Sunshine was out with Carrot. She went out most days now to gather more lost things for the website, carrying a small notebook and pencil so that she could jot down the details for the labels before she forgot. Freddy was out laying a new lawn for one of his customers, so Laura was alone. Except for Therese.
“I know, I know!” she said out loud. “I’m going to look for it today, I promise.”
Since Sunshine’s revelation that Anthony’s letter was the clue they needed, Laura had been trying to remember where she had put it. At first she thought that she might have left it in the dressing table in Therese’s room, but the door remained locked, so she hadn’t been able to check. In any case, it hardly seemed likely that Therese would be preventing her from finding the very thing that she wanted her to find. Even she couldn’t be that awkward. Laura went into the study. She would just check the e-mails first. The website was proving popular with hundreds of hits already. There were two e-mails. One was from an elderly lady who said that she was eighty-nine years of age and a silver surfer of two years thanks to her local retirement center. She had heard about the website on the radio and decided to take a look. She thought that a jigsaw puzzle piece found years ago in Copper Street might be hers. Or rather, her sister’s. They hadn’t got on, and one day when her sister had been particularly vicious she had taken a piece from the puzzle her sister was working on. She went for a walk to get out of the house and threw the piece into the gutter. “Childish, I expect,” she said, “but she could be the very devil. And she was livid when she found that it was missing.” The old lady didn’t want it back. Her sister was long dead anyway. But it was nice, she said, to have something to practice her e-mails on.
The second was from a young woman claiming a pair of lime-green hair bobbles. Her mum had bought them for her to cheer her up, the day before she started a new school she was feeling nervous about. She’d lost them in the park on the way home from a day out with her mum, and it would be nice to have them back as a memento.
Laura replied to both e-mails and then set about searching for Anthony’s letter. By the time Sunshine returned with Carrot, she was poring over the letter at the kitchen table. She had found it tucked away in the writing desk in the garden room. As soon as she had found it, she had helpfully remembered that, of course, that was where she had placed it for safekeeping. Sunshine made the lovely cup of tea for them and then sat down next to Laura.
“What does it say?” she asked.
“What does what say?” said Freddy, bursting through the back door, his boots covered in mud. Laura and Sunshine both looked at his feet and commanded in unison, “Off!”
Freddy laughed as he struggled out of his boots and left them outside on the doormat.
“Talk about henpecked!” he exclaimed. “Now, what’s all this?”
“It’s St. Anthony’s dead letter and now we’re going to find the clue,” Sunshine exclaimed with far more confidence than Laura felt. She began to read out loud, but resurgent grief choked his generous words in her throat before she could even finish the first line. Sunshine took the letter gently from her and began again, reading slowly and deliberately, helped by Freddy with some of the more difficult words. When she reached the final paragraph, where Anthony asked Laura to befriend her, her face lit up with a smile.
“But I asked you first!” she said.
Laura took her hand. “And I’m very glad you did,” she replied.
Freddy slapped his palms on the table.
“Enough with the mushy stuff, you girls,” he said, rocking his chair backward on two legs. “What’s the clue?”
Sunshine looked at him with dutiful amusement, which quickly withered into undisguised scorn when she realized that he wasn’t joking.
“You cannot be serious,” she said, looking to Laura for support.
“Well, it could be anything . . .” Laura ventured uncertainly.
Freddy was studying the letter again.
“Well, come on, John McEnroe,” he said to Sunshine, “Enlighten us.”
Sunshine sighed, and like a schoolteacher sorely disappointed with her class, she shook her head slowly before announcing, “It’s so obvious.”
And when she explained, they realized that, of course, it was.
CHAPTER 42
Eunice
2011