Page 47 of My Favorite Lost Cause
I reach out and tap his shoulder three times in a row. “Like that. I thought it was you.”
He regards me with wary eyes. “What the fuck, Maren? And you didn’tmentionit?”
“I thought it would sound crazy if I said some ghost was warning us about the mouse, so I?—”
“What if it wasn’t a ghost? What if there was someone actually in the house?”
Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. Still... “There wasn’t. I’d have heard footsteps. Anyway, you remember that day you found me in the room upstairs, and I didn’t realize all that time had passed?”
“Yeah…” he says with a hint of dread.
I reach down to pick up Echo, who’s whining beside my left leg. “It wasn’t like I was dreaming. I didn’t think I’d fallen asleep, though I guess I did. But I had this huge burst of excitement, out of nowhere, and I was thinking about high school and then suddenly I was remembering something else, something about going to a dance and telling someone Papa wouldn’t let me attend until my brothers got home from college. Except I don’t call anyonePapa. And I don’t have brothers.”
His jaw locks. “This is why you were weird about the photo album.”
“I wasn’tweird,” I reply, setting Echo down again. “It was just…I’d had this dream that I was a young girl who had several older brothers, and it turns out that the girl who probably lived in that room…had older brothers.”
“You realize that doesn’t mean anything, right? Lots of people have older brothers. It’s not…rare.”
“I know. That’s why I didn’t say anything. But then this morning I had this dream about that little desk, and I’d hidden a journal under one of the drawers, so?—”
“So you came running out here without a bra at dawn to see if you might acquire the magic journal.”
My nipples stand at attention again. It’s as if they perk up any time they’re being discussed. His gaze drops quickly, then shoots back to my face. “For someone who routinely has multiple girls naked in his apartment, you’re making a really big deal out of the bra. But yes. I just wanted to check, and I know it sounds crazy, but…wouldn’t you want to look if you were me?”
His raised brow says quite clearly that no, he would not want to look. “Maren, honey, you’re starting to freak me out a little bit. I’m worried I’m about to find you crawling on the ceiling or speaking in tongues.”
I shake my head. “I know it’s strange, and I know I haven’t always made the most rational decisions, but this is different. It feels like the house is trying to tell me something.”
“You realize that’s the kind of thing a girl would say in a movie right before she started crawling on the ceiling?”
“If I start crawling on the ceiling, you have my permission to remove me from the house.”
“If you start crawling on the ceiling, I’ll be too busy running toward town screaming to get you out of here.”
I laugh. “That seems fair.”
He nods toward the desk. “I don’t want you climbing. Tell me what drawer.”
If I’d checked on my own and found nothing, I’d have felt a little silly. If Charlie checks and there’s nothing, I’m going to feel like a fucking idiot, but it’s pretty clear he’s not going to just leave me alone here if I request it. “The main one,” I tell him. “Like, if you were sitting, it’s right above your knees. She wasn’t keeping it in the drawer, though. She was hiding it underneath.”
He leans toward it, resting a hand on the credenza as he glances up. “Maren, I can see beneath it right now. There’s nothing there.”
“Oh,” I say. “Okay.”
He turns, looks me over, and gives me a weary smile. “Would you like me to look under the other drawers?”
My whole face must brighten because he laughs.
“You’re going to have me dismantling this desk if it doesn’t turn up, aren’t you?” he asks, reaching toward the desk again. He pulls the bottom drawer out and finds nothing, pulls the middle drawer out and finds nothing, pulls the top drawer and finds?—
“Huh,” he says, almost inaudibly.
He slides his hand beneath it…and withdraws a book.
I take an automatic step backward in my shock. It doesn’t lookexactlylike the diary I dreamed about, and it wasn’t under the correct drawer, but…
“This is weird, right?” I ask.
