Page 102 of The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth

It was not a very long trip, and the driver pulled up before what was clearly an apartment building across the street from a park. Henry paid him and Mariah headed to the door with instructions in her hand. Veronica paused, listening. The street was fairly quiet, only distant sounds of traffic and a pair of people talking somewhere, and alternating bird calls. She could pick out a woodpecker, and almost certainly some kind of crow, but others, too, sweeter, songbirds. She hadn’t even thought about the bird sounds she might hear.

Amid the noisy chirping of something small and repetitive, Veronica unmistakably heard the sound of a rooster.

The front door opened to the code, and the flat was on the top floor, with two bedrooms and a sofa bed, and a wide terrace overlooking the street below. “This is so great!” Veronica exclaimed. “I’ll take the sofa bed.”

“Or,” Mariah said slyly, “you and Henry could share. You are anyway, right?”

“Not your business,” Henry said, and Veronica felt her cheeks getting hot. “Let’s just drop our stuff and get out of here, shall we? It will get hot at midday.”

“Right now?” Mariah said. “I’m starving. We need to buy groceries.”

“We can do that on the way back,” Henry said. “Today we should have breakfast at Britannia and Company. It’s one of the most famous Parsi cafés, and it’s not far from the location of Café Guli, where your mom used to go. Maybe somebody around there will have answers to what happened to the family.”

“You’ve been here?” Veronica asked.

“No. I read the letters, and did some research.” He glanced at Mariah. “Making hay while the sun shines.”

Veronica nodded. Her heart ached in a million ways—that Mariah was growing more unstable, that the trip was proving hard on her, that her own life was a mess back home, and if she was honest—mostly she never wanted the trip to end at all. She wanted to explore everything outside that door, and then the rest of India, and then the world.

But all she had was now. “Let’s do it.”

Chapter Forty-Seven

Once they landed, Mariah tried to be on her best behavior. Henry and Veronica had almost called an end to the trip after Mariah’s rage-fest at the garden, and now she needed to show everything was cool, no matter how she felt inside. A couple of times, she found herself making barbed comments or a snide aside, but she kept it to a minimum.

And honestly, India was a lot, all at once. So many people! She’d never seen so many people in the streets, on walls, on roofs, and ... everywhere. The apartment was a pool of quiet, with a garden on the roof and a cute little kitchen, not that she wanted to cook. She was jet-lagged and irritable, and when Henry said they should go to the café, she wanted to balk.

But she saw the look they exchanged. Henry wanted to take the trains to the neighborhood they were going to, but Mariah protested. “Let’s just pay the money for a taxi.”

So they did. This time, Mariah slid into the back with Veronica, leaving Henry to sit in the front. As always, he chatted with the driver, asking questions to get him going about life in Mumbai, about his kids, about the signs advertising housing and the economy.

The window was open, and the air was warm. Almost hot, honestly, which was a relief after all the cool weather they’d been experiencing. Veronica said, “It feels good.”

“Yeah,” Mariah said. “Probably wouldn’t be great in August.”

“August is monsoon season, madam,” the driver said. “Hot, but rainy, too. A lot of rain.”

Veronica smiled. “I have this idea that I’d like the monsoons. I grew up in the desert, and we had monsoons, but maybe not exactly the same. It would rain really hard in the afternoon, giant thunderstorms, and then cool everything off for the evening.”

“Not so different,” the man said, nodding.

The taxi stopped at a light, and it was a busy intersection, so they sat a long way back. Gazing out the window, Mariah saw a blond woman in a green blouse that was exactly like one Rachel had owned, with little white dots all over it. She sat up, peering hard to see the woman’s face as she turned to talk to her friend, and they waited at the light. The woman brushed her hair out of her face, and Mariah was electrified. “Henry!” she cried, and swallowed the rest,It’s my mom,when the woman turned fully, and Mariah saw she was no more than twenty, and, yes, she looked like her, but not really.

The mediumship instructions came back to her. That those who’d crossed over showed all kinds of manifestations and signs. The green blouse was a sign. Maybe that person was a vision of Rachel when she was here in the city when she was young.

“What is it?” Henry asked.

“Do you see that lady? In the green blouse?”

Obediently, he looked around. “Where?”

“Right there on the curb. In the polka-dot blouse.” If he couldn’t see her, maybe it was a manifestation of Rachel.

“Yeah. I see her. Do you know her?”

Disappointment plunged her mood into dark gray. “No. I just thought the blouse was like my mom’s.”

Veronica took a protein bar out of her purse. “Want one?”