‘I mean, whatever I can google. I’ve fixed M-Mom’s a couple of times. But it’s kinda nice, right? I wasn’t for sure it was hers but …’ He digs a little further inside the box, moving aside all manner of alluring treasures. Keys. He jangles them in front of his eyes. ‘Still have these.’

‘What happened to the car?’

Ellis shrugs. ‘I guess they would have impounded it or something. Which sucks, b-b-because it was really nice.’

Further inside is a trinket, a guitar pick, a Morse code key, a couple of books – philosophy – and a birth certificate. Mother: Constance O’Hare; there’s no father listed.

Then a journal.

I flip it open, hungry, and shine my flashlight on this too. I recognize some of them as finished lyrics. ‘Glass Daughter’, ‘Orion’, ‘Anywhere, Anywhere’.

‘This is amazing,’ I breathe, feeling like I’ve caught a glimpse of something very intimate but not compelled enough by ethical deliberation to want to stop.

There’s tons of unfinished lyrics too, throwaway phrases and words and thoughts, penmanship tidy. It’s fascinating to watch in real time the ticking of her brain. None of it makes much sense; in a margin she’d written a whole day in heaven and teeth-cracked pistachios, and give her the peach-blush and risen sky in a syringe, give her peace and quiet, then, in massive letters, on the same page, bright ascetic dissonance!!!! Lists of words elsewhere: moss / maggots / fly trap / tendril. Then, The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions, Friedrich Nietzsche.

‘What is a poet?’ I read aloud from a page to Ellis. ‘An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.’

Ellis watches me.

‘And people flock around the poet and say, “Sing again soon,” that is, “May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.”’

I feel my mouth go dry. ‘That’s, uh, Kierkegaard, apparently. Danish philosopher.’

‘Yeah,’ Ellis says. ‘There’re some quotes. It’s mostly unfinished lyrics. But in the back there’s something – “Baby Blue”.’

‘That’s a song of hers.’

‘No, that’s what I thought too, but – they’re not the lyrics to the song. They’re letters. Addressed to someone called Baby Blue.’

I look at him, breathless. ‘Baby Blue was a person? Do you have any idea who it could be?’

‘Not a clue.’

I flick hungrily to the back of the journal.

The letters are heavy. Talk of new lives, using words like forever and immortal and intertwined and heat.

There’s no greater earthly phenomenon than you, in the dark, reading my mind.

All beginning with Dear Baby Blue.