Читать книгу Secret Summers - Glynda Shaw - Страница 8

I explained how they’d seemingly vanished into thin air.

“Things seem to do that in this house now and again,” she mused. ”Well, no great harm done. I’ll bring in your suitcase.” Now good common sense would blame the whole thing on Aunt Claire, and I was certainly inclined to at the time, but I felt she was as flabbergasted as I was when we’d fetched and opened the old, black case.

“My heavens,” Claire said, “How did this happen, I wonder?”

Though I’d taken no great interest in the packing of my clothes, I’d seen what Mom had put in it, more or less. I knew there were some jeans, some shirts, some cutoffs, a good pair of pants, and a couple nice sweaters. (“In case your aunt takes you somewhere special.”) Some of the items in the suitcase now resembled things I’d expected to find there, but only somewhat. The colors were all wrong and so were most of the things.

“Tags must’ve been switched,” Aunt Claire observed, holding up a light blue pleated skirt. ”Can’t say that’s happened to me before though you hear about it all the time.” She riffled through the other stuff in the case, and I saw neatly folded sweaters, blouses, a couple of other skirts, pants too, shorts, something that might be a dress, socks, undershirts with straps instead of sleeves, several pair of underpants, most of them flowered in various colors, a pair of sandals, some other items.

“Well,” Claire looked at me sort of sidelong, her fingers still exploring the folded clothes in what should have been my suitcase. ”We’ll report the mistake. Probably be sorted out in a day or two. For the time being I guess we’ll just have to make do.” She pulled out a pair of green shorts with an elastic waist, not much to set it apart from something a boy might wear, and a white cotton tee shirt with a black duck having a green head and yellow bill.

“But I can’t wear these!” I protested. ”They’re girls’ stuff.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Claire said calmly like this happens everyday. ”Growing up in a house full of females, you mean to tell me you’ve never worn something that belonged to one of your sisters?”

I decided not to argue that point but said, “They belong to somebody else.”

“So,” she answered reasonably, “who knows who’s wearing your clothes right now? Did you have anything in your suitcase that couldn’t be replaced?”

“I guess not,” I admitted.

“I suspect the same is true for miss.” She studied the tag of the suitcase again. ”N. Halley. That combination must be commoner than I’d have thought. When we find her, we’ll just launder the things we’ve borrowed, and everything will be as it should be. Meanwhile …” She pushed the things at me again, along with a pair of white socks.

Still I hesitated.

“Oh, come on.” She winked at me as if we were sharing some great secret. ”Just for now. I won’t tell anyone!” Then rummaging in the bottom of the closet, she came out with a pair of red sneakers. ”I think these should fit you,” she said and left me to dress.

“But how could my own stuff go away like that?” I called after her departing back. The pants and shirt I had last night!

“This house,” she called back, “seems sometimes to have a mind of its own.”

Feeling pretty peculiar but at least covered up, I joined my aunt in the kitchen a few minutes later to find her pouring hot tea and beating eggs for the crackling frying pan ready for the scramble. ”Scrambled eggs and toast okay for your first breakfast in the great state of Oregon?” she inquired.

I nodded. ”Fine!”

“Tea?”

“Well, maybe,” I said. I loved tea but only got it on very special occasions and never for breakfast. Claire pressed a finger to her lips as if to say this too would be our secret and poured me a cup about two thirds rich black tea and a third cream. She turned then and gave me a hug. ”It’s so good to have you here,” she exclaimed, “after all this time.”

Hugging back, I became aware of a whup-whup-whup-whup sound from somewhere outside, I thought. It was something that had been at the back of my mind for some time perhaps, but I’d already encountered sufficient strangeness that I didn’t feel just then like another mystery.

Claire splatted a gob of eggs and an English muffin onto my plate, thunking butter, catsup, and marmalade down on the table. ”I flunked culinary school,” she remarked. ”Plenty more where that came from.”

Claire’s manner was so different from Mom’s at the table, so offhand and free of rules, that I had trouble imagining the two of them at the same meal.

“Let’s have the grand tour,” Claire suggested after we’d stacked the dishes and re-stowed the condiments in the fridge.

We went first to the kitchen window that peered out in the same direction as my bedroom. I saw that the house had been built lengthwise along the cliff overlooking the ocean and that my bedroom really was the top of a tower built up from the beach below, so while entering through either of the house doors, one was at ground level. My window was indeed five or six stories above the rocks and sand. ”Not much interest in real estate on top of a cliff,” Claire said again. ”We grew up here, your mom and me. When it was decided I’d inherit the place, I was still working in Salem and had additions done to the side of the house where your room is, and then we expanded in here.” She led me through the dining room, which adjoined the kitchen, past the round mahogany-topped table, toward the south-facing entranceway of the house with its slate tiling and glass door out of which were some pretty amazing gardens. We went through a couple of workrooms, and Claire pointed out her own bedroom at the exact opposite end of a diagonal from mine. ”I enjoy the morning sun,” she told me.

Now we progressed into the living room, which took up the northeast portion of the house. There was a frayed gray davenport, a matching rocking chair, a pair of straight-backed maple chairs, a somewhat scarred coffee table, two end tables. On one wall a wood-bordered oval mirror and on the wall a large framed photo portrait.

I stopped still in the middle of the room, riveted to the spot. ”Who’s that?!” They talk about people walking over your grave. That wasn’t quite right. Perhaps someone just then was walking over my cradle.

“Your mother and I,” Claire said.

Two little girls in flowered headscarves, dresses down past their knees: one in pink, one in blue. One was smiling, waving; one was almost frowning, her arms crossed in front of her. I studied the pair for a few moments, trying to guess. One of them looked exactly like me!

“Which one?” I asked, not sure I wanted the answer.

“You can’t tell,” Claire said it more like a statement. I shook my head. She pointed. ”Can you believe it?”

I felt a bit disloyal to Mom that she was the one I less resembled, but happy too that I looked more like the smiling one. ”What’s your mother’s name?” Claire demanded suddenly.

For a moment my mouth must have hung open like she’d asked me what year it was or what that bright thing up in the sky might be.

“Claudia,” I said.

“Is that what you think?” she asked, not challenging just like checking facts.

I nodded dumbly. ”Claudia,” I said again.

“Cloud-ia,” she pronounced. (So that was why it had always sounded a little strange when she said Mom’s name.) ”The family jest,” she told me. ”Claire Belle, Cloudia Skye. The child always had a gloomy cast to her even when she was a baby.” Claire touched me lightly on the shoulder. ”I’m glad though that she has a child as bright and pleasant looking as you.”

“Well, thanks,” I said.

“May I try something?” she asked. ”Would you mind?”

Not knowing what she intended, I, of course, had no way of deciding, but I’d grown up so far expecting adults to have substantially benign intentions when they asked questions like that, so I stood mute.

Aunt Claire moved to an end table, pulled out one of the little drawers in it, and took out a folded scarf, one with flower patterning similar to that on the scarf the girl in the picture wore. Folding it into a triangle, she smoothed it over my head tying it beneath my chin in a bow. ”There,” she said with a note of triumph in her voice. ”Look.”

Pointing to the wall mirror, she turned me in that direction, then back to the picture. Even I was amazed by how much I looked like my aunt when she was about my age. ”We could almost have been twins,” she said. While I was struggling for some way to respond to this, I caught a flash of color racing past the living room window. There was a knock on the door and a call of “Claire!” in a girlish treble.