Page 69 of Play With Me

“That her ‘scoundrel of a husband’ was undeserving of her,” I say, without looking up.

The diary alluded to JEQ’s feelings toward Eleanor. But we didn’t know how far it went until we found the cache by the golf course.

Jude gave me credit for that one, seeing as I took that first diary and read it about a thousand times. I knew we were missing something. Then one day Jude and I were watching the old movieShakespeare in Love.Or rather, I was, while Jude was half asleep. Listening to the way they spoke and remembering how when reading Shakespeare in college I’d learned to decipher each line for its meaning, I woke up the next morning with an epiphany. “The product of the trees o’er the woods by the game” wasn’t just a poetic turn of phrase JEQ had used.

As it turned out, JEQ had hidden a second diary.

The diary, we discovered after combing the trees by the golf course, was a stack of papers we found in a metal box hidden in the woods edging the Rolling Hills resort’s golf course.

“That diary was a two-hundred-page story of unrequited love,” Jude says.

The woman’s practically swooning, her fists curled under her chin.

She gets me.

Jude is obsessed with this story because he wants to prove that Eleanor’s husband murdered her after finding out about her affair. I also wanted to get these answers. But mostly, I’m obsessed with JEQ’s love story. Those papers tell a tale of an unrequited love that went on for years.

I can relate.

“And that’s where the trail runs cold,” Jude says, sighing.

The papers, just like my life when I left Jude for London, ended in a cliffhanger: JEQ noted that all three of them would be traveling to Switzerland for a year, where George planned on dumping Eleanor in a remote cottage he owned in the Alps.

“The last note in the diary is that JEQ said George told him his job would be to ‘mind’ Eleanor, by checking in on her every so often over the course of the year,” Jude explains. “We think that’s where the affair started.”

“Here!” the woman says.

“Yes,” I tell her, zooming in.

“So,” Jude concludes, “we know this is the town George Cleary did a ton of his business deals in during the first world war, so we were hoping—”

“Wait, stop,” the woman says. “Cleary?”

“Yeah,” Jude says, standing up straight. “You heard of him?”

The woman opens the pony-door beside the front counter and comes out, striding briskly past us to the photos I was looking at when we first walked in.

“George Cleary,” she says, pointing to an old black and white photo.

We join her, and I aim the camera at the photo, slowly zooming in. The photograph is of a portly man with a thick black mustache and long black coat lined with glossy metal-looking buttons. He’s standing with his foot on a shovel in front of a slew of other men, some with their feet perched on rocks, stumps, and one, a wagon, all posing for the camera. Behind them mountains stretch into a clear sky.

“American businessman G. W. Cleary,” Jude reads from the English portion of the plaque, “breaking ground on what would later be Brehmsbruck’s official town hall.”

A thrill runs through me as I look up from the camera, meeting Jude’s eye.

“He built the building we’re standing in,” I say, unable to keep the excitement from my voice.

“He is in many documents and photographs,” the woman says, sounding as excited as us.

I look up from the camera at Jude. He grins widely, again setting that flutter off in my stomach. My brain chooses that moment to show me an image of his face, at the side of my tub, his hands gripping the edge as he watches me…

I bite my cheek hard to stop my wild train of thought. We didn’t come all this way to get distracted.

“Let me just see if Herr Mueller is available after all,” the woman says, then disappears down the corridor.

Ten minutes later and we’re being led down the stairs toward a surprisingly bright and well-lit hallway by an older gentleman who looks considerably less impressed by us than the woman upstairs.

This man doesn’t speak English, but after he asks us a question in German as we’re going down the stairs and we just blink like fish, I pull out my phone, cuing up the translator app.

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