NODE 3: ALICIA COREY’S BOARDING HOUSE
- A wooden, hand-painted sign declares as much on the sloped front lawn. An attached lower placard reads ROOM FOR RENT.
- Ma Kelley is a woman in her mid-50s. Widowed when her husband was killed in the war. She knows what the Girls know (below), and can also provide Alicia Corey’s rental application.
- Men are generally not allowed through the door at any hour; if they have official credentials, she won’t make a fuss about it, but it will nevertheless startle the girls.
Bedrooms: One of the second floor Chambers is occupied by Ma Kelley. The other four are furnished for rental. Three are occupied (including Alicia’s); the fourth is currently available for rent.
ALICIA COREY’S RENTAL APPLICATION
- She moved into Ma Kelley’s in July.
- Lists a forwarding address: 169 Page Street West, St. Paul, MN. (Node 5: Fatima’s Shrine)
QUESTIONING THE GIRLS
- Betty, Grace
- They probably don’t’ know that Alicia is dead (unless it’s been a couple of days, in which case the cops have followed up).
- Alicia always paid her rent promptly in cash.
- She worked as a secretary, but they realize they don’t know for what firm.
- She never had any guests that they can recall, but she did keep strange hours from time to time. (Ma Kelley doesn’t have any sort of curfew, so this wasn’t considered a problem or anything.)
- She’d once mentioned during dinner that she had been in Cairo. The girls thought this was terribly exotic, but it didn’t seem as if Alicia wanted to talk about it. (Betty is convinced this means that she has a dark and mysterious past; probably featuring a lover who tragically died.)
ALICIA COREY’S ROOM
Furnished with care and love. A handmade quilt on the bed. (Features an arabesque design indicative of it being Egyptian in origin.)
Writing Desk: Everything is meticulously clean. Any written matter has been carefully destroyed.
Loose Floor Board: Under the bed. Alicia Khouri’s Diary is hidden inside.
ALICIA COREY’S BACKGROUND
Alicia’s real name is Alicia Khouri. She is of Egyptian descent.
Rashida Khouri, Alicia’s mother, is a Hu-manifestation of Ra and a Sister of Fatima. Alicia learned the teachings of the Sisterhood from her mother, but had not yet been indoctrinated into the inner mysteries of the coven. (She didn’t know that her mother was a Hu-manifestation of Ra.)
Gladys Roy had alerted the Sisterhood that there was Tanit activity in the Twin Cities. Alicia was sent to conduct an investigation. She had tracked the cult activity to kidnappings at Harriet Tubman’s Asylum for Colored Orphans (Node 4), but gotten no further in her investigation at the time of her death.
Investigators may suspect that Corey was directly targeted in response to her investigation, but this is not the case. Her exposure to the Tophet serum whiskey was coincidental.
ALICIA COREY’S DIARY
Flipping through this thin red volume – well-worn and weather-beaten despite containing pre-printed entries only for the year 1925 – reveals that the first half is completely blank and unused. In July of this year, however, entries in a fine and elegant script begin (mostly in a blue ink, although there are some scrabbled out in pencil and others in a black ink; all appear to be of the same hand, however).
At first glance, most of the entries appear to be concerned with sightseeing around the Twin Cities. But in aggregate an odd pattern appears: The sites she is notating as if they were tourist attractions generally… aren’t. They’re common businesses or even private residences. Mixed in among these curious entries you notice a recurring mention of the name Tanith, and also one reference to “a defacement of the eye of Ra”.
Over the past month, the entries become fixated around a single location: Harriet Tubman’s Asylum for Colored Orphans, located in the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul. The exact nature of these notes is difficult to discern as they are partly written in some form of code, but they seem to catalog the comings and goings of numerous individuals, tracking their movements in some detail.
If Lost, Please Return Me to
169 Page Street West, Saint Paul, Minnesota
Go to Node 4: Harriet Tubman’s Asylum for Colored Children