They had spent an hour cleaning the rest of the coffee stained papers. There didn't seem to be anything on them. Not even the ones marked with a hand-written X. Alaia hadn't had the time to check through these papers in particular, but almost all of the papers she had checked through had seemed to be notes for old articles he had written to send home. These were no different. Not the ones marked, or the ones that weren't.
"Maybe there's nothing to miss," Alaia said, rubbing her tired eyes. "Maybe there simply isn't anything in these papers."
"There has to be something. There must be some piece I'm missing that connects the incidents to what these papers are saying."
Alaia picked up the paper closest to her.
"Something that connects a presidential election ten years ago to something that has been going on in Old Town in the last year?" She eyed the paper. "Why are papers this old even still here?"
"There has to be something," Tove said, stubborn. "Why would he have marked some of the papers if they're not connected?"
"To mark them as important?" Alaia suggested. "Because he has a habit of drawing X:s on papers when talking to people?"
"He has a habit like that?"
"I don't know. I've never met him," Alaia said, beginning to be exasperated.
"You hopefully will tomorrow," Tove said with a small grin.
"I can't believe you talked me into that. This is crazy. I don't know what kind of conspiracy you're running after."
"I'm a journalist. I'm not running after a conspiracy. I'm running after the truth based on where evidence takes me. And right now evidence shows the old correspondent knew something about this."
"There's no connection to any of it in the papers," Alaia tried one last time to get some sense into her only friend on this side of the world, without much hope of success. "And I seriously need to go home and get some rest. You should too."
"I'll stay a while longer," Tove said as Alaia stood up, stretched and started to pull on her coat. "Do you mind if I go through some of his other papers you have here?"
"Help yourself. Basically all the papers on the desk there are his. While you're at it, throw out anything that isn't useful to me. Since that is the only reason I started going through these in the first place."
Tove muttered a thanks as Alaia made her way to the door.
~X~
"Hej, Alaia!"
She had barely walked into the office the next morning when Tove already caught up and fell in step next to her.
"We're meeting Marqués at his place in an hour. So get ready."
"You still think it's a good idea?" Alaia asked her, doubtful, making her way along the walls towards her office.
"I go where the leads take me," Tove simply said. Alaia stopped and turned to her. She was about to say something, but forgot what it was as she got a proper look at Tove's face.
"Have you slept at all last night?" she asked instead.
"Yeah, sure, of course. I went home when my head started to hurt too bad from reading in the middle of the night, and got some sleep, but then I woke up again and couldn't sleep, so I came back to continue."
Alaia just stood there for a moment, looking at Tove. A bunch of things she would have liked to say crossed her mind, but all of them sounded too much like lecturing a child doing something stupid. She decided Tove was old enough to take care of herself. She didn't need someone else to tell her it was stupid to stay up all night obsessing over something like old journalist's notes. If she wanted to do that, she was free to do so. So Alaia simply turned and continued her way towards her office, pretending she didn't care and it wasn't any of her business.
"We're leaving in a half an hour!" Tove shouted after her.
And leave they did. As the correspondent had retired he had moved out of Old Town, so they had to get a tram. They sat there, side by side, silently watching the buildings slip by. Alaia tried to start a conversation a couple of times, but only got one word answers from Tove, who didn't seem to want to talk to her, so she soon gave up and spent the rest of the trip staring out of the window and feeling awkward.
An elderly man came to open the door as they knocked.
"Mr Marqués? Hi, I'm Alaia Vega Abaroa," Alaia introduced herself in Cametonian. The man's expression brightened at hearing his mother tongue. Alaia couldn't imagine he heard it much here. "I'm the new correspondent from Cametonia. And this is Tove Nielsson. She works for EFAR."
"Yes, come in," the man stepped out of the doorway to let the two in. "You can leave your coats here, and then this way to the living room."
"I know I'm here to hear some tips for the job and living here," Alaia began as she followed him into the living room, "but if I may ask, why did you stay here after you retired? Why not return to Cametonia?"
Marqués gave a light laugh.
"I worked as the foreign correspondent here for thirty years. After that long away, Embärfjell feels as much like home as Cametonia," he said as they sat down on couches in the living room. Alaia must have unknowingly made a face at his response, because he gave a second small laugh. "This is a good place to be, truly. It might not seem like that this time of the year, especially since this is your first touch with the country. So I'm sorry to drag my replacement here in the beginning of winter. It might be tough for you for the next few months. But it gets better with spring. This is a very lovely place in the summer. And it never gets too hot."
"Um..." Tove drew the attention to herself. "Any chance we could speak a language I speak too?"
"Ah, yes, of course," Marqués also switched to Esperanto. "Or would you prefer Fellish. How much do you speak, miss Abaroa?"
"Only a little," she answered, a little embarrassed without really knowing why.
"You should learn," he told her. "Especially if you're going to stay longer."
"Yes, I know. I'm working on that," Alaia said.
Something caught her eye in the corner of the room. A telescope. An old telescope. Except there was something odd about it. Something didn't look right. Something...
"I see you've noticed my telescope," Marqués pulled her back from her thoughts.
"Yes. It's beautiful," she answered. "I used to have a telescope as a teenager, this old thing my parents got me as a gift." What was it? It felt like something was missing, some relevant part, or that there was something that didn't belong to a telescope, but she kept staring at it while talking and couldn't pinpoint what it was that was so odd about it. She tried to dismiss it as just her imagination, but the feeling there was something odd about it wouldn't leave her alone. "I went out on the roof at least once a week, when it wasn't cloudy so the stars and planets were shining bright. I used to know the names and positions of maybe a hundred, and all of the constellations. I'm afraid I've now forgotten most of them."
"Well, if you're interested I should tell you you should go out some night here. The stars here are different than at home, so there would be something new for you to look at. You definitely should go during the winter. The warmer nights during the summer are somewhat too bright for proper star gazing," Marqués told her.
"Maybe I will. Thanks for the tip," Alaia said giving him a smile.
"We're just getting started with those, I assume," he waved her thanks away. "Now, can I offer you two young ladies something before we really get down to business?"
_________________________________________________________
I was going to write farther, but then it was suddenly longer than I expected. So. Yeah. You'll just have to do with just this until tomorrow.
The topic for tomorrow is Deeds.
~matu
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