The Key to Anchor Lake ✓

38 : Blaire

B L A I R E

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When I leave the café after a few hours, in need of a change of scenery, I don't get far. I end up in the library, drawn to the smell of books, the stacked shelves, the quiet. I need to focus, and it's pretty hard when there's a constant stream of people in the café, everyone making noise.

The library is silent. It's just me and Regina here, and she's engrossed in a book, sitting behind the information desk. I'm at the other end of the building, sitting cross-legged on a stiff sofa hidden from Regina by the stacks, the book cradled in my hands.

My earphones are plugged in, Sukie's podcast playing. I've gone back to some of the older episodes, ones I don't need to pay attention to because I know how they end; it's the perfect background noise for research.

Though what I'm researching, I don't know.

I keep getting distracted. Thoughts of Elizabeth. What her deal is. Who she really is. Why she has the book and why I'm in it, why she plays her cards so close to her chest.

Once I've been through the book again, praying for something to jump out at me, I pull out my phone again to text Sukie, to ask her when her shift's over. The last app I had open was my gallery, the futile stream of blurry photos. I heave a sigh at my incompetency and scroll through from the first to the last, a few words understandable here and there, but mostly just what Betsy's written. Not Elizabeth's annotations.

Except the second to last photo.

I nearly fall off the sofa.

It's the timeline page of the book, the one where Elizabeth has written my own name beneath her own and my mum's. But now that I'm not rushing, now that I know to expect it, I see something else.

Alongside every other tragedy in the timeline, she has written names. It's in black pen, so small and precise that I must have mistaken it for typed font. But now I can see it isn't. It's Elizabeth's handwriting. Thirty names. All of them taken from the list I've made, names I recognise already.

I zoom in as much as I can, so I can see exactly what she's written.

1619: Temperance (1)

1644: Henry (2)

1669: Norma (2*) & Michael (3)

1694: Nicholas (3*) & Isabel (4)

1719: Alice (3) Henrietta (4) Savannah (4) Francis (4)

1744: George (4) Rachel (5)

1769: Rebecca (7)

1794: Oscar (8)

1819: Simon (6) Emily (7)

1844: Ronald (9)

1869: Robert (10)

1894: Duncan (11)

1919: Amelia (12) Ruth (13) Clarence (13) Ethel (13) Edwin (13)

1944: Louise (11) Margaret (13)

1969: Eleanor (14) Edward (14*)

1994: Alison (15) Josephine (16)

I don't know what to make of it. My brain is scrambled. It feels like a washing machine on a spin cycle with nothing inside, pointlessly turning and turning and getting nothing done.

These are the names that mean the most. Names that meant a lot to Betsy, names that Elizabeth has figured out; the ones she has weeded out from everything else in the book, that she has put in some kind of order. But I don't get it. I don't know what the numbers are for, what the asterisks are for when there are no footnotes. They seem to be stars for the sake of stars, leading to no later thought.