Читать книгу Secret Summers - Glynda Shaw - Страница 14

Monique sprinted up the trail like a goat in petticoats, both of us having resumed our stage of somewhat overdress from last evening. At the top of the cliff, she looked back over the edge to make sure we weren’t being watched, then ran toward the house, stopping short beneath my side window. She pointed to the ground. There in the damp earth, which was neither flower bed nor lawn exactly but mostly just mud, were footprints, obviously not ours and not likely belonging to Claire either. They were large and roughly patterned like heavy boots might leave. They pointed first toward the cliff, then doubled back to swerve around and parallel the road east of the house, fading out as mud gave way to grass and grass to gravel. Though I fancied I saw some remnant smudges on the hard-packed roadway, there was no telling where our visitor had gone or where he’d come from.

“Do you think?” I asked. Monique wagged her head slowly from the footprints in the yard to the road out front and back again.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but who else would it be?”

“Will he come back, do you suppose?”

“He’s following us,” Monique said, “just as we said last night. Quick, let’s go inside.” Not sure what going inside was supposed to solve since no one was here with us just now, I followed nevertheless and soon apprehended her intent. ”Where’d you put The Book?” she demanded when we’d gained the comparative security of my room.

“You put it under my pillow yesterday,” I said. ”I didn’t have time to move it before we left for the party.”

“Well, it’s not here,” Monique inspected my unmade bed. ”Would your aunt have taken it?”

“How should I know?” I asked. ”I’ve only known her, what, two days now?”

“Good point,” she said. ”I think I know her pretty well though, and I can’t imagine her hiding something from you like that, at least without saying something first.”

“Hmm,” I said.

Both of us, having the same idea, headed for the closet. Monique got there first, but gaining the top of the ladder, she was confronted by the box, locked and in place.

“Where was that thing when we left here yesterday?” she inquired.

“Under my bed,” I said. ”I didn’t have time to move it either. Aunt Claire was watching me.”

“Can we open it again?”

“Let’s see.” I climbed up beside her and began the safecracker’s trick of feeling my way along the concealed spindle through the hole in the bottom of the box. Soon enough, I had the box loose from the floor, the familiar thumping issuing from within.

“The thing I want to know,” Monique said, pointing at the stub of the inch-wide peg sticking up out of the attic floor, “is how in hell did this get back here and locked in place?”

“Well,” I said, “I suppose if somebody could get the box unlocked they could somehow work the spindle up into bottom of the box.”

“No way,” Monique objected. She took a hold of the spindle top between thumb and fingers, pulled, twisted, pulled again. It gave a little but sprang forcefully back into the floor when released. ”I think it has to be sent up from underneath.”

“Underneath where?” I asked. ”That would be down …”

“Somewhere below the floor,” Monique finished for me.

“Yeah, but that’s crazy,” I said. “We were all at your house last night. I heard my aunt and your mom still snoring when I got up. And besides, there’s no way up from underneath.”

“Somebody else must’ve been here,” Monique said, “and found a way.”

Then both of us together said, “Him.”

“Gosh,” I said, free from Mother’s stricture that gosh was just a sidewise way of saying God. ”We’re in trouble.”

I suppose there could have been many explanations for the bit of tidying affected in my room but only one leant itself to our imaginings at that particular moment, that of a shadowy figure, having easy access to all portions of the house while its occupants were away for the night. Would anyone dare penetrate the house while my formidable aunt was in residence? I wondered. But who could say? Did she know of this Dark Man who we knew only from a brief sighting on the beach and the mark of his supposed footprints near the house? Same answer.

“Let’s see if it’s the same that’s in here,” Monique said at last. We went through the same process as yesterday with the dowel and the key and the box opened readily enough. The scuffed brown volume was lying inside.

I removed it, hoping for a chance to read a little before Monique could snatch it away. Then I saw something else. ”My diary!” I said. “How’d that get here?”

“You keep a diary?”

“Well, I have since I started my trip.” I turned to the last entry, which should have been the one I dashed off just before leaving the house for Laina’s party, the one in which I’d admitted on paper to wearing a dress and had ended in a manner much truer than I could’ve guessed while writing it. But there was another entry following that written in a hand definitely not mine but not unlike Mom’s I thought or maybe Grandma Halley’s. The ink looked somehow strange, and the letters looped in unusual ways. The passage began

I feel that two persons near and dear to me are in grave danger, and I can do very little just now to help them. I am certain, however, that if they remain in THE LIGHT, they shall be safe from the shadows, and those who can be of assistance shall reach out to them.

The two words “THE LIGHT” were written large and in all capitals and seemed to leap off the page. The wording, the penmanship, the general appearance of the simple though astonishing paragraph held the air of a time past, like the leather book that had recently lain next to my purloined diary. ”Gosh,” I said again.

“Gosh is right. You mean to tell me you didn’t drop that in there?” She indicated the carven box.

“I sure didn’t.”

“You didn’t write this?” Monique indicated the curious passage.

I pointed at the previous entries, remembering too late that they might indicate more about me than I intended.

“You don’t usually wear dresses?” she asked absently.

“Not usually,” I said. She was still studying the final passage.

“Let’s take this,” she said, lifting the leather volume now, “and go someplace safe to look it over good.”

“Where’s safe?” I asked. ”I think I know a place,” she said. ”I think first though I’m going to change back into my stuff from yesterday.” Monique moved to the dresser and retrieved the shirt and shorts she’d shucked off the day before when putting on the dress to match the girl in the picture.

“Me too, I guess.” I still hoped Monique wouldn’t guess my real identity because, scared as I’d been, the adventure we were having was more exciting than anything I’d done before, lost luggage or no. Maybe in the shorts and shirt Claire had given me yesterday, I’d feel less the impostor. I took my things into the bathroom to change, returning to hang the dress in the closet next to the one Monique had just taken off.

“Where to?” I asked.

“I want to introduce you to a friend,” Monique said. ”Two actually.” She peered out my window looking up and down the beach. ”Guess if we can’t find your aunt or at least we don’t want to disturb her in her office, it’s okay to leave the yard?” Monique picked up a pen from my art set on the desk, scribbling on the back of a piece of paper ”Off to the lighthouse. Be back before supper.” Clutching the paper, she led the way through the kitchen, leaving her note on the table, then out the front door.