room to look at a copy of the portrait of Richard the Third and tell him what they saw. A doctor saw a polio patient. Another cop saw a judge. Everyone sees what they want to see in his picture. And then after that, the detective has people bring him different history books and he realizes things don't add up if you look at all the stories side by side. It's all about who tells the story. It reminds me of this place for some reason?"

"What do you mean?" she asked.

I wasn't sure what I meant. That had kind of popped out of my mouth.

"Just... there's no mystery here, but there's this story of two kids dying. We have pictures of them. And Dr. Henson is in charge, but she seems to hate this place? She said something about not caring if it fell down."

"She has a point."

Riki seemed to like to lead me only so far in the conversation, then watch me make my way to the next step. But I wasn't sure where this path was going. I switched to more solid ground, something I needed to say.

"Thank you," I said. "For making sure I knew about Chris."

"It was the right thing to do," she said. "I was going to explain it all myself, but I'd get so much shit for it. I figured if I brought it up, April would take care of the rest. That's sort of her job. Van might, but... not the others. Liani is treating it like a state secret. And who the fuck knows what Tom thinks. He'll do what Liani is doing. But you can't hide someone's death." She plucked at the tufts of synthetic hot-blue fuzz. The air crackled with things unsaid.

"I know there's some kind of problem," I said. "With... I mean, among all of you."

"Oh?" She smirked. "You noticed?"

"April said it was because... of Chris."

"What did she say?"

"That you were the reason Liani and Chris broke up."

"Well," she replied after a moment. "That's true. Not everyone loved him, no matter what April tells you. April is the only one who's still a true believer in Chris. April wants everyone to be happy and in love with each other. Everyone else knows the truth. Chris was an asshole. But I need this job—the store needs it—so I'm here. And I have stuff I want to do."

"Stuff?"

"Personal stuff," she said.

She leaned back into the blue fluff of the beanbag and looked at me harder than maybe anyone has ever looked at me. I felt like she could see my bones.

"Let me know what you think of the rest of the book," she said. I was being dismissed from her tower, back down to fantasyland. I hesitated for a moment, surprised by the sudden change in the conversation, then got up and left.