For a long moment, Carol didn't move. Her heart was pounding, her feet were cold, and one thought kept going around in her head. He knew my name.
She wanted to knock on that blue door and demand answers, but it was two o'clock in the morning, she was alone in a strange city in her pajamas, and she had no idea who was waiting on the other side. So, she did the only sensible thing. She turned around and went looking for home.
That was harder than it sounded. Every street looked the same in the dark. She walked uphill, because the river was downhill, and she stopped at every corner to listen. Twice, she took a wrong turn and had to go back. Somewhere far away, a church bell rang, and she followed the sound like a rope. When she finally found the narrow street with the familiar green front door, her phone said ten past three.
The key turned in the lock without a sound. The hall was dark, and the whole house was asleep. She climbed the stairs on the edges of her feet so the old wood wouldn't creak, and she walked past Room Five without looking at the door. She didn't want to know whether he was back.
In bed, she pulled the blanket up to her chin and stared at the ceiling. "Lisbon is not kind to women who follow strangers." Senhor Lobo's words kept going around in her head. They sounded like a warning. They also sounded like something a person says when he wants to keep you safe. She couldn't decide which one it was, and that scared her more than the dark streets had.
Carol barely slept, and when the church bells counted six, she gave up trying.
She came down to the kitchen before Rosa, before the bread, before the light was fully in the street. The house was cool and quiet. She put the notebook on the kitchen table, opened her dictionary app, and went to work.
She skipped the Portuguese pages she had already translated at the café. They were only prices, repairs, and lists of food, the everyday business of a guesthouse. Today she wanted the other pages, the ones that had kept her awake.
At the top of certain pages, her aunt had drawn a little bird with one open wing. The pages under that bird weren't guesthouse business. They were dense, packed tight with code, numbers, small marks, and dates with no years. Carol couldn't read a word of them. She could only see that they were important. A person doesn't write that carefully about laundry.
She was leaning close over one of these pages when Rosa came in.
Carol didn't hear her. Rosa moved through her own kitchen the way water moves, without effort and without sound. She was simply there, by the stove, looking at the notebook open on the table between the salt and the empty coffee cup.
"That notebook is private," Rosa said quietly.
Carol's hand went flat on the page, too late and too obvious. "I was only reading."
"I know what you were doing." Rosa set a cup of coffee down at Carol's elbow. The old woman could read her like a book, and she didn't pretend otherwise. She turned to the bread and the oranges, and her back said the conversation was over.
Carol closed the notebook. She had given herself away, and she knew it. The trouble was that she didn't yet know what she'd given away, or to whom.
Why would a dead woman's notebook matter so much to her housekeeper? Carol watched Rosa's back at the stove and wondered what, exactly, the old woman was afraid she would read.
The phone rang at nine. It was Costa, and his voice had lost its usual smoothness.
"Good morning, Dona Carolina. I will be direct, because my client asks me to be direct. He needs your decision within three days."
"I have three days?" Carol asked.
"He is a patient man, but nobody's patience lasts forever, you understand. In three days, the offer goes away, and you are left with an old house full of empty rooms and a roof that will want money every winter for the rest of your life." The smile came back into his voice, thin and quick. "I am only telling you what I would tell my own sister."
"I'll call you in three days," Carol said. She hung up before he could say anything else.
She needed to think, and she couldn't think in the house, where Rosa moved like a careful bird and the walls seemed to lean in to listen. So she did what she'd done the day before. She took the notebook, crossed the street to the little café with the sleeping cat, sat with her back to the wall and one eye on the front door of the guesthouse. Then, she ordered some coffee by pointing and smiling.
She was learning to read her aunt now, not just her words. She was learning to read between the lines, but she knew she needed to keep her cards close to her chest until she understood what Aunt Lottie had really been trying to tell her. She kept the notebook angled away from the window so no one outside could see the pages, and she left a newspaper she couldn't read open beside it for show. Slowly, a pattern rose out of the pages.
The bird was always in the same corner, always the same size, drawn with the same careful hand. The dates beneath it came closer together the further she turned, as if something had been speeding up. The bird wasn't decoration. It was her aunt telling herself something, page after page, the way you leave a light on so you can find your way back.
Carol couldn't read the code, but she could count, and she could take a photograph of every page. So she did. She photographed the bird pages and the plain ones, from the first page to the last, until her phone was full of her aunt's secrets and the café cat still hadn't moved.
Whatever this was, she thought, it was bigger than a house. You don't hide a guesthouse in a code.
That evening, Carol sat cross-legged on her bed with her phone, going through the photographs of her aunt's notebook one more time. The window was open, and the sounds of the street drifted up with the smell of someone's dinner. Then came a soft knock at her door: two knocks, then one, then two.
Carol's breath caught. She knew that knock. She'd heard it once, at a low blue door near a church, in the middle of the night.
She opened the door. Senhor Lobo stood in the hall, tall, with gray hair and a long dark coat. He stayed where he was and didn't ask to come in. His hands were folded in front of him like a man at a church door, and his eyes were tired but not unkind.
"I will not keep you," he said, in his quiet, perfect English. "I came to say one thing. Your aunt was afraid of nothing in this world, but she was careful. There is a difference, and it kept her alive a long time. She knew when to be bold and when to play it safe." He paused. "I am going to ask you to be careful too."
"What should I be careful of?"
"Be careful of kind voices, fast money, and doors that open too easily." He almost smiled. "You followed me in the dark, in your shoes and your pajamas, into a part of the city you did not know. That was brave. It was also how people get hurt."
Carol felt her face go warm. "You knew I was there the whole time."
"I knew before you put your shoes on." He reached into his coat and took out a small folded paper. He held it out to her, and after a moment she took it. "Meet me tomorrow morning at eight o'clock. Come alone, and tell no one, not even Rosa. Especially not Rosa. That is not because I distrust her. The fewer people who know a secret, the safer it stays. Your aunt taught me that."
"What is this?"
"It is the beginning of an answer." He gave her a small nod, almost a bow. "Good night, Carolina."
He turned and walked back down the hall to Room Five, and the thin yellow light closed behind his door.
Carol stood there a long minute before she opened the paper. Inside was a small hand-drawn map of her own street. It showed the street, then a turn to the left, then a square, then a café marked with a careful little X. Below the map, someone had written two words in neat, slanting letters.
Come hungry.
The penny dropped. Costa wanted an answer in three days, but Carol had no intention of signing anything until she knew what her aunt had been hiding. Tomorrow at eight o'clock, she'd find out where to start.