Secret Summers. Glynda Shaw
”That’s what we’re supposed to find out. I’ve had some ideas but nothing very coherent.”
“I thought you’d never seen the box before.”
“Since we saw it last,” she corrected. ”Before we had the lemonade?”
“Ohhhh.” To do her credit though, she did proceed to quote the entire verse from memory.
“Wait a minute,” I grabbed for a pencil, then chose an art pen instead, red, fine tipped. I thought that would look more poetic, more proper.
“’The key to things without is that locked safe within,’” I read. ”Seems that’s just backwards. Isn’t the key usually outside, and isn’t it used to get what’s within?”
“I suppose,” Monique nodded, “that would depend a lot on what’s being unlocked. It could also mean that whatever’s in the box might unlock a bigger secret or mystery on the outside.” She thought a minute, then said, “Let’s have a look at the second line.”
The thread that runs, however far,
Must tie yet end to end.
”I’d say,” I said, writing the while, “that no matter how far you have to go to get an answer, you find it close to where you started. That’s usually how my teacher makes it seem when I ask a question.”
Monique smiled. ”Still … ‘The open hand alone can grasp the things unknown.’ That would mean that we have to keep an open mind in order to understand something very new or mysterious… .”
“That’s sound enough,” I admitted. And not to be outdone, I finished, “’No question lies upon the tongue with no answer nearby to be shown.’ I read somewhere that if you ask a question right and in enough ways, you can’t help but find the answer to it.”
“Hmmm,” Monique wrinkled her nose. ”Maybe we’re working it backwards. We have to ask a question as many ways as we can. We have to maintain a totally open mind. We’ll find the answer near to our starting point. We’ll find a key to something important, to something outside, within the box since that’s where the verse is written,” she concluded. ”On the box.”
“But how do we get inside it?” I persisted. ”Should we break it open or something?”
“I suspect that would not be correct,” Monique answered gravely. ”I don’t imagine she would approve of that.”
Again, that assumption that someone else was here, sharing my room with me!
”What about taking it apart?” I hazarded again. ”Sometimes there are screws in the bottom or you can take the hinges off.”
“There’s no …” Monique began, then more deliberately, “I didn’t see any way to open the box. When we were up there just a while ago, I mean.”
“We didn’t try to turn it over or anything,” I countered.
“No,” she replied serenely. ”You may go and try if you wish. Still, I think we’re apt to be barking up the wrong tree.”
“Ladder,” I said.
“Ladder.”
“’The thread that run, however far,’” Monique recited again, “’must join yet end to end.’ If we wish to open the box, if the box should be opened, we might start with an external mystery that the writing on the box might refer to. If we can solve that mystery, perhaps that will lead us back along the thread to the core of the box mystery.”
I imagined loops growing outward and circling back before my eyes, and my head began spinning. ”What sort of mystery?”
Monique obviously wasn’t finding this easy either. ”Well, has anything unusual occurred lately?” I thought about that, and yes, I supposed there’d been lots of unusual things since, well, last week, but not all of them did I feel like mentioning just then.
“There’s you,” Monique said.
“Me?”
“Yes, your coming here last night and us seeing you in the picture.”
“It isn’t me though,” I told her as if maybe she didn’t know that.
“But it could have been,” she retorted. “Can you think of anything else unusual about your arrival yesterday?”
I started to deny anything significant, but I’d grown up with a pretty strict prohibition against lying. Mom wasn’t the kind of person who gave you a line about clearing your conscience but punished you anyhow. Coming clean usually meant the end of things. ”I guess,” I said, “something weird happened today, well, yesterday. I just didn’t know about it till this morning.”
“What weird thing?”
“I got my suitcase switched, my clothes and everything, with another girl’s stuff because of the airline.”
Now left to myself, I would not have touched that strange girl’s things, but with Monique’s enthusiastic urging, soon the bed was covered with blouses, skirts, pants, underwear, socks, scarves, sandals, and a little pink comb, brush, and nail-care set. The suitcase was empty almost. In the pocket of the suitcase lid, we found a card of hair barrettes of various colors and insect shapes, some of those fabric-clad rubber bands for pigtails and the like, and a tiny diary much faded with age and locked.
Monique picked up the diary and shook it. Nothing fell out. She went through the suitcase pocket again, then studied the lining, pressing all around the inside of the case with her fingers. Closing the lid, she studied the exterior similarly and flexed the baggage tags between her fingers. ”Here it is,” she said with self-satisfaction, yanking hard on the tag, breaking the string that held it to the suitcase handle. I saw then that the tag was actually a little envelope. Monique tore it open and drew out a small silver key.
She immediately inserted the key into the little book, twisting this way and that, turning the key over, trying again. ”Seems jammed,” she concluded. She went to the desk, rummaged the drawers, and found the brass letter opener and the solid-looking, little wooden mallet with a corkscrew set in it. She laid the diary on the table, placed the point of the letter opener in the lock, and began hammering.
“Should we be doing that?” I asked. ”It doesn’t belong to us.”
“It’s rusted shut or something,” she told me continuing to bang. ”We’ll buy her a new diary.”
The diary lay open and revealed. Most of the pages were blank, but on the first leaf in a childish yet very legible hand was printed
I can’t help but think that everything from now on will be very different. The summer is young, however, and there are many pages to fill.
There was the signature monogram “C.” at the bottom of the page.
Monique flipped page after page, and it seemed there’d be nothing else until she turned to the back cover of the diary. She scrutinized the page up close, then held it out, so I could get a good look. There was the same verse we’d been reciting to each other since we’d first read it this morning.
“Could this have something to do with whoever made that box?” I wondered.
Monique shook her head. ”I don’t know.”
I reached out for the diary. ”C,” I said aloud, turning back to the first page. ”That’s my Mom’s initial, Cloudia. Could she have had this book when she was little?” I looked again at the writing. The hand could’ve been mine maybe a couple of years ago when I was first learning cursive.
“But you said it wasn’t your suitcase,” Monique objected.
“Well, the stuff in it isn’t mine,” I said. ”The suitcase looks the same, but who’d switch clothes in somebody’s suitcase?”
Monique took