Page 48 of Finders Keepers

The Albert Aaron in the interviews did not seem particularly impressed with his informant’s personality. Not that I blame him. Fountain didn’t hold much back, nor did he pass up an opportunity to amuse himself by embarrassing someone else.

“You’re shocked,” Eugene remarks, humor dancing in his dark brown eyes as he takes in my face, which I’m sure shows all sorts of emotions right now. Shocked is one of them, though.

“It didn’t seem like they got along all that well,” I say. “At least based on the transcripts we read.”

Emily returns, a thin, purple, clothbound book reverently cradled in her hands.

“It’s true that Mr. Fountain did not make a good first impression on my father,” Mr. Aaron says, taking possession of the volume.

He thanks his granddaughter before continuing, “But beyond his peculiar behavior and the occasional cutting remark, Julius Fountain was a good man. A kind one. Papa used to say that he left Sprangbur Castle equal parts annoyed and charmed. Then ‘charmed’ won out once this arrived at our apartment a few months later.”

He reaches forward and lays the beautifully bound manuscript on the coffee table in front of us.

I move my glass of water to the floor out of an abundance of caution before leaning in, my shoulder and leg pressed tightly to Quentin’s as we both take in the book.

I’m the first to reach out to touch it, but I pause with my fingers on the edge of the cover.

There’s a handwritten note tucked inside. I carefully slip it out and unfold the paper, immediately recognizing the penmanship from a few of the documents in the Fountain collection at the library.

“Oh, wow.”

Mr. Aaron smiles as I glance up at him.

“?‘Dear Mr. Aaron,’?” Quentin reads aloud. “?‘I send you this as…’ I can’t make out that word.”

My graduate work might not be particularly useful in day-to-day circumstances, but it did give me substantial experience deciphering old cursive handwriting.

It’s beyond absurd, yet I have the sense that this is what the past two decades of my life were leading up to, readying me for this moment.

I take over, reading, “?‘I send you this as promised during our meeting last June, and hope it finds you and yours well. Your boy must be toddling around and being quite a darling terror by now. I gift him these stories of my beloved second home of Edlo, inviting him into this place I hold so dear, with the wish that it will inspire joy and freedom in the tender years of his life and beyond. I remain—J. J. Fountain.’?”

Quentin’s finger hovers over a postscript written along the edge of the page. “Can you see what this says?”

I take a moment to decipher the much smaller writing, tilting my head as far to the side as it will go to turn it upright, then realizing belatedly that I can simply rotate the paper.

“I think…‘P.S. What you said before you left Sprangbur, about love…I have come to find you were correct. Thank you, Albert, from the depths of my desiccated old heart, for showing me what I could never see clearly on my own.’?”

“Do you have any idea what that means, Mr. Aaron?” Quentin asks.

Eugene shrugs a shoulder. “All my father would say was that they quarreled at the end of the visit, and that he said some things he had no right saying.”

“Fountain apparently didn’t mind,” I say.

“Even so, my father was quite embarrassed about the outburst. He wouldn’t tell me more than that, and I certainly tried to get it out of him.

The idea of my mild-mannered father shouting at a rich old businessman felt as fantastical as the stories in this book.

” Eugene smiles. “Papa ultimately came around on the fellow, but apparently Fountain pushed his buttons like no one else in the short time they were in conversation. I think he almost admired him for it.”

I refold the letter along its time-worn crease and place it back inside the book.

Quentin and I both emit gasps as we take in the illustration we uncover as I carefully turn to the next page.

Not terrible by any means, but certainly not the work of a professional artist. Maybe not even of an adult, actually.

It shows three people—a princess flanked on either side by a king and a queen—standing together inside of a large bubble soaring above a few cloudlike trees.

Next is the title page:

A New Account of an Incredible Land

By L. M. Worman

1918

Written helpfully beneath in large cursive, with the same heavy ink as the drawing on the previous page, it says:

Illustrations by Isolde Fountain, age 8

And suddenly everything makes so much more sense.

Because Edlo was Louisa’s creation, not Fountain’s.

She must have come up with it out of a need to connect with the child that inadvertently wound up in her partial care.

Edlo was a kind of play therapy for Isolde, and maybe for Julius Fountain too.

This book must be the product of years of storytelling—a recording of the world they created at Sprangbur.

The realization makes me surprisingly emotional, thinking about how this woman—someone paid to be responsible for Fountain’s daily business needs—wound up taking on this job of caring for the man and his young niece.

Because I would bet anything that the princess on the first page is Isolde Fountain, the king is Julius Fountain, and the queen is Louisa Worman.

This is a portrait of their family. Circumstances necessitated that Louisa slip into the role of matriarch without ever officially being part of it, and instead of refusing or resenting that role, she created something so absolutely beautiful for them to share.

“Look,” Quentin says, pulling me from my thoughts.

I refocus on the page in front of me and take in an illustration of the king speaking to a whale—about how anytime he leaves the kingdom, he should leave something valuable behind to comfort and assure the queen and the princess, according to the bit of story that goes with it.

You shall find what you seek beneath the whale…

Immediately below the rather rectangular body, in Isolde’s youthful writing again, is a piece of dialogue from the story: “Leave your heart tucked safely away in a bubble!” Sprangbur has so many details, bas-reliefs and wood carvings and painted ceilings.

Surely there are bubbles represented somewhere, overlooked while we were hyper-focused on finding whales.

“In a bubble,” I say. “It’s in a bubble.”

“Found something interesting, did you?” Mr. Aaron says from where I thought he’d actually dozed off in his chair.

“Oh, it’s all interesting,” I say, my voice shaking at this slight dishonesty. “Thank you so much for sharing it with us. Do you mind if I take a few pictures as we flip through?”

“Be my guest.”

I aim my phone over the page with the king and the whale and snap a shot of it.

We continue flipping through the manuscript then, my fingers increasingly unsteady as the reality of our discovery sinks deeper.

I keep an eye out for anything else that may fit the riddle, but Isolde didn’t draw any other whales.

It seems clearer than ever: All we have to do is go back to Sprangbur and look for anything that could represent a bubble.

Then it’s over. The treasure, the thing we’ve searched for all summer, and all those years ago, will be in our hands.

It’s the piece we’ve been missing, finally clicking into place.

After we’ve closed the book and given it back to Emily, who dutifully returns it to its place in her grandfather’s bedroom, we both stand in front of Eugene’s chair.

“Thank you again, Mr. Aaron,” I say. “That was…an extremely special experience for us. I don’t think I can express how much we appreciate your help with this.”

He reaches out to squeeze my hands. “Maybe you’ll name your firstborn after me.” He gives me a wink and I laugh, not really sure what else to do.

But it does make me remember that there’s a whole life I’ve made up in my head that I still have to actually talk to Quentin about.

We discussed the past the other night in the gardens at Sprangbur, throwing out the clean slate for good.

But we still need to have a real conversation about our future.

About the fact that he apparently loves me.

And that I definitely love him. I want him to know that before we find the treasure, so there’s no doubt in his mind about my motives or my intentions for our post-hunt relationship.

So we can talk about what’s ahead for us.

There’s the whole car ride home for me to figure out the right way to bring that all up, though. Right now I want to take a minute to bask in what we’ve accomplished.

After attempting to say our farewells but getting roped into a surprisingly long story about when Albert Aaron met President Truman’s cousin, and then managing to cut the anecdote off before it subtly transitioned into another, we finally say goodbye for real.

A quarter of the way down the block, out of view of Mr. Aaron’s house so he and his granddaughter won’t spot us, I stop walking and start jumping up and down, squeezing my eyes shut and my fists closed.

“Ahhhh!” I scream in excitement. “Quentin!!” I grab his hands and jump up and down more, but he stays firmly planted on the sidewalk.

“We did it! This is it! We’ve almost found it! ”

“Calm,” he orders like I’m a small child or a dachshund. “You need to calm down, Nina.”

“Why? This has to be the answer! All we have to do is search Sprangbur and find the bubbles. Now that we know what to look for, surely it won’t take long to figure out—”

“Nina. Stop.” This time his voice is louder and even firmer. He frees his hands from mine and instead holds me by the upper arms to keep me from hopping around. Quentin looks into my eyes until he has my full attention. “It isn’t there.”

“Since when did you get so pessimistic?” I ask. “Of course it’s there. It has to be. I know you’ve been worried about us, about if I really meant it about staying, but—”

“Nina Hunnicutt, would you please just fucking listen to me for once?!”

I freeze, noticing now that his eyes are devoid of any hint of the excitement and joy I feel. Instead, he looks absolutely miserable.

“It’s not there.” He drops both his gaze and his hands then, freeing me. His voice is soft now, pained. “Or it isn’t anymore. Because I already found it.”