Читать книгу Secret Summers - Glynda Shaw - Страница 7

My pajamas were packed in the suitcase, but I didn’t feel like bothering with them, so I tumbled into bed in my underwear and was asleep before a dozen waves had struck the cliff below. They were still striking when, I knew not how much later, I woke suddenly. It was as if I’d heard a door opening and closing, not a big door like a room or a closet door, but a little door more like a cupboard or chest. I thought I also heard little gasping noises, not sobs or cries, but sounds of effort like somebody was trying to move something, open or close something, and finding it difficult. At first I thought Aunt Claire was either in my room or nearby, finishing a last minute chore, which idea surprised me since I thought she’d been as tired as I. Then I wondered if someone else could be staying in the house with us. Nobody had stated explicitly that my aunt lived by herself. I wasn’t really frightened, maybe a bit irritated. Then a stroke of thunder echoed off the cliff below me, and the room was, for a moment, daylight bright, and when it was quiet again, it was really quiet. I wasn’t disturbed again that night, but I lay awake quite a while and finally dropped off only to be greeted almost immediately by a chorusing of sea birds, gulls, and cormorants, I would find out later, and several sorts of crows all vying with the surf and the waves.

I crept out of bed, careful not to disturb anyone else who might be in the house and looked about for the pants and shirt I’d taken off. Though I’d placed them on the chair right next to my bed, I now saw only the chair and nothing else. Thinking again the sounds I remembered hearing from last night might have been a midnight tidying foray on my aunt’s part, I opened the closet feeling a little chill go up my back as I did. There were hangers with a few dresses and sweaters looking sort of old and way too small for my aunt, hanging at one end and a ladder mounting the wall at the other, leading up to a yawning hole into the attic. On the floor was a shoe rack with a couple pairs of girls’ shoes and that was all. Nothing on the shelf overhead, nothing hidden among the hanging dresses. Shutting the closet, still feeling a little spooked, I turned to the dresser. The chest of drawers—same story: some old paperback books, a few sewing things, an old brass compass and spy glass, some candles, a letter-opener, a little mallet with a corkscrew on it, nothing of mine.

Could be, I supposed, that Aunt Claire had taken stuff to be washed. I heard no machine going anywhere. In fact, I heard only my own breathing and the bird and ocean sounds from outside. Since Mother had packed all of the things she thought I should have in my suitcase, I’d taken only the things I thought I needed in my satchel. Those were five science fiction books, my drawing things, my diary notebook with two entries in it so far, a strip of Double Bubble gums, my transistor radio and the silver whistle, a flute really, which Vivian had sent me from Vancouver, B.C. Short of painting pants on myself with watercolors or contriving a breechclout out of book pages, I had nothing to wear.

I opened the door as quietly as I could and slipped into the bathroom, finding a towel hanging above the tub. I needed to use the bathroom anyway, and the towel at least was something if I had to go looking for my aunt.

“Oh, there you are,” Aunt Claire said from behind me, and I nearly jumped out of my shorts. I pulled the towel close around me.

“Where are my clothes?”

Her face grew genuinely puzzled. ”I haven’t the foggiest,” she said sincerely. ”Where’d you leave them last?”