Part 5

      I spend another few moments seated on the rock, gazing at the vaguely visible opening in the fence. I wonder how long this has been here... I can't imagine tiles like that being in style for fifty years, at least, probably more like a hundred. I trail my fingers in the cold flowing water, getting the mud off of them. I run a finger gently over a few pieces of marble, and a broken fragment of tile---
      I hear laughter, the light bubbling laugh of a young boy. Looking up, I can see past the fence, and there is a boy with absurdly golden curls, jumping out of the creek, the ends of his ivory tunic dark with wetness. He laughs louder as he trips over the reed-like plants at the water's edge, falling among them, the cream cloth tied at his waist now covered in water spots – but no mud, for the edges of the creek are lined with colored tiles, and the bottom is covered in crushed marble. There is a call from somewhere nearby – the voice is low and rich, sonorous, but also tired sounding. It's too low for me to make out the words. But the boy stifles his laughter, his slim frame shaking with the sounds he prevents from escaping it. His glance flits back over the water, and even at a distance I can see how startlingly bright his green eyes are – not the green of a cat's eyes, but a vivid emerald, the color of the summer sunlight tangled in tree leaves. Now back on dry land, he dashes off into the gardens – it can't be anything but a garden, there are leaves and blossoms and delicate ornamental trees that I can't identify...
      And I'm staring again at the wall of vines covering the old ironwork. There's no opening, barely even any light able to get through. I jump up, and almost run to the fence – but I can't, there's no way through the brush, and a few jabs and scratches of the dead growth are enough to recall me to myself. Standing still, I listen intently, but the sounds of the forest are the same as they've been all afternoon, distant bird calls and the breeze playing in the newborn leaves of the treetops. I stare helplessly at the vine-encrusted fence for a long time, but all I see are leaves and dead branches and rusted iron swirls.
      Finally, I take a slow breath. Adjusting the bag on my shoulder, I turn around and begin my long walk back, following the creek back home.

      For the next few days, I stew over what I saw, or didn't see. No, I did see it, there's no denying it, I saw it as clearly as I've seen anything. My dreams are sometimes pretty clear, but the camera angles in my dreams are always changing, and certain details I just can't see (which is frustrating even to dream-me). Heck, half the time in my dreams I'm not even myself, and I was definitely myself that afternoon. I've retraced every detail, written down and sketched as much as I could... and it was a lot. Even things I didn't know, like the words said by the distant voice, or the names of the trees and plants, I can still picture as clearly as anything, I can still reproduce the sound in my head. My memory of that garden is as sharp as my memory of places in the creek. And the light there was the same... it looked later in the year, but maybe there were just earlier-growing plants there? You can make anything bloom at any time indoors, I'm sure there are tricks for getting them to turn green sooner outdoors too.
      But the boy... it's odd, for all that he was dressed like a little Grecian statue, something in his manner didn't seem that ancient. I guess boys are boys no matter what era, but... there definitely weren't Caucasians here when Athens was at its height. Unless North Carolina was Atlantis and I'm the first to find it. Anyway, the tile can't be that old, and I saw more of the tiles under the boy's feet... or could it be that old? I mean, people find pottery from Mesopotamia. But the detailing... no, that's no proof of it being so recent either, hieroglyphics have just as much detail as this, the brush strokes are as delicate. As soon as I was home that afternoon, I dug through the boxes until I found my old art history textbook. The thing is a beast, but... I'm still not quite sure what my tile is. My gut instinct of Russian or something from an Islamic country is still holding, and given how much tile work there is in mosques, I'm leaning toward that. But this is a little less sharply geometric than most of those, so I'm still not sure. I'm not quite desperate enough to hunt down my old professor... though, come to think of it, maybe I should. I think every slide he showed us in lecture was a photo he'd taken himself, traveling the entire world over the years. I'm sure he'd know at a glance...
      And I guess the tile's going to have to be my main clue, though if I could find out about the original owners of the property, that would help too. I went out to the bookstore and did pick up the book of old photos of the town... but while there were several pictures of grand houses, I recognized all of them, they're all still here, in town. The portraits of important people meant little to me, the descriptions of each were basically job descriptions, and I have no idea if a doctor or senator or freaking chimney sweep lived there. Alright so it had to be someone rich, but the money could have come from anywhere, it could have been an English lord from an ancient family or a politician who liked bribes or a surgeon or someone who--- no there was no state lottery back then. But back when? Was the boy a servant or a son? I have no idea where to even start looking... In every book I've ever read, the heroin (it's always a girl in stories like this) goes through the microfiche at the local library and finds a headline that gives her all the answers. But I've used those silly things for school assignments and they're absolutely miserable. It takes half an hour to flip through a single issue of a newspaper, the type is tiny and dark, God forbid you try to print anything out, it's never legible. The indexes are vast, and unless you know exactly what you're looking for – and it's something big, like, a war – you're so totally doomed.
      I suppose I could start hitting up my coworkers for stories. Most of them have spent their entire lives in this town, and I've heard the occasional ghost story about some building or another. Plus they know every family in town – I've listened to conversations go on for like fifteen minutes, tracing the family connections between one person and another. Half of my coworkers are related somehow or another... which leaves me feeling a little left out occasionally, but most of the time, I'm frankly glad to be able to stay aloof from the drama. Your husband's sister isn't inviting him to her second wedding, though she's asked you to help with the catering arrangements? Your ex-boyfriend's mom just walked into the store? The co-worker who's your second cousin on your dad's side just broke up with your boyfriend's brother's best friend? I love the stories, but they're so much more fun from the outside.
      Every town has records of property ownership and the like, but... I have no practical idea of how you find that stuff out. Can you just walk into town hall and someone will look it up for you? I guess it wouldn't be a privacy issue, just to get the name... or, heck, they'll know who owns it right now, and I might be able to--- no, better if I don't ask that person, I might get nailed for trespassing. I hadn't even thought about that. No signs were posted though, so I have that as an excuse. Still, I've seen town zoning maps - we had to copy parts of one for a customer one day, I remember people staring at the lines scrawled all over the satellite view of the county, trying to find their house. (That was a novelty like a decade ago. Why are people still so fascinated by it? I mean, I am too... but it's weird.) I should be able to get access to something like that, and at least find out if there's any kind of road in there. I know my county map doesn't show one - that, at least, I could check.
      Now, to find the time to do all this research... I don't have another day off for three days yet, and by then I'll need to do laundry and get some grocery shopping done... and I'll have to get up at normal-people hours, I'm sure the town hall and things close by five. If not earlier. I'll have to look that up, too... If I lived in any size of a city, all this stuff would be on the internet, but the town's too small for that. There's a website, of course, and they'll post a listing of the local festivals during the summer or whatever, but other than that it's a handful of tiny pictures of the town in summer, a couple generic paragraphs about what a great place to live it is, and links to sites filled with text on demographics.
      This is starting to feel like a long and dull school research project. But when I remember how that garden looked, and the brightness of that boy's eyes, the whole Eden-like vision... I just have to find out more, I can't let that kind of beauty just slide into the fog of memory, I have to find some way to hold on to it...