Granny doesn’t answer. Elsa puts her forehead against the lower edge of the coffin. She feels the cold wood against her skin and warm tears on her lips. Then she feels Mum’s soft fingers against her neck, and she turns around and throws her arms around her, and Mum carries her out of there. When she opens her eyes again she’s sitting in Kia, Mum’s car.
Mum is standing outside in the snow talking to George on the telephone. Elsa knows she doesn’t want her to hear them talking about the funeral. She’s not an idiot. She’s still got Granny’s letter in her hand. She knows you’re not supposed to read other people’s letters, but she must have read this one a hundred times these last two days. Granny must have known she’d do this, because she’s written the entire letter in symbols that Elsa can’t understand. Using the strange alphabet she saw on the road signs in Granny’s photographs.
Elsa glares at it. Granny always said she and Elsa shouldn’t have any secrets from each other, only secrets together. She’s furious with Granny for the lie, because now Elsa sits here with the greatest secret of them all and she can’t understand a crapping thing. And she knows that if she falls out with Granny at this point it will set a personal record that they can never beat.
The ink smudges over the paper when she blinks down at it. Although there are letters that Elsa doesn’t know, Granny has probably misspelled things. When Granny writes, it’s as if she is just scattering words over the page while she’s already mentally on her way somewhere else. It’s not that Granny can’t spell, it’s just that she thinks so fast that the letters and words can’t keep up. And unlike Elsa, Granny can’t see the point of spelling things correctly; anyway she was always better at science and numbers. “You bloody understand what I mean!” she hisses when she passes Elsa secret notes while they’re eating with Mum and George and Elsa adds the dashes and spaces in the right places with her red felt-tip pen.
It’s one of the few things they really row about, Granny and Elsa, because Elsa thinks letters are something more than just a way of sending messages. Something more important.
Or used to. They used to row about it.
There’s only one word in the whole letter that Elsa can read. Just one, which has been written in normal letters, tossed down almost haphazardly in the middle of the text. It’s so anonymous that Elsa didn’t notice it the first time she read it. She reads it again and again until she can’t see it through all her blinking. She feels let down and angry for tens of thousands of reasons and probably another ten thousand she hasn’t even thought of yet. Because she knows it’s not a coincidence. Granny put that word right there so Elsa would see it.
The name on the envelope is the same name as the one on The Monster’s mailbox. And the only word Elsa can read in the letter is “Miamas.”
Granny has always loved treasure hunts.
6
CLEANING AGENTS
She has three scratch marks on her cheek. As if from claws. She knows they’ll want to know how it all began. Elsa ran, is the short answer. She’s good at running. That’s what happens when you get chased all the time.
This morning she lied to Mum about starting school an hour earlier than usual. And when Mum pulled her up on it, Elsa played the bad mother card. The bad mother card is like Renault: hardly a beauty but surprisingly effective. “I’ve told you like a hundred times I start earlier on Mondays! I even gave you a slip but you never listen to me anymore!”