A 000000"01C;I wasn’t murdered, but I’m a girl. Maybe I can help.”
“Okay.”
She sits down beside me as I pile Alice’s things onto the floor. There’s a pair of her favorite shoes. Some dime-store bracelets and necklaces from when she was a kid. An Altoids tin with fortune-cookie fortunes and buds of eleven-year-old pot. I set everything on the floor and Candy examines each object. I don’t know if she’s helping me or trying to figure out who Alice is.
I hear Kasabian putting a DVD into the player by his computer.
“What are you putting on?”
“The Wizard of Oz,” he says. “It’s about a dumb broad who flies off to somewhere weird and dangerous so she can wander like an asshole down a road she doesn’t know and get attacked by monsters and fucked over by a magic man. It sounds strangely familiar.”
I pull out more of Alice’s things. A brush. A Weirdos T-shirt. Photos of a ruined motel by the water, part of Salton City, an abandoned town in the desert. We were going to take a trip there.
From behind me I hear Traven say, “I wanted to thank you for saving me today and taking me to Allegra’s extraordinary clinic.”
“How’s Hunter doing?”
“Much better. He can go home tomorrow.”
“Good for him.”
“Is there anything I can do to help besides tape things?”
I get a pen and paper off Kasabian’s desk and scrawl lines and shapes. My memory isn’t a hundred percent on how the seven symbols Alice was writing looked, but I draw them as well as I can. I hand Traven the paper.
“Do you know what these are?”
He carries the paper over to a lamp and stares at it for a minute.
“This is a very rare script. It’s a kind of cipher combining pictograms and letters. Each letter has a numeric value, but their meaning changes in relation to their position in relation to the other characters. Where did you see this?”
“A friend showed it to me. What is it?”
“It’s the secret language the fallen angels used to plan their rebellion in Heaven.”
“Do you know what it says?”
“May I borrow your pen? I’ll need to do scenneed toome calculations.”
I toss it to him and he starts scribbling on the paper.
I’m on my knees next to Candy with Alice’s life spread around me on the floor. It’s like I’ve fallen into a Hank Williams song. I push the T-shirt, underwear, jewels, and address books around like I’m looking for the prize in a box of Cracker Jacks. Candy upends a pair of green dress shoes with one broken heel and something falls out. It’s a small toy, a plastic rabbit with beard stubble and a cigarette jammed between its lips. Candy holds it up.
“What’s this?”
“Alice said it was me in a former life.”
Candy smiles.
“I think we have a winner.”
“Eleusis,” says Traven.
I look at him.
“What’s Eleusis?”
He raises his eyebrows.