It was colder, the grass rough against my skin. I looked up at the stars and they were fading too, lights shuddering out one by one as I made my way back to the farmhouse. I sprawled out on the couch, listening to the rest of Bryn’s records, filling the empty house with ghosts I’d never heard of before. I felt strangely deflated. I was sick of wandering around this island, delirious and confused, and finding nothing that actually meant anything to me. No clues. No answers.
And in my defiance I decided to just sit and wait. Which lasted a good half hour. Then I got restless, which made me anxious, which made me panic. I started to feel caged, as lost as I’d felt that first time I’d opened my eyes. Clues. I need to find some fucking clues.
I found Bryn’s grandparent’s old bedroom. It wasn’t stripped bare like the rooms in the trailer house. There was a quilt over the bed topped with thin pillows still pressed in the shadow of someone’s sleeping head.
I’d read about the coin collection in her grandfather’s closet under his shoes and boxes of shotgun ammo from Bryn’s diary. He probably had some old stuff in there, old stuff I might recognize if I’d been misplaced here by way of some faulty time travel machine. Or if I was some kind of ghost. Maybe a soldier lost at war. No, not a soldier, a real badass—an infantry sergeant or something. I found the faulty floorboard and slipped it free. There were binders full of coins and paper bills, catalogues, and indexes, and pamphlets from coin shows.
I reached for one of the binders, turning the heavy pages, and reading the dates on the coins. Some were American—vintage pennies from before the civil war—but some were foreign.
I closed the binder and reached for a shiny red box, skin smooth like velvet. It cracked open and sealed in a thick plastic case was a gold coin stamped with a male profile wearing a crown of leaves. A slip of paper spilled into my hand and I unfolded it. It said the coin was a genuine replica of Roman currency from the…Roman. I grew still, the box tumbling back into the closet.
Roman.
My pulse quickened.
Roman…
Chapter 18
Bryn