Chapter 3 – Finding Mabel [Evidence]

Joyce had tried to read the third page. Then the second. Then the first.

Blank. Every one of them.

It was Sunday evening, already late. She needed to get to bed, back to work in the morning.

She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, easing the dull ache that had settled behind them. Seated at the bureau, she felt herself drifting, that soft pull toward sleep that came before you realised it was happening.

From somewhere deep in her mind, a hushed voice called her name.

“Look down, Joyce.”

Her eyes opened.

On the sheet before her, words bled slowly into view, as if drawn up from beneath the paper itself.

Find the life you once lived.

Before she could read them again, they sank back into the page. The paper lay blank, innocent.

Her breath caught.

She shuffled through the documents, sharper now, fingers searching for something, anything. Nothing revealed itself. No marks. No ink. No trace.

Then she saw it.

Low down, almost hidden in the seam of the case, a stub of an old train ticket had been caught and forgotten. Worn thin. Folded soft with age.

A return ticket.

Easterwich to London.

She held it between her fingers, heart ticking louder than it should have. Not proof. Not evidence. Just enough.

Tomorrow, she would have access to the records. Street directories. Census rolls. Old addresses that refused to stay buried. She could trace the place, follow the paper trail, see what remained.

Why, though?

Was she imagining this, or was it simply time to revisit what had been pressed down so early it no longer felt like a choice, that quiet ability to see past the surface of things?

Only one way to know.

She stifled a yawn, the edge of it catching her by surprise. Sleep was no longer optional. As she rose, the questions still pressed at her thoughts, but she let them go. The night, she knew, would take them whether she wished it or not.

──✿──

She had slept well.

The village came to her in dreams, solid and insistent. She walked its streets as if she had never left them, recognised corners before she reached them. She even found the house that had once been hers.

But when she tried the door, it would not open.

She woke refreshed, yet with a faint sense of having been cheated. Something had been promised, then withheld. For a moment, the question pressed at her, why she had been allowed to see the place, but not cross its threshold.

As the day asserted itself, she shook the feeling off and dismissed it as no more than a dream.

Still, somewhere at the back of her mind, it lingered.