“I remember your mom.” He flashed a grin in her direction. “I was not worried that would be the case.” He picked up the phone. “No.”
She glanced over at him. “Is that what it says?”
He held the screen in her direction. “Yep. Woman of few words, is your mom.”
“I often wonder where she came from, because she’s not like either of my grandparents.”
But she’d raised Erielle to be like her, guarded and careful. At least, this version of Erielle. The one he remembered from those summer days when they were kids had been happy and carefree. He wished he could bring some of that back to her.
He watched her roll out the dough and use a biscuit cutter, then toss the biscuits onto a cookie sheet. “Is all this your grandmother’s?”
“Yes. Don’t worry, I cleaned everything off. I haven’t given anyone food poisoning yet.”
He grunted, because he had worried about that, since the house had been sitting empty long enough that she had to chase animals out of it.
“Any luck with finding the symbols?”
He pulled out his own phone to use the flashlight in the dimly lit room, passing it over the faded pages. He looked between them and the napkins still held in place by silverware. At the stove, she tossed some crumbled sausage into a cast iron pan she’d apparently been heating, and it immediately began to sizzle. The scent filled the room instantly, and his stomach responded with an eager grumble.
They worked in silence for a bit, the only sound the sizzling sausage and the flip of pages.
“Got it!” He thumped the tip of his forefinger on the table for emphasis. “All here, and all in order. But it doesn’t say what it means.”
She crossed the room to look over his shoulder, wiping her hands on a towel she carried with her, and his skin prickled a bit as her warmth seeped through the back of his shirt. “There’s no key or table or anything anywhere in the book?”
He flipped to the front and back of the book to show her the blank pages. “Not that I can find.”
“Let me go grab my laptop. See if you can maybe look up what language it is.”
“I’ll go.” He motioned to the stove. “Where is it?”
“Um. Upstairs. Bedroom.”
He stilled for a minute, hoped she didn’t see. Where the ghost had trapped her. He hadn’t told her yet that he’d seen that ghost before, that he’d been here before. He should tell her. But maybe not right now.
If she noticed his hesitation, she didn’t say anything. He pushed his trepidation—he refused to call it fear—aside and headed up the stairs. Again he hesitated at the door to her bedroom. He saw the laptop sitting askew on a folding TV tray. He took a deep breath, charged in, snatched it and the charger up and bolted down the stairs.
This, she noticed. She turned to him with eyebrows raised. “See anything?”
“Didn’t look.” He crossed to the table and set the laptop down, his heart pounding. He sat, breathing through his nose so she wouldn’t hear him struggling for breath. He flipped open the top to see a password screen. “You want to sign me in?”
“My password is EDD13.”
His turn to lift his eyebrows as he typed it in. “You trust me enough for that?”
“What are you going to do? Steal my secret recipes?”
“You have secret recipes on this thing? Maybe I will.” He grinned at her when she turned to glare at him. “Is this like code for Eddie, or something?”
“What? No, my initials. And the number 13, clearly, which is Taylor Swift’s favorite number.”
This time, his surprise was a bark of laughter. “You’re a Swiftie?”
“One hundred percent.”
He admitted he didn’t know a lot about Taylor Swift, but it seemed like she was more for girly girls, which Erielle had proven herself not to be. But he wasn’t going to question it right now. Instead, he opened a new browser tab and typed in “languages with curly fonts.”
And realized he wasn’t connected to the internet. “What do I do here?”
