Read Online Flashback by Jenny Siler - Free Book Online Page A

here.” I watched her click her mouse again, her dark eyes roving the screen. “Look at that,” she murmured to herself, then to me. “It looks like you left something with us, in the safe.”
    She looked up at me, suddenly skeptical, and I felt the skin along my arms flush with goose bumps.
    â€œOh, yes,” I said easily, feigning irritation and surprise at my own thoughtlessness. “I had almost forgotten. How stupid of me. It’s just something I picked up in the medina. I can’t believe you’ve held on to it all this time.”
    â€œOf course,” the clerk said, offended that I would question the hotel’s reliability.
    I took a step back from the counter and casually adjusted a stray lock of hair. Just a forgotten trinket, I told myself, trying to quell the desperate surge in my heart. “Could you get it for me?”
    The woman nodded. “If I could just see your passport, Madame.”
    â€œYes.” I smiled. “Of course.” I set my pack down and reached into the front pocket, brushing aside Marie’s passport, pulling a one-hundred-euro note from my savings. I thought for a second, contemplating the plush lobby, the woman’s blue suit. No, I didn’t want to get this wrong. Reluctantly, I pulled out a second note.
    â€œWill this do?” I asked, straightening up, sliding the two bills across the counter.
    The woman hesitated a moment, and I felt my heart still. Then she put her hand out and carefully considered the sum before her.
    â€œYes, Ms. Boyle,” she said, finally. “This will do.”
    *   *   *
    Hannah Boyle. I said the name to myself, running my tongue along each syllable, hoping to feel the familiar pattern in the sounds, the words worn to fit like the ledge just below the altar at the convent’s chapel, the stone cupped from all the knees it had received. All those months with the sisters I had imagined some kind of epiphany, a flash of self-recognition. I would stumble on something, I thought, a place, a name, and the past would spring open like a rusty gate newly oiled.
    And yet, there in the lobby of the El Minzah, nothing had changed. The Tangier Hannah had moved in was still a mystery, the woman herself only a gaunt shadow, someone with a taste for vodka martinis, someone a waiter might remember fondly, even after a year. As I watched the desk clerk emerge from the door she’d disappeared through earlier, I remembered something Dr. Delpay had once told me. We all struggle to know ourselves, he had said, our whole lives.
    The woman had a small black case in her hands, a little smaller than a shoebox. She came out from behind the desk, crossed to where I was sitting, and set the case on the low table in front of me. It was fastened by a lock, a metal circle with a narrow slit for a key.
    â€œThank you,” I told her.
    She nodded, her duty discharged, and turned away.
    I sat for a moment, staring down at the relic, remembering how I’d acted with Joshi, more uncertain than ever of just how much I wanted to know. Just a trinket, I reminded myself, and perhaps it was nothing more than a forgotten bauble, a dead end.
    There was laughter out on the patio. A group I’d seen earlier at the piano bar stumbled into the lobby and out the front door. The desk clerk raised her head as they passed, then looked back down, deeply engaged in some task. I needed privacy, I thought, glancing around the room, my eyes lighting on a row of wooden phone booths in the back of the lobby and beyond them an alcove marked WC . Taking the box with me, I stood and made my way to the ladies’ room.
    Ducking into one of the stalls, I sat down on the toilet and set the box on my knees. I fished two bobby pins from my pack, bent them slightly, slipped them into the lock, one on top of the other, and jiggled them gently. Yes, I knew how to do this. When I heard the latch click softly free, I set my thumbs