Page 49 of The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth

Chapter Forty-One

It was a cool, cloudy day. Henry and Veronica wandered, turning into this alleyway and that, admiring jewelry and fine leather and home goods.

They talked to many cats and once, got caught in a minor traffic jam when a wagon with a wide load of wooden furniture had to navigate a congested turn.

More than once, they had to squeeze against a wall to allow a motorcycle to whizz by.

Every shop owner wanted to talk, and were delighted to speak with Henry in Arabic, and to a lesser degree, Veronica in her rusty French, laughing and negotiating in a blizzard of words that fell like copper coins around her.

At last, they sought the address that Rachel had included in her list, one without much information attached.

It was not easy to find. They had to stop and ask directions three times, circling closer and closer until at last they came to a small street with only two doors.

One was painted blue, and the other had a hand symbol in the middle, a symbol that was everywhere in the medina.

Veronica said, “A hand like that shows up in New Mexico, too.”

“Well, New Mexico was settled by the Spanish, and Spain was heavily settled by North Africans, so it’s probably the same thing.”

She gave him a look of admiration. “So it is.”

He grinned, brushed the back of her hand with the back of his own.

“Stick with me, kid.” He knocked on the door, and for a while it didn’t seem anyone would come.

As they were about to turn away, the door opened abruptly, and a Western man with a grizzled beard and sandals barked in French, “What do you want?”

Henry waved Veronica to the fore. “Sorry to bother you,” Veronica said in the same language. “I’m a writer doing some research, and I wonder if you knew a woman named Rachel Ellsworth.”

“Rachel?” He shook his head and switched to British-inflected English. “You must have the wrong person.”

On a hunch, Veronica said, “Did you spend time in India in the mid-nineties?”

He straightened. “I did. Do you mean American Rachel, from somewhere in the Midwest, maybe? Chicago, someplace like that?”

“Denver. You knew her?”

“Barely. We traveled around some is all. Bit of fun.”

Veronica remembered the first boyfriend from Rachel’s letters, the guy she’d traveled to Delhi with the first time. “Are you Alex, by any chance?”

“I am.” He stepped back. “You’d best come in, then.”

They followed him into a courtyard overgrown with plants. A gray dog, quite old, sat panting by a set of stairs. The man sat and gestured for them to join him around a table inlaid with tile. Without asking, he poured them all water from a glass pitcher. “What’s this about? Is Rachel dead, then?”

It was such a bald question, but she supposed that was quicker. “Yes. She was killed just over a year ago in a shooting.”

“Jesus,” Alex exclaimed, his bright-blue eyes peering hard into her. “Bloody American shootings—they’re like a virus. I’m so sorry to hear that.”

Veronica nodded. “She was a food writer, and left notes for a book on Parsi cafés, and to a lesser degree, cafés in general.”

He stroked his grizzled chin. “That tracks. She was never going to be a professor. Can I read her books?”

“Yes. I’ll leave you a list.” Veronica opened her notebook and scribbled Rachel’s name and The Wonders of Spice , the book she was most known for. “We don’t know why she wrote your address down. Do you have any idea?”

“She quit drinking or something, have to go through her amends?”

“I don’t know. Henry?”

“Not that I know of, but maybe it was along those lines if that’s what occurred to you. Did she owe you an amends?”

He looked down, and the angle made him look quite a lot older. “I used to think so. We were in love, traveled all over India together. And then she met this girl and dropped me like a hot potato.”

That was an angle Veronica hadn’t considered, that Zoish might have been the love interest. But in the interest of keeping an open mind, she asked, “Were they lovers?”

“Nah. I mean, people weren’t out then the same way, but I don’t think so. They were friends, tight friends, but something happened, and they fell out in a big way. I saw Rachel just before she went home, and she wouldn’t even talk about it, said it was all too horrible. She was wrecked about it.”

“Something to do with the family of her friend?”

“Maybe. The girl wasn’t speaking to her.”

Veronica looked at Henry. “Do you remember the family name?”

“Nah. But they ran a café we all loved, Café Guli. It had been in the family for eighty years or something like that.” He paused, staring into the past. “They had this sandwich, a bun maska , that we all loved so much. Rachel wasn’t all that careful with food—she’d eat street food and take a drink of water if someone offered it, saying you couldn’t be rude, but we all liked Café Guli. You could count on it.”

Henry laughed. “Never changed, either. And her daughter is back at the riad right now, nursing a case of food poisoning.”

“Well, to my knowledge, Rachel never got sick. She had a cast-iron stomach.”

They sat for a moment. “Anything else?” Alex asked.

Veronica hesitated then asked, “Do you know if she fell in love with someone?”

He shrugged in a lazy way. “Maybe. That would account for her ghosting me. I think she wanted to try to stay in India, but it fell through.”

“Really.” That was new information.

“Yeah, but it was a challenge, you know. Where to live, what to do for work. She didn’t really have the chops.”

Veronica imagined a young Rachel wheeling and dealing to try to extend her visa. Was there more in the rest of the letters? But there couldn’t be many more if the last one was a few weeks before she left. What had happened in those last days?

Maybe Jill knew what happened with Zoish.

“Well,” she said, standing, “thanks for your time. If you give me an email address, I can send you a copy of Rachel’s book list.”

“Ah,” he said, waving a curmudgeonly hand. “I don’t do email. I don’t even have a computer.”

Veronica smiled. “Here, then.” She ripped out the piece of paper from her notebook. “This is her name and her most well-known book.”

He accepted it. “I might have to go find an internet café or something.”

“Or,” Henry said, “find it on your phone.” He pointed to a late-model Apple phone on the table.

Alex nodded. “Cool.”

Back at the riad , Veronica checked on Mariah and found her deeply asleep.

In the courtyard, Henry settled with a blanket on the settee and a tray of tea he’d had sent up when they arrived.

She wrapped herself in a blanket and sat nearby, her shoes discarded, her knees tucked under her.

The evening was overcast, quiet, but the lamps were lit, throwing their magical stars, and the fountain trickled, and far away was the sound of someone shouting happily.

She accepted a glass of tea and settled back.

“It doesn’t feel like Christmas Eve at all,” she said.

“No.” He stretched out, his big feet on the heavy table, his head back on the cushions. She admired his craggy profile, the rather too-large nose, his square chin. “I have to admit it’s been a long time since I celebrated in any kind of traditional way. I was always on the road.”

“Does your family have a lot of traditions?”

“I’m Italian, of course we have traditions—for everything. But yeah, a lot for Christmas, the seven fishes, midnight mass.” He pursed his lips. “Other things I’m sure I’ve forgotten. How about you?”

“I thought I’d be miserable missing my kids, and I’m not.

” She tucked her hair behind her ears. “I mean, I do miss them and all the things we would do leading up to the day, but mainly, Christmas week was about reading for me. They all love to ski, and I’m just not into it, so I stayed behind in the lodge and read. ”

“That sounds all right.”

“Yeah, it was.”

“What was it like when you were a kid?”

She hadn’t thought about that in a long time.

“First, it was tamales on Christmas Eve. Somebody’s grandma was always selling them by the dozen, so we’d pig out on tamales and Christmas cookies and string popcorn for the tree, make construction-paper stars with glitter.

” She grew quiet, remembering. “I realized when I was older that we didn’t have any money, but it never felt like that, you know?

I always had some toy I’d been wanting, and she’d make a turkey or a roast chicken, and we’d sing carols and all that stuff.

All the things. It was just my mom and me then.

My dad was never really around. She married my stepdad when I was ten, and we were more of a traditional kind of family after that. ”

“Did you like him, your stepdad?”

“I loved him. He was a good guy. And it helped to have more money coming in.”

“That’s nice.”

Henry drained his tea and set the glass on the table.

He looked at her for a long moment. Veronica looked back, and a soft cloud of yearning enveloped them.

She thought of his kiss, his big hands. He took her glass, too, and set it aside, then moved gracefully, smooth as a cat, across the space separating them.

“I don’t think Mariah is going to wake up, do you? ”

“No,” she said quietly. Stars of yellow light danced over his craggy jaw, touched his eyebrow.

He brushed hair from her forehead, followed the line around her ear, down her neck.

Veronica flowed into her body, occupying her limbs entirely, and let their longings lead her.

She raised her hands to his face, cheekbones under the pads of her palms, eyebrows at her fingertips, jaw at her wrists.

His eyes shone with flecks of reflected light.

She stroked the length of his nose, his full lower lip.

“I haven’t had sex with anyone but my ex in about three decades,” she said quietly.

“Are you okay?”

“Very,” she said.

He waited, letting her lead, and it gave her permission to take her time.

Languor and heat ran just below her skin as she bent closer to kiss him, find again that shock of surprise at the ripeness of his mouth.

They opened to each other, kissing like adults who knew exactly what they wanted.

After a time, he pulled her into his lap, and she straddled him, unbuttoning his shirt so she could touch his skin, and he skimmed her sweater off over her head, then her T-shirt, and gave a slight audible sigh as the skin of his palm touched the bareness of her skin.

He ran his palms down her sides, up her back, down her arms, finding her hands and tangling his fingers with hers, all the while kissing and kissing, their pelvises moving slowly against each other.

“Let’s go to my room,” she murmured.

“I thought you’d never ask. Wrap your legs around me.”

“You can’t carry me!” she protested quietly.

But she wrapped herself around him, legs and arms tight, their chests sweating ever so slightly, his hands clutching her rear end hard.

It made her dizzy with heat, and when he tumbled her down in the red room, she shimmied out of her jeans, casting them off the side of the bed.

He skimmed out of his clothes too, and when he was naked, she held up her hand, breathless. “Wait. Let me look at you.”

He touched his belly, lazily, his thigh, giving her full view of him, his leanness, his scars, the burn marks over one arm and his left side, his penis alert and ready.

“Okay,” she whispered, and he fell down with her, wrapping her up, kissing her hard, and then they were all in, blending, blurring, his big mouth and his big hands and his long legs, and her arms and breasts and hands and mouth.

So much, so much, so much. Veronica gave herself to it entirely, wanting never to forget this particular Christmas Eve in Marrakech.