Page 45 of The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth

“Not yet.” They turned the corner, and on the wall in front of them was an enormous mural of a woman. Around her neck were graffiti tags, and script-covered doors all the way down the block. “The mural is gorgeous.”

“And it will be gone tomorrow.”

“That’s sad, isn’t it?”

“Not everything is meant to last forever.”

“Or anything, really,” she said.

“Right.” He paused. “This is the address.”

It was a narrow shop between two larger ones—one a fabric shop, the other a bodega offering the usual mix. The window of the bodega boasted a multicolored cat, fast asleep amid cartons of laundry soap. Handwritten specials advertised loo paper, canned beans, wine.

The shop in the middle was empty, and looked as if it had been for a long time. No signage was left behind to show what it had been. Veronica lifted her cupped hands to peer into the gloom. Just an open room with a concrete floor, a ladder on one side. “Can’t tell anything about it.”

“Maybe they’ll know next door.”

She hurried to follow him as he set off for the fabric store. He greeted the man inside in what sounded like Arabic. The man, wearing a button-down shirt and well-cut trousers with a kufi on his head, responded in kind, and then, “How may I help you?”

“We’re looking for someone, and they might be connected to the shop next door. Do you know what it was?”

“Oh, sure. It only closed during COVID. It was a little bookstore with books in Urdu, Hindi, and Bengali.”

“Who ran it?” Veronica asked.

“Mrs. Irani,” he said. “She returned to India when her father fell ill, and I believe she stayed there.”

“What was the name of the store, sir?” Veronica asked.

“The South Asia Book Emporium. It was quite wonderful.”

A bookstore! Veronica imagined a shop filled with towering shelves packed with history and travel and culture. “I wish it was still there!”

He bowed ever so slightly.

“Thank you,” Henry said.

Veronica wrote the name down when they got outside on the street. “Hate to see a bookstore that’s closed.”

“Agreed,” he said. “But why did Rachel have a bookstore on the list?”

“Maybe she wanted to do some research for her recipes? Or something to do with the cafés?”

“Possibly. But whythislittle shop in this faraway neighborhood?”

“Good question.” Veronica looked up at the marquee over the store, but whatever signage had been there was gone. “Rachel didn’t seem to care if things were obscure.”

“That’s true. But she wasn’t deliberately opaque, either. There must be some reason she wrote down this address. I wonder if Ms. Irani is connected to the café we visited yesterday.”

“Maybe.” Her phone buzzed, and she glanced down. “Mariah. She’s looking for us.”

“I’ll text her the address of the café. We can meet there.”

Chapter Twenty-One

When Mariah left Henry and Veronica at the grocery store, she smirked a little that both of them thought she was afraid to go in. Which was ridiculous. She had been in grocery stores a million times before the one time that it went bad, and had no feelings of worry or panic going into one. Not that she actuallyhadgone inside one since the thing, but she didn’t worry about it.

But she’d let them think that because she’d spied a tiny shop with a sign in the window that said “Psychic Medium, Readings £50.” Once Henry and Veronica had ducked into the store, she circled back two blocks to the psychic. For a moment, she stood outside wondering if she wasreallygoing to go in. The window was ordinary, just the sign, neatly lettered. A teapot and matching cups sat in the display area.