16
KAI
I enterFrancisco’s apartment a few minutes later. He wears jeans and a long-sleeved top.
“What’s going on?” I ask, walking into the living room while he closes the door.
“So the crazy thing is that someone did break into my apartment. But there were no signs of breaking and entering. Several people have checked my apartment. And I thought, all right, maybe that guy was wandering in my building, and it just happened that they got footage of him roaming on my floor. That changed, though, when I got home and inspected my apartment. I don’t have many things here, as you can see. No cash or valuables. Asides from my clothes, I have nothing. And then I find this…”
He walks to a small bookcase, reaches up, and retrieves a small box.
He tosses it on the coffee table before extracting a stack of papers, and setting them to the side, and then digging deeper.
He fishes out an old notebook with handwritten recipes and doodled things on the edges. It’s stained and in bad shape. And the cover is missing. It must’ve unraveled throughout the years from usage and just plain old age.
“What is that?” I ask, not believing my eyes.
“It’s my nana’s recipe book.”
My mouth falls open.
“Are you shitting me?”
“I know. What the fuck, man?”
“How…? What…? What the hell?”
I look at it. Touch it.
“I don’t understand. What did they take?”
“They ripped pages out of it. Look.”
He shows me where the pages were ripped off.
“This is a joke, right?”
“It’s no fucking joke, man. My grandmother gave me this recipe book before she died. It has heirloom recipes in it and all that. There were a few Brazilian dishes she cooked a certain way, and she knew I’d spent time away from home, so she gave me her recipe book. This thing here has sentimental value. My niece doodled things on it. Look.”
She shows me the edges. Tiny figurines and numbers.
“Why numbers?”
“She was obsessed with numbers since she was little. The first pages that they took were covered in numbers. The notebook was so worn out that it no longer had a cover. They took that, man. I don’t understand?”
I stare at the recipe book, stunned.
This is insane. I live inside my head for a few good moments while Francisco keeps talking, expressing his anger and frustration.
Cover… Numbers. The cover was missing. The pages had drawings done by a little girl. Numbers. Numbers… There is a connection.
There certainly is a connection. Did they get what they were looking for? Clearly no. I can’t imagine Nana’s recipes were the answers to their problems.
Plus…
“Weren’t the recipes written in Portuguese?”
“The first few pages were mostly my niece’s doodling. They didn’t take the rest, mainly because the notebook was coming apart, and they must’ve snatched the first few pages without digging deeper to grab the rest.”