The Light of the World, page 19
“She cried.” Eva indicated the places where the ink was stained and the paper was warped.
“I would have too.” Liv’s voice was a whisper in her ear.
Eva did not want to think about Liv crying. She was probably the type who cried beautifully, like in the movies.
She sighed. “Do you think this could be something?” Eva asked.
Liv pursed her lips. She hummed the affirmative. “Could be.”
Eva stared down at the letter for a moment before her eyes drifted over to Theo. He was looking at them, his gaze open and dark, as if it were set to devour them both whole. Eva felt a shiver of fear run up her spine. That isn’t natural.
But just as soon as it appeared, it vanished. Theo shook himself, as though he’d been out of his body. He went back to looking at the document in his hand as if nothing had happened.
Chapter 17
Catherine Monroe
If she was really honest with herself, Eva was grateful for a second pair of eyes on the letter. She had a deep-seated worry that she was going to read too much into things if she got too excited. Her grandmother’s diary required a certain level of interpretation, but that was different. Eva knew her grandmother. And even though the girl in the diaries was far less touched by life experience, she was still the same person beneath all the sadness.
She was getting very good at reading between the lines with her grandmother’s diaries. There was a lot that Mary said that she did not explicitly state in those diary entries. This letter seemed to have the same weight to it. It was far more than just tragic news. Still, Eva could not let go of the feeling that she was looking for something for the sake of wanting to find something.
Liv was still there, standing just behind her. Eva didn’t trust herself to move. She wanted to lean back and let Liv press against her. Theo was still absorbed in his letter and didn’t seem to be paying them any mind. Liv smelled of fresh air and the slightest whiff of cigarette smoke and coffee, like a café on a blustery morning.
“I think this might really be something.” Liv’s breath was warm in Eva’s ear. Eva hummed, shifting in her seat, distracted by Liv’s presence. “See how he talks about duty and a higher calling than her parents?” Liv tapped the page with a finger, careful to only graze it with her nail. “Wren talked about that same sense of obligation to Mary.”
Eva nodded. The warmth at her back was gone. Liv had stepped away. Eva frowned and turned to see Liv collecting a notepad and pen from the desk. She pulled the computer chair over to sit next to Eva, their knees brushing against each other. Eva couldn’t move.
She could never figure out how to behave around Liv. She sat there and watched, hands in her lap, as Liv copied down the letter in quick, precise handwriting that made Eva bemoan her own smeary left-handed scrawl. When Liv was finished, she reached for the archival bag and wrote down the catalog number. She then held it open for Eva to put the letter back.
“I thought we were sure that Wren wasn’t living at the boarding house,” Eva said when Liv wrote a big “Wren?” at the bottom of the page.
“I know, but it doesn’t mean that she didn’t leave the letter there or receive mail there. That happened all the time back then, especially if the…” Liv flipped the letter in its archival bag over and read the return address with narrowed eyes. Eva wondered what she could possibly have been thinking, but Liv was already off to the races, pushing back in her chair and scooting on its wheels over toward the computer.
“Careful!” Theo called, not looking up from his pile of papers.
Liv made a noncommittal noise, her feet arresting her movement. Eva slipped from her chair and went to stand behind Liv, who had pulled up Google Maps and was typing in the letter’s return address. Eva watched as the website ticked away, her fingers circling the hard back of Liv’s chair. The thrill of the chase was with her now. She’d been carried along by Liv’s enthusiasm, fully prepared to ride it for as long as she could. When the results came up, the scenery on the street view was eerily familiar. Eva stared.
“We buried my grandmother in that cemetery.” She tapped the screen where the side road and vine-covered gate looked almost overgrown. “Must’ve been before they cut back the kudzu for the year.”
Liv clicked back into map view and there it was. The small patch of green labeled “Bluff Cemetery” was on the far side of a little train track icon. The red flag was just a little way down the road.
“You did?” Liv turned to Eva, frowning in confusion. “I thought she was from here.” She clicked back into street view and moved the map until they were back at the entrance to the cemetery. As Liv moved the cursor over, a wash of brown and grey swam into view. Eva stared at it, not really fully comprehending what she was seeing. It must have been winter when they took the second picture.
“Yeah, she insisted on it,” Eva said. She leaned over Liv’s shoulder to get a better look at the street view of the cemetery. It was full of dead leaves and trees with skeletal branches reaching toward the heavens, not the overgrown swath of green it had been at her grandmother’s funeral. It was so strange to see it in a different season, all life gone from it. It looked almost haunted. “My dad didn’t understand it; no one we know is even from Calverton.”
“Weird.”
“Totally.”
“Maybe that’s why the letter was there, though. Maybe your grandmother knew Catherine.”
Eva shrugged. “She could have. There were two women named Catherine mentioned in the diaries. Maybe more. The name was common as dirt back then.”
Liv made a humming noise and opened up another tab, pulling up the New York Historical Society’s website and then logging into an area of it that Eva had never seen before. She clicked through a few pages almost too quickly for Eva to follow and arrived on a search page. She typed in the address from the letter and soon there were scans of old deeds and a few photographs filling the results tab. “It says here that this belonged to the Monroe family from about 1809 to 1934, when it was sold following the death of the only living heir of the property, a Catherine Monroe.”
“1934?” Eva frowned. That was well outside their time frame.
Shifting against Eva’s shoulder as she clicked through to the next document, Liv said nothing. Her eyes scanned the document quickly before she let out a low whistle. “Wow,” she said, and leaned back to that Eva could read the article.
Eva’s hand slowly rose to cover her mouth. The story of the death of the Monroe family’s first son, in the trenches of France during World War I, opened with an optimistic tone. There were more children, the family would persevere. As she kept reading, the true tragedy became evident. Their second son died of an unknown cause, and then the family lost everything not long before the Crash in 1929. To make matters even worse, their daughter, Catherine, had disappeared in 1925 not long after the death of her brother, and was never seen again.
“She was seventeen when she disappeared…” Eva breathed. She frowned, scrolling back up to the top of the page. “And they didn’t declare her dead until 1934? Why in the world?”
“It was harder to keep track of people without the Internet.” Liv shrugged. “But she could be the Wren we’re looking for.”
“Wren is such a weird nickname for Catherine.” Eva shook her head.
Catherine Monroe, who went by Wren to friends, has been officially declared dead after vanishing without a trace almost nine years prior to this date. The investigating parties are certain of Miss Monroe’s death, citing that she has not been seen in nine years and there was little chance, at the time of her disappearance, that she left the area. The family has elected to place a marker in the family plot despite the fact that no body has ever been recovered. Authorities have declared her case closed, and after an exhaustive search have no choice but to rule that Miss Monroe may have died unknown in Brooklyn, where she lived and worked. Anyone with information regarding her disappearance or death is urged to come forward at this time.
Eva could scarcely believe what they were reading, or their stroke of good fortune. “No. Way.” This had to be their girl. She went by Wren. Wren! The timing was right.
Wren Monroe had disappeared in the latter part of 1925, right around the time that Eva’s grandmother’s journal entries completely changed in tone. Eva hadn’t read them fully yet, but she had skimmed them. She was shocked by how drastically the tone had changed in November and December of 1925. Wren had gone missing at the end of November. This would make it all make sense.
Eva let out a strange, strangled laugh. It just figured that their missing character, the one unknown entity in their search, would turn up in such an innocuous manner.
Liv grinned triumphantly. “Yeah. Way.”
“This is her.” Eva’s confidence leaked into her tone. “It’s gotta be. Everything fits.”
Theo called from across the room, “What have you found?”
Eva turned and Liv peered around her, a smile plastered on her face. It didn’t reach her eyes, though, and Eva felt a coldness radiating off her that felt like a deep loss. “I think we might have just identified our mysterious Wren.” Her tone was the same as the look in her eyes, a little distant and measured. It was as though she didn’t want to give anything away. She turned back to the computer and hit the print button.
Theo pushed himself to his feet, his chair scraping against the hardwood. Eva winced at the noise. Despite Liv’s odd look, she could not keep the smile from her lips. She was practically vibrating with excitement because now something might finally happen. They had a name, and with it they could find out more. They could narrow their search. They could track down relatives!
Only, they couldn’t.
There were no other Monroes. The line had ended after Wren disappeared. Still, there might be cousins. Eva wasn’t giving up hope. And besides! They had a name!
She was practically hopping up and down as Liv handed Theo the transcribed letter and then the newspaper article that they’d found from 1934. He read them quickly, pushing his glasses up his nose and staring so intently that his already impressive eyebrows joined together into one long, bushy caterpillar across his forehead.
Watching Theo read, Eva could see a multitude of emotions crossing his face. His eyebrows scrunched into an even bigger caterpillar, before they relaxed, the lines in his face creasing upward into a genuine smile. “I can’t believe it,” he announced, and the excitement felt real. He handed Liv back the notepad and added, “I never thought we’d actually find out who she was so definitively.”
“Me neither…” Liv replied. She shifted from foot to foot, holding the notepad against her chest, the white of it a stark contrast to her charcoal-gray sweater. “Well, it’s impossible to be completely certain, as Eva’s grandmother has passed, but it is a really strong suspicion.”
Theo clapped Liv on the shoulder. “This is why you are my assistant,” he explained. “And I am the expert. This is something! Far more of a something than we’ve had to go on in ages regarding the light of the world.” He was positively beaming as he turned to Eva. “Do you realize what this means, Eva?”
She shook her head, still not quite following how they’d segued from probably figuring out who Wren was to talking about the light of the world again. It seemed to Eva that they were making an extreme leap in logic.
Liv’s face seemed to close off entirely. She looked almost hesitant as Theo continued to speak, her lip caught between her teeth.
“If we know the girl’s name, we might be able to track her through the city. We know that the room underneath Penn Station is one starting point.” Eva and Liv exchanged a quick glance at that, but neither of them said anything. “But what if there are more clues within these documents? If we know more about who she was, we might be able to piece together why she disappeared and maybe take a guess at where she went.”
Eva glanced between Theo and Liv, who was staring down at her shoes, her fingers playing with her necklace. “That’s…” Eva started, her voice shaking slightly as she tried to figure out the proper tone to take with him. She could see how Liv had retreated. She didn’t know if she should do the same. “That’s really good, right?”
Theo bounced away and headed back to the pile of papers in their little archival bags on the table. “I want to go through as many of these as we can today. I have a good feeling about them.” He spun on his heel, looking rather like an overly excited poodle, his greying curly hair and eyebrows flying every which way as he moved. “If we can find something on the light of the world, it’ll be huge, trust me.”
And that was the crux of the issue. It wasn’t that Eva didn’t trust him; it was more that he wanted different things than she did. The small aside at the end of the article came to mind. The family had been buried using some of the sale of the estate in the non-denominational cemetery up the road from where they lived. The same place where her grandmother had insisted on being buried.
As Theo turned his attention back to the pile of papers on the table, Eva glanced over to see Liv’s fingers tangled up in the chain around her neck. Her eyes were worried and she had sucked her lower lip completely into her mouth, pressing it into a thin line that seemed to amplify the emotion that was starting to show on her face. Eva took half a step forward, toward Liv and away from the overly excited old man, but Liv shook her head and turned away. She would not look at Eva as she fiddled with the collar of her shirt and tucked the chain smoothly below it out of sight.
Again, a question about the necklace sprang into Eva’s mind. First one, and then another, until they rattled around with no space for her to find the words to open her mouth and simply ask.
Probably just a nervous habit, she reasoned, turning back to the table. She had no idea where to start with her pile, so she set down the one letter that had been their biggest clue and sighed. Her shoulders slumped and she was about to hook her ankle around her chair to pull it in behind her to get back to work when Liv’s voice cut through the silence that had descended.
“I’m going to go smoke.” Liv scooped up her old battered army coat from where it lay over the back of the computer desk.
Eva didn’t think twice before she headed for the door and grabbed her own coat, following Liv, dodging around Al and a customer he was helping.
It was freezing outside. The wind whipped up the street and Eva tugged her coat collar up for more protection. Liv had her back to the wind and was lighting a cigarette, her hand cupped around it. It took her more than one try before she managed to get it lit.
Eva watched as she sucked smoke into her lungs and tilted her head up to the sky, exhaling smoke and breath, a message upon the wind.
“You don’t really want to find the light of the world, do you?” Eva asked. She jammed her hands into her pockets and stood hunched against the wind.
“I think some things should be left alone,” Liv replied tersely. She took another pull on the cigarette and stared at Eva intently. “Think about it. Before, this it was all about solving your puzzle, now it’s about his once more.”
“If you don’t like it, why do you work with him?” Eva asked.
“Because someone has to keep him from getting too far off track and usually I’m the one for the job,” Liv explained. She shook her head, a rueful smile glancing across her features as her bangs blew down into her eyes. “And as much as I hate to admit it, telling your grandmother’s story is far more interesting than chasing something that shouldn’t exist.”
Eva tilted her head to one side. “You really don’t think it exists?”
“I never said it doesn’t, I said it shouldn’t. The light of the world has existed on the fringes of historical research for decades now,” Liv took another pull on her cigarette and glanced up to see Eva’s confused expression. She smiled, and seemed to decide to try to explain it a different way. “Why do you think Theo’s so obsessed with finding it? He wants to prove to the academic community as a whole that they were wrong to laugh him out of grad school when he presented his thesis.”
“So this is all about his glory?”
Liv shrugged. “It could be, and I don’t like it.” She glanced at Eva, her eyes crinkling at the corners and her smile slow and easy. “I think he could write a book about your grandmother and get just as much respect from the academic community, if not more.”
She had a cigarette dangling from her lips, but Eva wanted to reach out to her, pull her in close, and kiss her for being so insightful and so kind. She was a good person, a true and honest one.
“Do you really think so?” Eva asked quietly, her voice almost lost on the wind.
“I do,” Liv said firmly. She pulled her cigarette from her lips and raised her arm, and Eva didn’t need telling twice. She scooted into the warmth of Liv’s one-armed hug. “Your grandmother had a wonderful life, Eva. And if what happened to Catherine Monroe is what broke her, then it is up to the historians who have researched her story to tell the world about it.”
Chapter 18
Belief
It took nearly a week to sort through the remaining documents. Eva spent countless hours huddled in her sweater in the backroom of the bookshop, her eyes aching in the low light, sipping tea with Liv and Al. They scoured the documents for any further mention of Catherine Monroe while Theo started the laborious process of digging through countless old newspapers to see if he could find any articles about her disappearance.
It was slow, trying work. The writing on some of the documents was nearly illegible. It would sometimes take hours to decipher the contents only to discover that the document had very little to do with the query.
“This is hopeless,” Al announced on the afternoon of their fifth day at it. “There’s nothing here.” He got to his feet and stretched his arms over his head, fingers spread wide. “I give up.”
