“You do that and I’ll do this,” she said, her tone distracted.
He went back to his side of the table, saw the app was ready, gave it the proper permissions, and took a picture of the first page of the book.
The image was not great—the pages were yellow and the writing was faded, so the app was no help. He repeated the process with a few different pages in the book, but no luck.
“It’s not working with the book. I think it’s not getting clear enough pictures.” An idea struck, and he walked over to the window, snapped a picture of the carved symbols.
But when he looked at the photo, no symbols appeared. Just the frame.
“What the hell?” He turned his phone for Erielle to see it.
She frowned and wiped her face with a napkin. She rose and took his hand, tugging him out of his chair. When he was up, she picked up the chair he’d been sitting in, and marched into the living room. She set the chair in front of the window and climbed up on it, then held out her hand.
A moment passed before he realized she meant for him to hand her the phone. He did, and she took a picture in the app, checked the screen, then silently held the screen for him to see.
Nothing. A chill ran through him.
He took the phone from her, switched to just the camera app. He didn’t know why they hadn’t taken photos of the symbols before, why she had done the rubbings, figured it was just because she didn’t have a way to print out the pictures to look at them side by side. But now he wondered.
She snapped a picture, checked the screen, again showed him.
Nothing.
“What the hell.”
She reached up and rubbed her thumb over the carving. “I feel it. It’s there. So why isn’t the phone seeing it?” She looked down at him. “You see it, right?”
“I do.”
She shook her head and climbed down, placing her hand casually on his shoulder as she hopped to the ground. “Okay. This is….this is weird.”
“Let’s go back to what we were doing. I’ll look up languages, you inspect the picture, then we’ll switch. See if we see something the other person missed.”
She made a noise in her throat that may have been acceptance, and walked back into the kitchen. But she sat in his chair and pulled the laptop closer, so he pulled his breakfast plate to the other side of the table so he could finish eating. The frantic clicking of keys sounded from the laptop.
“What are you doing?”
“Making notes of everything we know right now. I don’t want to forget any of it.”
They worked together quietly, and he noticed she barely ate anything, despite all the work she’d done. He cleaned his plate, though the gravy had cooled and congealed. It still tasted good. When his eyes started hurting from the reflected light of his flashlight on the painting, he got up and washed his plate, then eyed the remaining biscuits.
“You have a way to save these?”
She made a noise and gave him a wave, like she wasn’t going to worry about it now, so he opened a couple of cabinets before he found a box of baggies for the biscuits. He didn’t find anything for the gravy, so scraped it into a coffee cup and set it in the fridge. Then he washed the pans and wiped down the stove.
“What are you doing?” she asked finally.
“You cooked, I clean.”
“Are you done with the painting?”
“My eyes were getting tired. Taking a break. You find anything?”
She rubbed her thumb between her eyebrows. “There are so many, and the websites take so long to load. Nothing matches exactly.”
“You want to switch?” He hung the dishtowel back on the front of the the oven.
She nodded, and they rotated. He watched her for a moment. She took much smaller areas of the picture to inspect. Probably more effective. He noticed she went back a little over the area where he’d gone. Yeah, she was going to take forever.
