Since Louise couldn’t get to sleep, she had spent the late hours hiding under her blankets and downloading emulators and drivers. In theory, all she needed to do was plug in the flash drive and transfer whatever data it was holding. Once they had a copy of the data, they could hide all the evidence of their crimes.
Her heart fell when there wasn’t any package on their doorstep. Did their mom come home early? Did someone steal it? Or would it come tomorrow?
Louise fumbled through unlocking their front door and pushed it open. Lying in the hallway was a bulky envelope that the delivery person had pushed through the mail slot. Its address label read “J. E. Mayer.”
Relief flooded through her. “Oh, thank god. This better be worth it.”
Shaking, she ran upstairs. The faster they used the reader and got it hidden away, the less chance they’d get caught. She had it connected before Jillian came in the front door. She could hear her twin thumping around downstairs while she downloaded everything onto her tablet.
The television went on in the kitchen, blaring out the news, moments before Jillian charged upstairs. She must have parked Tesla somewhere downstairs, as she was alone.
“Well?”
“It came. It works. Here.” She flicked files across their home system to Jillian’s tablet. She tucked the flash drive back into the Chinese box. The last step was to hide the reader and the mailer away where their parents wouldn’t find them. “There’s just one large PDF file and lots of jpegs. I think they’re photographs.”
“More pictures,” Jillian complained as she scrolled down the listing of files. “Etienne Dufae 1843. Roland Dufae 1880. Are those the dates the pictures were taken?” She tapped the thumbnail of the first picture and gasped. “Oh wow!”
Louise glanced up from stuffing the reader into the back of the camera drawer. Jillian was gazing raptly at a boy who could be their older brother. The photo was in black and white, the clothes were ridiculously old-fashioned, but there was no mistaking the family resemblance. “Well, at least we know who he is.”
“We do?”
“Doh, we’re related to him.” Louise considered the mailer. Their parents might see it if she just put it in their trashcan. She folded it neatly so that the mailing label was hidden and tucked it into the bottom of her backpack. Tomorrow she’d throw it out at the train station. “He’s probably our grandfather or something.”
“It says 1843. More like great-great-grandfather.” Jillian tapped on the next thumbnail. “Etienne had his own store.”
The boy stood under a storefront sign that read: E. Dufae & Co., Watchmakers and Jewelers.
“Where do you think that was taken?” Louise said.
“It’s ‘Cambridge, MA 1843’ so I’m guessing in the Boston area.”
Leonardo had gone to M.I.T in Cambridge. Orville had been born there and his mother had been killed there. Louise felt like she suddenly had sunk roots deep into distant soil. It was an odd feeling, suddenly being anchored like that, making her aware how adrift they had been beforehand with no family history beyond where their parents had gone to college.
Jillian suddenly squealed loudly in pure excitement and leapt up to spring around the room, shouting and flailing her tablet.
“What? What?” Louise started to flick open photographs, trying to find the one that got Jillian excited.
“We’re elves!” Jillian shoved her tablet out to show Louise.
The female in the black and white photo could have been Jillian; she looked more her twin than Louise did. Only the female was an elf. With her dark long hair coiled like a crown on her head, there was no mistaking the point of her ears or the almond shape of her eyes. She sat in the high-back chair like a queen on a throne. From the Victrola beside her chair to the newspaper on her lap, everything said “Earth” while she remained wholly elf.
“That’s—that’s not possible,” Louise stammered.
“She’s an elf and she looks like me and she’s a Dufae. Josephina Dufae.”
Louise stared at the picture as her insides went all fluttery with excitement. This couldn’t be real. It had to be like the Danish king comment on the back of Neil Shenske’s photograph. She picked up her own tablet and started to open the other photographs for more proof. It was impossible to tell in the other pictures; the subjects all wore hats. Certainly, though, the earlier Dufaes had that elf look around the eyes.
One labeled simply “Dufae” proved to be a scanned copy of a handwritten document showing their family tree. The top branches were all in Elvish runes. The name that formed the trunk, merging all the Elvish bloodlines, was Guillaume Ruelle Dufae. Jillian was right in one regard; the Dufaes started out as elves. Somehow, though, they became Frenchmen. Guillaume had married a Bridget Dubois. There was no indication if she was human or elf; no information was given on her except the date of their marriage and her death. She apparently died giving birth to Etienne because his birth date was the same day. For Guillaume’s death, it was given as only September 1792.