“How so?” Harper asked.
“Athena hated Medusa, and Athena was a much more powerful goddess, so what Athena said became the truth,” Lydia explained. “Medusa was just a beautiful young girl, and she had an affair with Poseidon. And that pissed Athena off ’cause she had a thing for him, so she turned Medusa into the gorgon. Then, later, Athena sent Perseus to kill Medusa, but he fell in love with her instead, so then Athena finished the job herself.”
“How do you know all this stuff?” Harper asked. “That’s not written down in any of the books I’ve read. Some of it sounds similar, but Medusa’s always described as a monstrosity, and Perseus as a brave hero for slaying her.”
“That’s because Athena was a huge asshole,” Lydia said. “Think about it. She twisted their love story and made it into the exact opposite, so the rest of history would condemn Medusa. It’s pretty sick.
“And as for how I know it, it’s because that’s what my family does,” Lydia went on. “For centuries, we’ve been collecting all the information, all the truths from the supernatural elements of the world. We’re the record keepers for the things in the world that the rest of humanity doesn’t—or can’t—properly record.”
With that, Lydia swiveled her chair and took the lid off the box. As she began to rifle through its contents, Harper noticed the scar on Lydia’s shoulder, red, beveled flesh protruding from around the strap of her tank top. Lydia had told her it was a werewolf bite, and Harper wondered about the price of being the paranormal world’s memory keeper.
“That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about,” Lydia said. She pulled out a green file, worn around the edges with a cracked spine. “Marcy asked me about Audra.”
“Yes, she told me that you were related to her. She was your great-grandmother, right?”
Lydia nodded. “She was my grandmother’s mother. And my grandma never married, and my mom never married, so it made tracing the lineage a bit easier from Panning to Panning.”
“She wouldn’t happen to still be alive, would she?” Harper asked hopefully.
“No, unfortunately, she’s not,” Lydia said. “She wouldn’t be that old, though. I think…” She tilted her head as she did the math. “Audra would be in her eighties, but she passed away about fifteen years ago, and she’d already been in a sorry shape before. Very early onset dementia.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Harper said.
“It’s a side effect of the profession, I think.” Lydia sighed. “I didn’t know her that well, which is why it’s taken me a bit longer to break her code.” She pulled papers out of the file, then she looked up at Harper. “Did Marcy explain to you about the code?”
“She said that Audra kept her journals coded,” Harper said, and Lydia looked back down at the pages.
From where Harper sat, she didn’t have the best angle to see them, but they appeared to be old pages from notebooks, yellowed a bit, but mostly okay. The words were written in very small cursive that she couldn’t read at all.
“She did. If things weren’t important, she’d write them in regular English, but if she needed to keep something especially private, she’d write in a code that only she could read,” Lydia elaborated.
“Nana’s code was a variation of Audra’s, so that helps,” Lydia said. “There’s no one linear code that we go by, again, to make it hard for strangers to break. My own expands on Nana’s, but Audra’s code has a mind of its own, just like her.
“This file right here”—Lydia rested her hand on the green folder—“this is all of Audra’s notes for the summer that Thalia came looking for her. So what I wanted to show is in here, and in fact—”
Lydia cut herself off and reached into the folder, digging around for something, and she pulled out two small black-and-white photos.
“I thought you might find this interesting.” Lydia reached across the desk and handed one of the photos to her.
It showed three people. A woman, probably in her early thirties, with her light hair pulled up in a tight bun. While she was attractive, there was a hardness to her smile, and an almost devious glint in her eyes. Like she was hiding something.
In front of her stood a young girl, no more than nine or ten. Her long hair was in two braids, and she wore overalls. Her smile was bright, and it actually looked just like Lydia’s.
The third woman, standing with her hand on the child’s shoulder, Harper recognized instantly. It was the same radiant blonde she’d seen in all the pictures she found at Bernie’s house.
“That’s Thalia,” Harper said, tapping the photo.
“I know. The other two people are Audra and my grandma,” Lydia explained.
Harper flipped it over, finding an inscription on the back that said just as much—Audra, Delia, and then simply the letter T. She turned it back over, searching the black-and-white photo for clues.