Ella had misprinted the last letter several times.
Yet she wasn't looking for information.
She was listening to the writing.
All the letters chose their beautiful words, but this one...
had an unintended slip:
"The death that was executed, the same one that was pronounced thirty years ago, while the name Thomas was forgotten, and the name James was mentioned at Omar."
"James?"
The name didn't appear in the externals.
Not even in the literary encyclopedia that meticulously preserved Leonard's archive.
Ella went to a small public library in Brooklyn, which hadn't kept a list of women's names, unpublished books, and writers who wrote but weren't read.
After hours of searching, she found what she wasn't looking for directly:
"James Holloway" - an obscure Washington writer with a single literary article in 1987, a literary magazine that disappeared completely months later.
And then... signed: "Leonard Graves."
But the handwriting on the original copy (which Ella had extracted from the archives) was different.
She shuddered.
A person who didn't write much.
A personal book, in structure... not in craftsmanship.
At the page covers, a faint sentence in pencil:
"If they forget my name, may the snow remember."
Here, Ella began to understand.
"James" wasn't a mistake.
He was coming from the first of the young ones.
But not shot dead, but killed by accident.
She went to the old address with the name "James."
A small house in Red Hook, half-ruined.
She knocked on the door.
No one answered.
Just as she thought she was about to leave, she noticed something inside the mailbox:
A page torn from a book, and on the back was the innocence:
"Your name is coming... not in freedom, but in the unread texts."
And at the bottom of the page, the signature:
"T.W."
-Thomas Wheeler?
Or was someone using his name to lead her to the next episode?
Ella was still on East Street, staying, the wind biting her cold nails.
She wasn't any closer to a solution.
But she was closer to the real man of her time.
7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ6t6FXns3n6
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