Secret Summers. Glynda Shaw
once more, companion me till dawn—
“What are you two doing in there?” Aunt Claire’s voice suddenly jolted us back to this day and this place overlooking the very sunny and rather self-satisfied looking Pacific Ocean. Reflexively, Monique slid the book under my pillow, and I slammed the box closed, noting as I did so the shreds of blue denim and tatters of another fabric, once white perhaps, inside the box. I pushed the box under my bed. ”Heavens to Betsy!” Aunt Claire expostulated. ”What a mess the two of you are.” She brushed at my dress front. ”You look like a ragamuffin. You’ll need a wash and some tidying.” To Monique, she said, “You’d best run along home. The party will be in a couple of hours. Your mom will want to scrub you too.” Monique frizzed up her hair like a madwoman’s and made a ludicrous face at my aunt.
“I shall go roll in mud to prepare for the festivities,” she said. Claire swatted at her as she scampered out of the house.
Divining Tea and the Dark Intruder
“Now,” Claire said to me, “has that girl been filling your head with stories of ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the attic?”
I nodded somewhat sheepishly.
She harrumphed, said “You’re as safe here as you could be anywhere,” then returned to scrutinizing my clothes. ”You’ll want a petticoat under that,” she decided. “Go clean up and I’ll see what I can do with the dress.”
I’d determined to object about the dressing up thing, but Claire pointed out something of which I’d become uncomfortably aware about an hour after I met Monique.
“She thinks you’re a girl,” my aunt said. ”Don’t look so shocked. I’m afraid things happened so quickly this morning, she kind of jumped to conclusions, and it’d probably be better to let her down easily. She’s been so lonely here summers. Let’s just see if anyone at the party guesses, shall we?”
Yes, I know that anyone reading this will say I could have resisted in any number of ways, and perhaps you’d be right, but at age ten in those days when an adult relative told you to do something and there was no parent handy to look for a veto, you generally did it. Had there been a dad, uncle, older brother in the house, I’d have surely balked, but the only names I heard since I’d arrived here were feminine, and the only person I’d met besides my aunt was Monique with whom I’d just spent the most fascinating and exciting few hours I could ever recall.
“Well,” I said, “Okay, just for tonight.”
“Fine.” Claire patted my shoulder. ”The shower’s rather old. If you have trouble with it, just call. Now scoot!”
I stripped, leaving scarf and dress on the bed, along with the shorts and tee shirt I’d been wearing, and covered up with the towel I’d grabbed this morning when first I’d noticed my clothes were gone. I made my way to the bathroom and took what I hoped was an adequate shower.
I returned to my room to find the blue dress, brushed clean and pressed, on a hook on the back of the door. On the bed were a new set of socks and underwear—oh, well, I’d have to change them eventually—and a white, cotton half slip from the new suitcase. Dressing wasn’t too much of a problem, although I had no idea how to retie the scarf that I’d had on previously.
“We’ll need to hurry up a bit if we don’t want to be one of the stragglers,” Claire announced without particular comment on my attire. ”Here, I’ll help you cover your hair. It’ll be chilly on the beach yet.” She’d changed into a long, white, flowing draped something or other. Awfully formal, I judged, for a yard party. About her neck, she wore a chain hung with what I now saw was a goddess image with a half moon. A circlet of silver wire and tiny emeralds sat on her loose-combed, dark red hair. I never saw my aunt use make-up or hairspray. She didn’t need to.
“Aunt Claire,” I said, “you’re beautiful!” The occasion demanded something, and that’s the first thing that tumbled out.
She kissed me on the forehead. ”And you too, my dear.”
It turned out that Monique’s house was about a mile along the coast from Aunt Claire’s. We walked the distance, my aunt maintaining that the exercise should give us a good appetite. The wind was blowing steadily from the south, and as we left the yard, I again heard the whup-whup-whup sound I’d noted earlier. ”What’s that sound?” I inquired.
“Wind mills,” she told me. ”It’s how your poor old aunt makes her living, more or less.” I must have looked puzzled, but the world of business wasn’t something that held a lot of interest for me at not quite eleven years of age. ”I’ll show you later,” she said, leading the way up the two-lane gravel road topping the seaside cliff.
The house that Monique and her mother occupied was near the turn off from the state highway and was, of course, the place from which we’d seen the light while driving here the night previous. There were already a number of people gathered in the coarsely grassed front yard.
“Claire!” A tall woman sharing Monique’s long blond hair and peaches and cream complexion bore down upon us, throwing her arms around my aunt and bussing her full on the mouth. I’d seen women kiss before but seldom with so much energy.
“Laina!” Claire held our hostess for a moment before releasing her. ”Wonderful to see you. It’s been all of what? Three days?” Both women laughed as if this were some shared hilarity. Then Laina turned to me.
“You must be Nini-anne!” She pronounced my name with an inflection at the end that made it sound rather French and enveloped me against her tight bosom under its blue terry cloth beach robe. ”I’ve heard so much about you,” she said, confiding, “Monique has spoken of nothing else since she’s come home. You girls seem to have gotten on famously. Poor thing has no one of her own age to play with this summer! Welcome, welcome!”
I stammered my thanks and considered saying more, but Monique appeared around the house, carrying a bag of charcoal held at arm’s length to save her dress, which I noted she’d embellished with a silver necklace and a pair of matching bracelets. Her ponytails, retied, protruded from the back of a rose headscarf. ”Let’s go for a walk,” she offered without reference to the adults. Everyone having their own things to do with what was shaping up evidently to be a barbecue. There seemed to be no issues of politeness to worry us just now, so I looked to my aunt, who nodded, and we were off down the trail leading toward the water, first over largish boulders, then to clean swept sand that planed down to the water’s edge.
“Big storms,” said Monique, “can come in all of a sudden and just wash right over you and pull you in, drown you. You just never know.”
“And you walk here?” I asked with about equal parts horror and incredulity.
“Oh, sure,” she said offhand. “It’s been thirty years since anything like that’s happened. You just never know.” On the heels of that sentence, she asked, whispering though there was nobody but us and the seagulls to hear, “Did you get a chance to read more in The Book?”
“No,” I told her. ”Aunt Claire made me clean up for the party. I didn’t have time to even glance at it.”
“Did she say anything about us being up in the attic?” she demanded then. ”Did she know?”
“I’m not sure. She told me that you had some idea there was a ghost in the house and she said (Wait, what had my aunt said?) I was as safe here as I could be anywhere,” I repeated.
“But,” Monique pointed out, “she didn’t say there wasn’t a ghost.”
“No, I guess she didn’t,” I admitted. ”Has anyone seen the ghost?”
“Not close up anyhow,” Monique told me, “not so far as I know, but,” and here she stopped stock still in the sand and put her mouth directly against my ear, “there used to be a little girl living there.”
“You said that before,” I said. ”With