Lee,

I don’t know what to believe anymore.

Reynard has finally revealed what he’s been hiding. The divinity student, Lament, is right, partially. The secret first wife of Adam is currently masquerading as a slave in the middle of Missouri. It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard, but the second-most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard is an everliving trickster masquerading as a slave in the middle of Missouri, so unfortunately I’m inclined to believe it. You cannot tell anyone, not yet. I know what this means to your research, but not yet! She is not evil by Reynard’s reckoning, but she is deeply vindictive and does not like attention.

Reynard brought her to meet me during the night, when her, well, not owners, the family she’s been hiding with had gone to bed. How do I even begin to describe her? She is barely over five feet tall. She knows twenty-four different languages, some so old I’ve never heard of them before. She doesn’t smile when she laughs. She hasn’t aged over six thousand years; she cut her own throat to prove she cannot die. She will go into a lengthy diatribe at the mention of France, bemoaning its failure as a country and a populace. She’s commanded the beasts of the world to kill thousands of people. She’s more and less human than Reynard has ever been, either impossibly ancient or remarkably anodyne.

Her plans and principles are similar. She is a killer, as Lament said. She is also deeply obsessed with justice. By her account, she is a divine executioner, seeking out those who live on the backs of others and bringing them low, on her authority as a steward of Eden and the only sinless human alive. She talks about it like you would explain touching the mezuzah to a Gentile, a act of her faith in her own sinlessness under the auspice of a God she hasn’t heard from in millenia. She does not only kill. She has stories of squirrels smuggling letters between brothers, sold off to different owners several miles away, tales of ferrets leading escaped slaves to freedom while the hounds hunting them suddenly lose the scent. She occasionally advises the children of her quarry on how to use their inheritance for the good of mankind. But there she experiments, there she’ll say she might have done better. She is deadly certain when it comes to death.

I am doing my best to capture her essence. I am not sure if she will still be here when you arrive and I’m not sure she’d be willing to talk to you. She’s barely willing to talk to me; Reynard has spent most of the night coaxing her to answer my questions.

You lamented in your last letter that you lacked the language to illustrate your love. Now I regret that I lack the grounding for a moment of this grandeur. Living proof of the written Torah’s truth in the form of someone who was largely excised from it. She made a sketch of Adam in the candlelight. I have a sketch of the first man in my hands. I want you here so badly. You’d be able to grasp all of this. You’d know the right questions to ask.

It would help to feel your touch as well. Reynard is clearly smitten with her; I cannot help but feel marginalized. It’s not the first time this has happened. His soul is water and fire and it never stays in one shape; I sense it’s a struggle for him to not abandon me entirely. I loved him all the same. But I’ve never seen him so charmed by, well, anything or anyone. Certainly not me.

I think he knows it. He has not looked me in the eyes since confessing. He might also be shamed by why he had to confess; he’s gotten into trouble. The divinity student, Lament, has made four more attempts to kill her, and they’ve both gotten it into their heads that I might be able to talk him out of it without it coming to violence. The sad thing is that I think I’m the only one capable of doing so. It’s the Kinzie incident again. They lack the perspective to understand why he’s upset.

I am so tired, but I don’t know if I can sleep. So I write a letter that isn’t worth sending. You’ve almost certainly left already; this letter won’t find you before you arrive. But it helps, to think of talking to you. I can see your face in my head as you listen to me tell you all of this over a nice drink.

[Several renditions of ‘Dr. Theodore Birch-Otto’ fill out the bottom of the letter.]

[The US government has forbidden digitization of the sketch of Adam for reasons I may speculate on but am not certain of. Providing a detailed description has also been vetoed. I can confirm that he had curly hair, tanned skin, and a striking resemblance to a well-established and lauded character actor circa 1987. Though the sketch is in black and white, other notes from Dr. Birch imply reddish hair and and red-brown skin.]