Total pages in book: 99
Estimated words: 93002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
“Good point,” I said. “Unless there isn’t any money, and it was just about the fun of the treasure hunt. But either way, I could see him wanting my mom to be a part of it. And we don’t know how long he planned to wait for us to try solving the clues.”
“True,” Sterling agreed. “So, what do we do now?”
I hated causing my mom pain, hated the look in her eyes when we talked about my father. She was still so raw and so angry. I couldn’t picture asking her for help, but the thought of not doing that, of walking away and leaving this unfinished, was equally untenable.
“Forrest,” Sterling asked, shaking me out of my paralysis. “What do you want to do?”
“We’re going to have to talk to her,” I said, knowing we didn’t have another choice.
Chapter Thirty-Five
FORREST
Ifound my mother in the kitchen, doing something with a cutting board piled with fragrant herbs. The spicy green scents of thyme and oregano filled the kitchen. She turned, her hair floating out around her slender frame in a cloud of gray and pink.
Her chin came up, but her eyes were cautious as they met mine. “What did you find?” she asked.
“We found what we were looking for,” Sterling said gently. “There was another clue in Forrest’s copy of Treasure Island.”
My mother was silent, but her eyebrow raised in question.
“The clue,” I said, “was Rumi. We think it means—”
“—the poet,” my mother finished for me. She let out a long sigh, seeming to deflate, her shoulders rounding forward, her chin dropping. Setting the knife on the cutting board, she turned, heading for the hallway that led to the bedroom she shared with Jerry. The space was bright and open, the ceiling a tall slant, no more than my height on one end, soaring to twenty feet on the other side of the room. Tall, plate glass windows made up the wall that faced the ocean, the deep navy spreading across the distant horizon.
Sunlight flooded the room, but as my mother entered, she brought darkness, her sadness clinging to her like a fog. I expected her to head to her closet or the bookshelf, but she went to the neatly made bed, sat on the side, and pulled open a bedside drawer. She rifled through it and, from the bottom, pulled a slim volume. The cover was the deep yellow-gold linen I remembered. Down the spine in gold-pressed letters, I could see Love Poems of Rumi.
“He gave this to me,” she said. “On our fifth anniversary. He always loved Rumi.” She rubbed her thumb over the words on the spine. “I always thought it was odd. He could be so unsentimental, so logical and orderly. Not the kind of man you’d think would be into love poems.” She let out a huff of breath and wiped at the bottom of her eye, her fingers coming away wet. “But he was a romantic at heart.” She flipped through the book. “I don’t see anything.” Shaking her head, she looked to me. “I haven’t read this in years. Not since, well.” She shrugged, cut off in a choke, and she swallowed. “But I don’t—”
Sterling laid a soft hand on my mother’s arm. “May I?” She reached for the book, and my mother slid it toward her, her eyes squeezing shut.
Sitting beside my mom, Sterling opened the book in her lap, carefully leafing through. With a glance at me, she shook her head. But as she opened the cover and closed the book again, something jumped out at me.
“Sterling—” I held out my hand, and silently, she passed me the thin volume. I opened the front cover all the way and looked at the endpapers, the sheets of paper that were glued to the inside of the hardcover of the book and served as the very first and last pages. They didn’t match the rest of the book, and they didn’t match the cover. Instead of a plain paper or some fanciful design that would go with a volume of poetry, these endpapers looked like pencil sketches of vintage maps. Were they printed maps or actual pencil sketches? I used my phone as a flashlight and studied the endpapers, but I couldn’t tell. I ran my fingers along the edge of the front cover.
Sterling’s breath drew in sharply, her eyes bright as they met mine over the book. Taking the volume from my hands, she caught her finger beneath the last page and turned the book, so instead of the front, we were looking at the last page and the inside of the back cover. Immediately, I saw what we’d missed. The endpapers in the back were the same vintage maps as the front, but here, the edge was raised, almost lumpy.
“Mom,” I said. She drew her attention from her memories and focused on the book in my hands. “Look at this.” I flipped the pages from the flat, clean endpapers of the front cover to the raised, uneven endpapers in the back.