Lost in Paris by Elizabeth Thompson (ebook smartphone .txt) 📕

spending it at the apartment getting the lay of the land and taking inventory.

I don’t like that I’m behind, but it gives me a renewed sense of purpose. Today, I dig in with vigor.

We find photo albums stashed on shelves and clothing hanging in the closet: two pairs of men’s pants and three shirts, a few dresses, a red cloche hat, and a long, camel-colored coat with faux fur edging the sleeves and collar.

The garments are dusty, but they’re in remarkably good shape. They look like back room thrift store pickings. I remove them one by one to examine them. The piece that tugs at my heart is a stunning black drop-waist dress trimmed in soft gray silk with the most delicate beaded flowers embroidered around the hem, neckline, and cuffs.

It was Ivy through and through.

She died when I was six, but a few months before, to celebrate my graduation from kindergarten into “big-girl school,” she embroidered similar beaded pearlescent flowers around the neckline of my favorite pink sweater. It was like wearing the most wonderful necklace, and I thought I was so grown-up. It’s one of my most beloved memories of Granny Ivy.

I start to call out to Marla to come look, but I don’t.

She wouldn’t remember, because she wasn’t there.

I make a mental note to have the items cleaned. In the meantime, I hang the dress back in the closet and turn my attention to five more diaries I find stashed away on the closet shelf. Jackpot. I take them into the living room and sit at the desk, where I thumb through the earliest volume and skim a part that has her talking about first arriving in Paris and having a difficult time finding a job, ultimately taking work as a painter’s model.

That must be where the paintings in the bedroom came from.

I put down the diary.

I’m wasting precious time sitting here reading when I should be searching. I only have three more days—two and a half if you count travel time—before I have to return to London and go back to work. I can take the diaries with me and read them later. Right now, I need to see what other treasures I can find in the apartment.

When I booked the ticket, I made a return reservation for myself, not fathoming that this shrine to Ivy’s life would be a real thing.

Honestly, since Marla was involved, I expected nothing.

Speaking of the devil, I hear her humming “I Love Paris” to herself in the bedroom.

I walk around the common area, opening drawers, closets, and cupboards, taking inventory of the contents. In the living room, among other things, I find an old deck of playing cards still in its box, a heavy glass ashtray, and a world atlas. In the bathroom, I find a brittle robe hanging on a hook on the back of the door. There’s an empty cut glass bottle with a faded label that reads EAU DE LAVANDE AMBRéE PURE and a sliver of petrified soap next to a silver-handled shaving brush. One of the more curious things I uncover in the kitchen, shoved in the back of a cabinet, is a set of five rectangular cookie tins painted to look like a train when set end to end. The first tin is the engine, the next three are cars transporting both human and animal passengers, and the last is the caboose complete with a waving conductor.

I keep reminding myself that I’m supposed to be here. I’m not snooping, despite how weird it feels to pilfer through someone else’s belongings, looking at what was left behind. I can’t escape the feeling that someone might burst into the room at any second and stop me.

Maybe it’s because I don’t really know what I’m looking for.

Finally, after I’ve been at it for a couple of hours, I silently bid Ivy’s ghost to give us some clues. I’m squinting at a faded grocery list that I found wadded up in a kitchen drawer when Marla calls from the bedroom. “Hannah, come here and look at this. I think I might have found something.”

I get up from where I’ve been sitting on the floor and walk into the bedroom. Marla is holding a stack of yellowing papers as thick as a phone book.

“This was under the bed. What do you make of it?”

I take the tome from her. It appears to be a manuscript of some sort written in French on a typewriter and held together by a rotting rubber band, which crumbles and falls away as soon as I take the stack from Marla and start thumbing through the pages.

There’s no cover page. No name anywhere on the manuscript—at least not from what I can see at a glance.

The yellowed paper feels brittle and fragile, like dry autumn leaves. I don’t want to rip through it.

“This might be something,” I say. “But I don’t know.”

A few French words jump off the page at me, but I can’t make sense of it as a whole. I bring it into the living room.

“Where are you going?” Marla trails after me.

“One thing I learned from the tours I lead is that we need to touch things like this as little as possible.”

“How are we going to look at it unless we touch it?”

“Marla, I can see by looking at the papers that they’re fragile. Dirt and oil on our hands will only make them deteriorate faster.”

She rolls her eyes. “Okay, excuse me while I get my X-ray glasses.”

“You’re hysterical. But I’m serious. While we’re figuring out what we have here, we need to treat it with care, and that includes keeping our hands off it until I can get us some gloves and an acid-free box to store it in.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

We stand and stare at the stack of pages as if we’re waiting for it to answer our questions.

“Okay, I know we shouldn’t get too excited, but remember that