I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(45)

But, anyway, I almost didn’t call him because I didn’t want to give even the tiniest bit of credence to Zach’s rebound accusation, until it hit me how stupid and childish this was. What the hell, Clare? You what? Don’t want to give Zach the satisfaction? I said to myself. He won’t even know. But then I reminded myself that Zach’s knowing or not knowing wasn’t the point. The point was that Dev was my friend.

He answered by saying, “You would not even believe what I’m eating right now.”

“Falafel.”

“Not falafel. The greatest falafel in the world.”

“The greatest falafel in the world is in Philadelphia? What about the entire Middle East? What about the falafel in Baghdad?”

“Better.”

“What about Dubai? I bet they have really great falafel in Dubai.”

“Not this great.”

“Is it the tahini?”

“It’s the tahini, the falafel itself, the taboon bread. It’s everything.”

“Can’t you just say pita like a normal person?”

“Who would say pita when they can say taboon bread?”

“Everyone.”

“Anyway, it’s not really a pocket. A pita is all about the pocket.”

“Can we stop talking about your lunch now?”

“Yeah, sure, stop when I was winning.”

“Winning the conversation about your sandwich?”

“You had no comeback to my pita pocket observation. It was painfully obvious.”

“You’re painfully obvious.”

“And we end with another classic Clare Hobbes counterinsult!”

“Turning your own words against you. You’d think you’d know better by now than to argue with the likes of me.”

“You’d think I’d know better by now.”

“I never think you know better.”

“True.”

“Can you just shut up at this point? Is that possible?”

“Yes.”

“Dev, listen.”

“Listening.”

“This morning, I spilled my coffee and went looking for a sponge because I thought maybe Joliet had left one, Joliet like the city not like the Shakespeare heroine—she’s the woman who cleans the house—and so anyway, this morning, coffee, everywhere, so I went looking under the sink for a sponge, and boom.”

“Boom?”

“Yes. But it really started before that when the nosy neighbor mentioned the murder and I went to the library, which was the most consummately perfect library ever with this amazing red door and full of rustling like I like, and I sat there and read through nearly a hundred and twenty-one copies of the Daily Bee, and I had to do some piecing together and it took me hours, although thank God they had all the newspapers digitized a while back, and, when I was finished working, I looked up and was surprised to see it was dark outside, and my eyesight was doing that underwater thing that comes from staring at a computer screen for too long, but it was all worth it because the story, Dev, it was amazing. Do you have time to hear it? Like is your lunch break almost over? Because I can call back later.”

“Did you say murder?”

“Yes.”

“I can stay later at the lab if they need me to. Tell me now.”

I told him everything. My conversation with Joliet; my conversation with Louise Smits; the two canoes; Joseph’s photos of Edith; Edith’s photos of Joseph; the marriage certificate; the obituary; the story of Elliot Giles’s murder, of John Blanchard’s trial, and of the disappearances of Edith Herron and Sarah Giles; the blue ceiling, the percolator, everything. I ended with the ledgers, opening them up and reading Dev a few entries from each.

After I finished, Dev was quiet for a while. I could feel the wheels turning inside his head, and even without seeing him, I knew exactly the expression he had on his face.

Finally, he said, “I guess we’re thinking the shadow guests were real people? She couldn’t have been, I don’t know, taking notes for a book she was writing or something? Or maybe they were just people she met someplace else, like at the beach or in a restaurant or someplace, not people who stayed at her house?”

“I never thought of that. I guess it’s possible they weren’t guests or even real people at all, but I think they were. There are the dates, for one thing, placed a line up from the guest’s name, just the way they are in the daylight ledger, and the two ledgers were together, in the same box, like they were the same sort of thing. A pair.”

“A pair,” he echoed. “Okay, that’s true. Plus, she makes reference to lullabies, right? And nightmares. There are at least two guests with ‘nightmares’ at the end of their entries. Which seem to indicate that Edith was with them at night. People just don’t sing lullabies or have nightmares out in public, and since Edith owned a guesthouse, chances are they were guests.”

“Yes, also—” I stopped, my cheeks flushing.

“Also, what?”

“Okay, not to sound crazy, but they just feel real to me, real and like they were here, in this house. Maybe it’s the details Edith includes that bring them to life for me, but I look around and picture them so clearly, here on the first floor where there’s a tiny bedroom, where I bet they slept. I see them knitting and running a toy truck across the floor and singing to a baby. There are these two chairs by the fire, and I can see women sitting there, the firelight on their auburn hair or blue-black hair or—” I sighed. “So, yeah, it does sound crazy.”