The Day Before Forever (10 page)

“Let me go talk to the woman at the desk.” Henley made to stand, but I stopped him.

“What are you going to say?”

“Just that we only brought cash with us.”

I let him go. Henley unzipped the backpack I held and found a pound coin. I watched as he walked to the desk and began talking to the curly-haired woman.

She didn't look happy. Her lips were downturned—and I didn't think they were naturally that way. Her chin bobbed
as she said something to Henley. I watched him stop and tilt his head. He was probably choosing his words carefully. The woman shook her head, but took his pound and counted out change.

I looked away as they came walking toward me.

When the woman came up to my shoulder, I pretended I was picking at a loose thread at the hem of my short shirt. I watched out of the corner of my eye as she did a few speedy keystrokes and typed some sort of code into another text box that had popped up. She pressed something and soon all of the boxes disappeared, leaving us with an unlocked computer.

“Thank you,” I mumbled.

She stalked back to the desk.

“I bought us thirty minutes,” Henley said. “Is that enough?”

“That's more than enough,” I said.

I realized this was the first time Henley had used a computer—well,
really
used a computer. I say that because Henley once manipulated my laptop when he was still without a body, to send me a message. That was the first time I had known he was still out there.

I clicked the first icon and the web browser came up with the search engine.

“This is the internet?” Henley's eyes were intently fixed on the screen.

I would have laughed at the look of reverence on his face then, but I knew I had worn the same expression when I had first been introduced to computers.

“Let's first search for an online translator,” I said, clicking. “Let's see . . .” I pulled out the letter. “The first words are
Querida Emilia.
”

Dear Emily
the computer showed on its screen.

“So you just type it in and the computer spits it out in English?” Henley said.

“Basically.”

I continued typing in the rest of the letter.

“There.”

We both craned our necks toward the computer screen to read the translation.

“That's it?” Henley asked.

The translation hadn't revealed much. It seemed like Juana was just writing a friend. She asked how her other friends and extended family were doing and mentioned she missed playing her harpsichord and recorder. The only thing that really meant much was the part she wrote at the end:

I feel as if I should be happier. And yet I'm not. Forgive me for not being able to bear showing my face to you. I fear I have become something I am not proud of.

“That's it,” I said, pointing to the end of the letter. “That's what we've been looking for.”

“‘I feel as if I should be happier. . . . Forgive me.' That doesn't say much at all,” Henley said.

“She says that she can't bear to show her face to her friend. It's because she's turned immortal and she knows it. What else could it be? And she even says that she fears she has become something she's not proud of!”

“That means nothing.” Henley sighed. “She could be
talking about most anything else. That she's taken something that wasn't hers and become a common thief. That she's become an adulteress now. That she thinks she's a bad daughter to her parents. It really could be anything.”

“No, it
had
to be immortality,” I said. “It fits so well and there was no one else who could be immortal. And if she hates it as much as it seems in this letter, there's no wonder she's killed all the Miss Hatfields.”

“All the Miss Hatfields save one,” Henley corrected.

I shook off my mistake. “Now time for the name of the auction house,” I said, pulling up another window on the computer quickly. Glancing over at Henley, still slack-jawed at how the computer worked, I asked him if he wanted to type.

“Can I?”

I turned the keyboard toward him. “Do you remember the name of the place that said they specialize in jewelry among other things?”

“Carter House.”

“Why don't you type ‘Carter House Auction,' just to be safe.”

Watching him was agony. Henley would painstakingly read the entire keyboard before finding the one letter he needed. He would slowly press that one key, as if worried he would break the keyboard. The result so far was “CaaarteerHoo.”

“Do you mind if I finish?” I would have let him go on if we didn't have more things to do. In his time I had been the clueless one, fumbling through social etiquette and tripping over my own curtsey. Now it was Henley's turn to be a fast learner.

Henley passed the keyboard over to me.

“Here's the space bar.” I showed him, while finishing the word.

I pressed enter, and we watched the page of results come in.

“Try the first one.” Henley prodded the screen with his finger.

“Henley,” I said. “One of the first rules of using computers is that you never touch the screen. Especially not that hard.” Unless it was a touchscreen, but I didn't tell him that part. It would only have confused him.

I looked over my shoulder at the circulation desk, and sure enough, the curly-haired woman was watching us with her birdlike eyes.

I clicked on the first link and it took us to what looked like Carter House's website.

“Obtainers of fine art and museum-quality antiques. Own a piece of history today!”
flashed across the screen.

There was a special tab for jewelry, so I clicked there.

We accept all verified vintage jewelry from all eras. Call for more info.

“I wonder what ‘verified' entails,” Henley said.

“They probably have a specialist look at it or something,” I said. “Do you think you could go ask the woman at the desk for a piece of paper and a pen?”

“What for?”

“So we can take down the number.”

Henley got up to go talk to the woman and came immediately back.

“She wouldn't give me paper. Said she didn't have any,” he muttered, as he used the pen to jot the number and address
down on the back of his hand.

“Just remember not to wash your hands before we call that number.”

“What do you take me for?” Henley said.

I didn't answer that, and instead looked up at the clock on the other side of the room. “We still have a few minutes left on the computer.”

I pulled up the search engine and tried to think of something useful to search for.

“Rebecca Hatfield” I typed. Holding my breath, I hit enter.

The search results popped up. Pages of them.

The first few links were to online directory results of people with the first name “Rebecca” or the last name “Hatfield.” There was never a person with both.

As I scanned the later pages, the results became more random and less relevant.

“I don't know if you're trying to look up yourself or my mother,” Henley said.

I didn't know either. I only wanted to have some record of me—of her. Some record to show that we had existed and that I still existed here.

“Why don't you try me?” Henley said.

I typed out his name, “Henley Beauford.”

Enter.

The page started filling up with a list of results, and I drew a long breath.

“Henley—these are all you,” I said.

Henley A. Beauford.

The last time I had read those words was on his grave.

“Look, there's even a photo of you!” I clicked it, and Henley's face filled the screen.

He looked young. Almost as young as I had remembered him in 1904 . . . Maybe a few added wrinkles and worry lines. Not that you could tell much from the black-and-white photo. He was wearing a tuxedo with a white bow tie. I remembered the white bow tie from when he first wore it to dinner in 1904. Tuxes were just coming in then. Mr. Beauford, Henley's father, had hated the way it looked. He thought it was much too casual. Mr. Beauford would have been shocked if he could see what his son was wearing today. I laughed.

“What?” Henley said. “You're not laughing at how I look, are you? You need to remember that the flashes they used then were incredibly bright and
that
is the only reason I'm squinting in that photograph.”

“You look fine,” I said. Of course, he looked nothing at all like he looked now in Richard's body.

Henley clicked to see the next photo.

In this one, Henley was on the left, and an equally familiar face peered at me from the right side of the frame. Eliza.

Eliza, along with her snobby sister, had visited Henley and his family when I was also at their country home—well, it was more of an estate than a little home. Eliza was sweet and gentle, unlike her older sister who, though a beauty, believed everything revolved around her. There was also the fact that Eliza's sister had designs to marry Henley for his father's money and influence—that hadn't made her too popular with me.

Eliza had gone blind from a fever when she was younger and was frail. That was probably a big reason for her piety and trust
in God. She had maintained all the faith and conviction that I didn't have. Henley had gone on to marry Eliza, and though Eliza had only survived a few years after she and Henley had married, I was happy two of the people I loved the most had been able to have a life together, however brief.

There were many things I wondered about what Henley had done after I had left his time. It was easy to forget that he had lived a full life before returning to me; he had gotten married, buried a wife, grown a business . . . but most striking of all, he had grown old and died.

Then again, it wasn't a permanent death since Henley was Miss Hatfield's son and therefore half-immortal. It was only the end of his life in his own time period, and the beginning of his life as a roaming ghost without a body.

“You're quiet. What are you thinking about?” Henley's warm eyes sought mine.

“All the lives you've led,” I said.

He didn't ask me anything further.

As I continued to click through the photos, we saw photos of Mr. Beauford's car (he was so proud of owning one of the first automobiles in the city), a few objects that used to belong in the city house, and the blueprint of the country estate. They all felt so familiar and yet so far away. I knew Henley was probably feeling this too, but even more so.

I instinctively gripped his hand, and he gave me a little squeeze back. That was the feeling of reassurance I missed when Henley was without a body.

“I wonder where they're getting all these photographs from,” Henley said.

“The better question is, who are ‘they'?” I didn't know who would be running a site with access to all of these photos.

With a few clicks, I came to the home page of the website.

Beauford Family Estate
, it said.

“You have a family estate?”

“Of course I do” was Henley's response. “It's probably run by some descendant of mine.”

My eyes went wide. “B-but you didn't have any children . . . And you don't have any siblings . . . Is there anything you forgot to mention?”

“Not that I know of. I meant distant relations. Like the great-grandchildren of my cousins or something along those lines,” he said.

“Thank God.” I let out the breath I didn't know I had been holding.

Henley raised his eyebrows. “Were you thinking I was going to admit to having four children you didn't know about?”

It sounded absurd, but I guess I hadn't known what to expect. “It's just that—”

“You know I've told you everything.”

Except about your life after I left
, I thought to myself.

“I haven't kept anything from you,” he went on. “And why should I?”

I bit my tongue. We only had a minute left on the computer, and I wanted to find out more about who was running this site.

I scrolled down to the bottom of the page. There was a small “About” section.

Muffy Beauford. Great-granddaughter of Philip Beauford—

That was all I could read before the computer cut off. We
were out of time.

“Damn it,” I said.

Henley looked appalled. “I haven't heard you swear like that before. A woman like you . . .”

“I was just disappointed,” I said. “Wouldn't you have liked to find out more about Muffy Beauford? Wait, maybe we could go to the front desk and pay a little more for a bit of extra time.”

“It's not worth it.”

I was surprised that Henley thought that. “What do you mean? You're related in some way to this Muffy Beauford. Don't you want to know more about her?”

“And what good would that do? It wouldn't make her any less of a stranger to me,” Henley said. “Besides, we now know that a Beauford Family Estate exists. That's helpful. It's a perfect backstory. We can tell the auction house that the jewelry was passed down from them.”

“But aren't you curious? All I got was that she's the great-granddaughter of a Philip Beauford.”

“Philip was my father's younger brother. They didn't get along much, so I don't remember seeing him. Supposedly I met him once, but I must have been young—I don't remember.”

I couldn't understand. “Don't you want to
know
Muffy, though?”

“Reading about her won't let me
know
her. And if you're going to ask me if I ever want to meet Muffy, or any others, no. I don't
know
them. They're not family.”

I knew I had to let it go. It wasn't as if it would be easy to contact them either. They would laugh if we told them Henley was their long-lost great-uncle. Or worse—call the police.
“Then let's get back to the hostel so we can call the auction house before it closes today.” But I still couldn't understand why he wasn't interested.