Million Dollar Soul

Chapter 2

I awoke with my head lulled back onto the high back of the grand chair behind fathers desk. When I picked my head up the room had grown slightly darker, just relying on the surrounding dim lights and slivers of dawn streaked sun that were fighting to make its way through the heavy curtains. I rubbed sleep from my eyes, gave a stretch and looked around the desk to see where my last few thoughts were.

I am definitely growing frustrated at my search now, I somehow feel like I’m running out of time, like I’ve been given a time limit I wasn’t aware of. I mean logically I guess I was because if someone else got the newly empowered telepath first, who know what they would do with them. I pick up a red leather bound journal, it looked older, worn and cracked in places. Yet it was on the desk so father had to have used in the last few weeks of mobility he had before bed rest. I half-heartedly fan the pages trying to search for key words, seeing if I could quicken my efforts this way. When the quick fanning of pages stops on a hard piece of cardstock shoved between pages.

Dearest Char,

Ever the resilient one you are, and resilient you will stay. I am sorry I have left you so soon, and that I left my work unfinished. From the minute I laid my eyes on you I knew I had to make our world better. Unfortunately I was unable to complete this mission, but I pass it to you now.

I hope that we can be bound together in death through my wishes for your peace. After all you were the binding that held up and stitched my story together. My star in the nigh, my held breath in dark rooms.

I have faith, though your journey may be far, you will conquer and thrive. Bask in the sun and don’t forget a little destruction, is cause for a little growth.

Love Father

I flip the card over its blank on the back side. I reread it and then read it again. I am a bit caught off guard. Now I loved my father, and he was definitely my closer parent with my mother being out of the house for her functions, and hating being involved in Jackal affairs. Still my father was harsh, at times, he always was driven by logic and purpose, never one to get emotional, even in those last bedridden weeks he was still asking me about training or what assignments the counsel had given me. So I am a bit thrown off, if not cautious, of an overly emotional note left in a book in his office, It was plainly his handwriting. Could it be this is what I have been looking for, a heartfelt goodbye being my ticket to his vision. I read it over again slowly and methodically, dissecting each sentence. Obviously the first part is him wanting me to find the next telepath which he wanted to do before he died. This weird bit in the middle about binding and stars seems oddly out of place when my father has always used my name when addressing me. “Stars in a dark room,” I mumbled to myself, and it clicked. I use to love this one artifact he brought home, said it from an old nunnery and use to comfort orphaned babies. It was a nightlight of sorts, a round cylinder with stars punched out of it, and it you removed the top there was space for a candle inside. He would send me back to bed with it when I would interrupt his work after a nightmare. I rise from the desk, quickly and rush over to the shelf where it has resided since the last time I used it, picking it up and admiring it remembering the late nights watching star patterns flicker across my ceiling. Nothing was out of place or added to it, I frown a little and look back at the shelf it was sitting on there was an obvious layer of dust but I could just make out a dust filled seem. I brush off the dust and run my finger along the edged wood and push slightly, it gives and falls into the apparently hollow shelf. I try to peer into the gap but cant get a good angle with the shelf proximity and decide to blindly shove my hand in, feeling around I almost feel nothing just empty space and wooden walls but on the back I don’t hit wood I hit leather and texture, I try to pry at the corner of it and am able to wretch it free of its flush space. Pulling it out I start to examine it, it looks familiar, opening up and beginning to browse the pages I notice it is a book of poetry that I was slightly obsessed with in my preteens. I quickly comb through its pages and see nothing out of the ordinary, closing it to the back cover even.

I huff back into the chair and drop the book on the desk. Well I thought I had found the answers but maybe my father was slightly sentimental, just a little hunt for a grieving daughter he knew would need purpose to make sense of suddenly losing the only parent she’s ever known. I look back at the note on the desk and read it yet again, grasping for answers. Bask in the sun…I take the book and shove away one side of the heavy red curtains with my shoulder, nothing weird on the cover, I open the book again and hold the inside covers to the light. Wait I think there is something under the seem of the last cover, I run my finger over it, it feels perfectly smooth, maybe I’m imagining it. I let the curtain drop back to its home holding the outside world at bay. Looking at the back cover closely just to see if it was a trick of the light and I see nothing. “A little destruction…” I sigh out, “Am I really going to do this?” I grab a letter opener from the top drawer in the desk. Staring at the back cover, I take a deep breath, and cringe slightly as I drag it along the edges of the attached paper. Once it is done I pry it back to reveal nothing, well I already destroyed it, I flip back to the front and perform the same book lover sin and again nothing. “Well now I ruined a perfectly good book Father, is this suppose to be a lesson. If you’re looking for answers everywhere you’ll find disappointment and more questions.” I grumble out to myself. I find myself continuing to cut along the seem straight through the binding to the other side and the same on the bottom so that the whole cover is removed from the pages now, you want destruction father well here it is, I think holding the cover aloft. It is then I see the small rectangle of paper perfectly curved with the spine of the book cover. I pick at its corner with a nail carefully, not wanting to tear it. Once it is free I unfold it, its about double its size now.

“Gallagher’s, Night Run, Tuesdays”

Gal’s? Really, I didn’t even know Father knew that place existed, its not exactly posh. Why night run, what am I suppose to find there? Turning the paper over there is nothing else on it, just the three words, bullet pointed and baiting. You make me tear apart a book you couldn’t be a little more descriptive. I look at the clock above the door, “s**t”, Night run starts in an hour or so. I dash from the study, grabbing a sweater on my way out the door, ignoring Harvey’s advances as I rush to the car and speed off toward the border.