Читать книгу Secret Summers - Glynda Shaw - Страница 6

As we worked our way south around bays and inlets along wide stretches of blue water, I noticed the side of the road nearest me was dropping off in increasingly sheer cliffs with dangerous looking rocks below. The air, when Claire bade me roll my window down, had a tanginess about it and something else that smelled a bit like a thing spoiled maybe but new and exciting all the same.

Noting my tendency to edge away from the passenger door yet maintaining a firm grip on the door handle, my aunt remarked, “A bit of a scare the first few times, I know, but I’ve driven this coast so often I must have grooves worn in the roadway. We’ll be all right.”

It didn’t make me feel much better though. The moon was filtering through dense fog, which had been rolling in for the last half hour, and there was a ghostly glimmer in the gray. The T-bird slewed back and forth and around as we skirted the jigsaw coastline.

“What do you generally do with your summers, Ninian?” Claire said presently.

“I don’t know,” I said. ”Read, I guess, hang around with my friends, go to the library, watch TV.”

“No summer camp?” she asked.

“No,” I told her, “though Mom has talked about it sometimes.”

“Well, I’ve got no TV,” she said. Good God, what had I gotten myself into? “But we’ll see what we can do to keep you interested.” Claire slowed the car, and I strained into pitch dark for any sign of a house or a driveway, but one patch of dark for me was like another. ”Bless her heart,” Claire said suddenly. I saw a beam of yellow light come lancing from somewhere on our left hand. Claire swung easily into something that looked more like a track made for goats than anything to drive on. She put down her window. ”Thank you, Monique,” she called, then drove bumpity-bump off the road toward what turned out to be a little inlet or cove across from which a bridge had been built, a bridge we did not cross just then, nor would I have occasion to for several weeks.

“My house,” Claire announced with satisfaction, pulling into a carport next to a structure whose shape I could only guess at in the gloom. We got out, and without a key, my aunt opened a side door in the carport, ushering me into the house. People at my town, even in those days, always locked up when they left home even for short trips, and Claire must’ve been on the road most of the day. As if reading my thoughts, she said, “Nobody bothers us here. We all know one another and strangers don’t tend to stay long. If I lose something, that’s just the more excuse to go shopping!” This bit of glibbery stated, she turned on lights and bade me come into the kitchen and sit down at a little, square, blue-painted table while she put together a snack for us. We didn’t bother with the suitcase, but I had my satchel containing all I’d need until tomorrow at least.

“You must be tired,” Claire said.

Though at ten, going on eleven, I dearly loved staying up as late as possible, this had been a truly unique and quite exhausting day besides having been three hours longer than any other I’d ever lived through. We settled on a piece of gingerbread and a cup of cocoa with a sprig of fresh mint for each of us.

“While the milk heats, I’ll show you your room.”

She ushered me to a hallway from which I could step almost directly from the kitchen to the living room. ”I think you’ll like this,” she said, leading in the other direction.

There was a bathroom on one side and what looked like a linen closet on the other. I stepped into the bedroom at the end of the hall and, flipping on the light, gasped. I’d entered the house on the ground floor but was now peering out what would be my window for the rest of that summer and, as it would turn out, for many after that. I felt as if I’d suddenly been elevated five or six stories into the air. It was like a tower that plunged down the sheer cliff-face to the roiling night-black sea.

“Not much market when I came back here,” Claire remarked, “for real estate perched on the edge of a cliff. There’s an easy enough way down actually, but not easy to find, so you may as well be in a tower up here. It’s the kind of thing young people fancy, I’d think. How do you like it?”

“Wonderful!” I choked out when I’d finally gotten back any use of my voice.

“I’m so glad,” she smiled into her reflection in the windowpane.

“We’d best call your mother,” Claire remarked when our cake and cocoa were finished, “else she’ll skin both of us. I’ll get the phone.”

In a little alcove near the kitchen was a small wooden stand with a teardrop-shaped, princess-style telephone along with the phone book and a writing pad. My aunt picked it up, trailing its long cord into the kitchen, sat it on the table, then turned to the cocoa pan. I picked up the receiver and started to dial but realized I’d never placed a long distance call before. Claire, glancing my way and reading the confusion on my face, advised, “First dial one. Then you’ll want six-one-six, then your phone number.” The line clicked a number of times. Then there was a dial tone sounding somehow muffled and after only two rings …

“Hello! Claire?” Mom’s voice sounded hollow like she was shouting through a drainpipe.

“Hi, Mom. It’s me.”

“Ninian! How are you?”

“Just fine,” I told her.

”Did you have a good flight?”

“Yeah,” I said, though I didn’t really know what the difference between a good and bad flight might be. ”It was fun.”

“You’re sure you’re all right then?”

“I’m fine, Mom.”

“Your Aunt Claire didn’t have any trouble finding you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay, Honey. I know it’s late. You’d better let me talk to Aunt Claire. Then I’ll see you later. You make sure and do what she tells you to.”

“Okay, Mom.”

“You behave yourself.”

“I will.”

“Ninian?”

“Yes, Mom?”

“I love you.”

“I know, Mom. I love you too.”

“Give me Aunt Claire.”

I handed over the pink receiver, and my aunt spoke for a couple of minutes, answering, it sounded to me, like all of the same questions I’d been asked.

“I know it’s after midnight where you are,” Claire said. ”Yes, we’re doing just fine together. Ninian’s been a lamb! Yes. Goodbye, Sis.” She hung up.

Claire, beckoning, led the way back toward the tower-top bedroom. ”Here are clean towels and washcloths,” she told me, “and here’s a good flashlight.” She handed me an eight-cell monster, which I set up-ended on the dresser. ”Just in case you should have need of it. Call out if you want anything else. Now I shall leave you to your bathroom and your bed.”

“Thanks!”

Claire gave me a quick hug, then retreated into the depths of the house.

I peed, washed sketchily, hearing Mother’s remonstrance in my ears, then took out Mrs. Falahee’s little notebook, and sat down at the writing desk opposite my bed.

I’m sleeping in a tower. It must be sixty feet to the ocean below, and it’s my own room for the whole summer!

It being a bit close in my little room, I swung my window open and was greeted by the full force of the ocean pounding, like what I had heard over the phone, but several times magnified. ”I’ll pretend I’m in a ship,” I decided aloud. Maybe this summer would turn out to be a good one after all.