Page 8 of The Hampton Beach Café 2
There was no return address, she noticed.
So, even when he was reaching out, he didn’t want me to be able to write back?
The flap was open, and the anger flared again. Her mom had read them! Frances replaced Bruno in his spot beside her and pulled out the letter inside. Her eyebrows came together as she stared, flicking through the pages.
They were all blank, every single one of them.
“What in the world…” she muttered, reaching for another envelope.
That, too, had been opened and contained only empty pages. Frances replaced them in the pillow case, her head full of questions. She stood more carefully as she was filled with confusion and annoyance rather than hot anger. She strode across the room and inspected the bookcase as thoughts Rand through her mind quicker than she could process them.
Why?
Why had he written her at all if they were blank? Why had her mom not given them to her? Why had her mom stuffed them in her box of childhood toys?
None of it made sense.
She ran her fingers over the spines on the shelf. They were mostly cheap classics her mom had picked up at the same charity shop they’d found Bruno in. Plucking a few of the less tattered copies off the shelves, she piled them up in the crook of her arm.
There was no way she could ask her mom about it––she felt a bit strange coming down to plunder her mom's attic and bookshelf after so long with such low contact. It wasn't like her mom was a bad person. She just had a real way of asking questions that let you know she already knew the answer, and your response would only dictate to what degree she was disappointed in you. Flipping open the red hardcover of Pride and Prejudice, Frances saw the little love heart in the top corner of the title page. It had been her way of marking books she had loved reading––a long way off the online platform she used now to rate and leave reviews, manage her To Be Read lists, and suss out if a book might be for her. Adding it to the pile, she realized that she had taken half the top shelf and would need help carrying them downstairs.
The stack she placed down was almost as tall as the blue cardboard box. She glared at it, wondering if she should just remove the letters and leave them stuffed down some sideboard and try to forget about it.
A loud bang made her jump. Spinning to face the noise, she saw that it had come from the bookshelf she had just been picking through. The number of books she removed had destabilized the row. At the very end of the top shelf was a shoe box. It was covered in dust and had been wedged in on the short end, so it had stood taller than the books that supported it. Now, though, it lay flat on the shelf where it had gradually leaned further and further until it tipped over.
“What has she put in you to make you so heavy?” she asked the box as she crossed to it.
It must have been heavy to make such a loud noise, she reasoned, but her mom wasn’t a collector of rocks or coins, so it must be something else. Approaching the bookshelf, she noticed it was secured with heavy packing tape that had flaked away over the years. Pulling the box down and coughing through the plume of dust she created by doing so, Frances peered under the lid.
It was stacked high with hardcovers, but why on earth would her mom hide them away? She remembered her mom's flushed embarrassment when, as a teenager, Frances had asked her about the books at the library with the muscular pirates in billowing shirts grasping well-dressed ladies by the waist. So, she reasoned, it was hardly likely to be anything of that sort––but if old romance novels weren't what her mom was hiding...
Glancing over her shoulder, Frances felt a creeping sensation in her stomach. She hated sneaking around. Prying the lid off, she spied dates imprinted or scrawled on the front of each dense book. Not books, after all, but notebooks. Opening the front cover of the topmost one, she calculated it was started just over a decade ago and glanced at the first page.
'I want this to be the last one of these I start. It's not good for me to keep doing this. This year, I'll find him.'
“Frances, sweetie?” her mom's voice made her jump.
“Coming, mom!” she called back, shoving the journal back in the box.
The faded pen, the looping script, it was her mom's handwriting in those journals.
'This year I'll find him'. The words made her queasy––they could only be referring to her father. Frances glanced around at the mess she had made, panicking about what she should do. A creak at the bottom of the stairs told her that her mom was going to be in the room soon. She had to choose.
Quickly, she lifted Bruno, placed the journal box in with her old stuffies, and covered them with the stack of books she had pilfered from the shelf.
Alex arrived at the top of the stairs. “Your mom said you'd probably be taking a bunch of books and that I should help carry them down. Then she wants to know if we will be having coffee?”
Frances nodded and smiled to try and hide her panic. “Yeah, sure, take this one to the car.”
She indicated the box but retained Bruno in her hands. There was no way he would be riding in the back of the truck where he could get damaged.
With one last glance around the attic, she wondered if she'd found everything hidden there, and if any of the things she had found would give her any answers.
SIX
Since returning to Hampton Beach from Salem a few days ago, Frances had been trying to avoid looking at the blue box she had stuffed away in the furthest corner of her bedroom. She'd removed the books from it, cleaned them up, and popped them into the free library bookshelf she had decided would be a permanent feature in the café. If she had acted the way she really wanted to deep down, she'd have stowed it away in one of the storerooms, but that ran the risk of Lucinda or Alex finding it––and that was absolutely not worth the tiny amount of added relief of not having it in her own room would create.
“Frances? We're heading to the store. You want anything particular for dinner?” Lucinda asked as she leaned casually on the door frame.
