The Romeo and Juliet Code (19 page)

I couldn’t wait. I wasn’t sure if it was the British part of me or the antsy Budwig part, but I began to climb the ladder in a shaky sort of way. A group of ring-billed gulls overhead were screeching as they landed on the roof above, breaking up the silence in the air. When you are climbing up high, it is probably a good idea not to turn round and look behind you. And so I didn’t. I just kept climbing and watching the road in the distance for a sign of the black Packard and Uncle Gideon or a cloud of dust that might mean a car coming along. When I got to the top of the ladder, I held on to one of the shutters and I pounded on the window.

Derek looked at me through the glass. “Go back, Flissy, it’s not safe,” he mouthed. But I stayed there pushing against the glass. I daresay I didn’t generally take orders very well. Danny often said I would not make a good soldier.

“No,” I shouted. I held up the screen I was carrying. It flew about in my hand like a gull caught in a draft. Derek rolled his eyes. He opened the window and I climbed partway in, huffing and puffing, dropping the screen into the room. Half of me was in and half of me was out, and Derek was pulling on part of me while another part of me had one of my dreadful laughing attacks. And then suddenly, I fell in on the floor. I lay on my back with my arms out trying to imagine what it would feel like to die. Did you float to the ceiling when it happened?

“Were you worried about me terribly, Derek?” I whispered, still breathless. “Would you cry at all if I had died?”

“Flissy,” Derek said. And he then didn’t finish his sentence. He looked a bit stunned.

“What?” I said.

“Here’s the box you saw delivered a while ago. It’s open.”

“What’s in there?” I said, getting up quickly and going over to look at the box. Derek reached in and pulled out a small crocheted pincushion with an embroidered butterfly across the front.

“Is that all?” I said as I looked at the box and the postmark I had grown to know so well. “May I hold it?” With the pincushion in my hands, I had a fleeting image of Winnie sitting by candlelight, her embroidery needle darting quickly over some fabric.

“We should put it back,” said Derek, reaching for it. But just then, he noticed a small two-inch opening along one seam. “Well, I see something was tucked
inside
here,” he said, “but it’s gone now. Someone has removed it.” He stared down at the floor.

Then he started opening drawers in the desk where the letters had been before. The drawers as he slid them out squeaked and dragged in the soundless air. Finally, he pulled out a stack of letters, all six that Gideon had received. He held them up towards the light.

We spread each letter out on the desk. It was really startling to see them all lying there. We slipped them gently from their slit envelopes. Each letter was full of a series of numbers and nothing else. We copied them over as quickly as possible.

“Anyone on the road?” said Derek, looking up at me.

I ran to the window.

“So far no, but hurry,” I said. “Have we got every letter copied?”

Derek nodded.

Then we went through the envelopes, quickly checking the postmark dates. Yes, it was true. I was right. We had not had a letter for a whole month. I put my face in my hands and looked at the blackness behind my closed eyes. Why had the letters stopped coming?

“It’s getting late. Come on, Flissy,” said Derek. “You leave by the study door. I’ll lock it behind you.”

“But what about you? Poor you?” I said, pulling a little on his shirtsleeve.

“Quick, go now,” said Derek. “I hear a car up on the road. Go. Now.”

“What ho, Fliss,” Uncle Gideon called as he got out of the old Packard. I stood off to the right of the house so my uncle would look towards me and not off to the left, where through the rosebushes he might glimpse the edge of an old tall ladder and a clever boy climbing down it. Uncle Gideon had a briefcase in one hand and a pile of papers in the other. There were books in his arms too, and it looked as if he might drop them all at any second.

“Lovely day, isn’t it!” I called out, hopping about on one foot. I always seemed to do that when I was nervous. “It hasn’t rained at all. Not even two drops.” And I changed to my other leg and started hopping again.

“Yes, it is a lovely day, a quiet day,” said Uncle Gideon, looking at me sideways and frowning. “You are hopping awfully well these days. Are you in training for a hop-scotch tournament?”

“No, no, I’m just rehearsing something. Um, thinking about rehearsing. I mean practicing something. I mean hopping is good for thinking, isn’t it.”

“Ah, I see. That makes sense, I think. Well, since we’re on the subject of rehearsals, how has my sister been doing at the town hall?”

“Oh, she has been doing a topping good job,” I said.

“Did you say a whopping good job?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “a topping good job.”

“And she’s not dropping out, is she?” he said.

“No, she loves being Juliet,” I said trying to think of other things to keep the conversation going. “Yes, she really does.”

“Yes or no?” said Uncle Gideon. “Which what?”

“Well, I’m not sure. She loves it, that’s all.”

“Oh, she’s a hopeless romantic,” said Uncle Gideon. “I guess we all are around here.”

“Probably not me,” I said.

“Well, then you’ll be the first Bathburn that isn’t, Flissy.”

“Why does everyone love
Romeo and Juliet
so much when it’s such a sad story, really?” I said, nodding my head up and down to make sure Uncle Gideon looked my way.

“They love it because they can see themselves in it,” Uncle Gideon said, and then he turned his face up towards the sky. A formation of airplanes was flying overhead in a V shape like geese heading south for the winter. If only they were just geese.

“Bad news every day with the war,” he said. “But your England is putting up a good fight.”

“What will happen if we lose?” I said.

He shook his head. “By the way, Fliss, you haven’t collected the mail for me and forgotten to give me anything, have you? I mean like a letter or anything?”

“No, I haven’t forgotten,” I said.

“I mean, the mail is usually on the dining room table when I get home from school. I mean, you didn’t see a letter for me?”

“No, I haven’t seen one,” I said, and then my heart got heavy again and fell like one of those black-crowned night herons dropping into the sea to feed.

Just then, a gust of wind whipped round the house the way it does sometimes even on quiet days and it ripped all the papers from Uncle Gideon’s arms and it swirled them all over the garden like a group of autumn leaves. Some of them flew about and landed in the rosebushes off towards the left. I ran after those, and Uncle Gideon chased the ones along the front of the house. I could see now that Derek had finally moved the ladder. I took a deep breath.

When I had grabbed all the papers on my side, I happened to see (quite by accident, honestly) my report on Frances Hodgson Burnett. Mr. Bathtub had written
A-plus
at the top in red and added,
“You are a marvel! Well done, Felicity Bathburn! You truly are an expert on this delightful author.”

I felt rather guilty and sorry indeed then that Derek and I had broken into the locked study and poked about in his desk while Uncle Gideon had been off correcting papers cheerily, writing nice things on the top of my report.

“Good catch, by the way,” he said, taking the papers. “We wouldn’t want to have a whole swarm of sixth-grade reports flying about in Bottlebay, would we? Some of the spelling errors would shock the general population!” He smiled a little bit and then he started heading towards the house. Soon he turned round for a moment and said, “I say, old bean, beautiful report you wrote. By the way, I’ve noticed your math is a bit off. You know, we can fix that.”

“Thank you, Mr. Bathtub,” I said, looking up at him, feeling worried and guilty and mixed up and sorry for him suddenly for loving my Winnie and having to sit alone in the dark, listening to sad songs, missing her.

The rehearsals at the town hall were going very well. We went almost every evening during the week. Aunt Miami floated quietly around the room, but when she stepped out onstage, it really did seem to become all hers. Derek learned the lines, but hardly tried. He was always looking off stage as if he were just about to walk out and leave the whole thing. And he was constantly saying, “Fliss, help. Find someone. Do something. I hate this.”

Still, whenever he was onstage, I thought he was wonderful, and I knew I loved him all the way down to my bones.

At rehearsals, I usually sat next to Mrs. Marlene Fudge, who had a trained parrot with her in a cage. She was hoping one of the acts would step down so there would be room for her and her singing parrot. I often chatted with her. I even asked her once if her name was really Mrs. Fudge. “Yes, I married into the Fudge family,” she said. “And they are not a very sweet bunch at all, I can assure you of that.”

Sometimes just to be winning, she brought in a plate of fudge for everyone in the cast. She was so hoping someone would cancel, which is why I kept begging Derek not to drop out. Not yet, anyway.

And besides, he was so smashing onstage. I wished, as he said his lines so halfheartedly, I wished that I was his Juliet and that he was my Romeo. I would gladly have thrown myself on the floor and died while giving a long, tearful speech onstage, if it would have meant that Derek would kiss my cheek.

I thought perhaps that Derek was the first boy I ever loved. And then I remembered Michael Hardy in first form. He happened also to be in my very small Sunday school class in London. We always held hands in Sunday school and it was our great secret because in regular school, we never even spoke to each other.

And then there was a little boy named Charlie in third form. Once, we were standing in a queue for lunch and someone said, “Oooh, you like Charlie Snappet?
He
has false teeth.” And Charlie said, “I do. Want to see them?” And he pulled out his two front teeth and held them in his hand. But it didn’t bother me because when you love someone,
nothing
they do bothers you.

When rehearsals were over for the night, and Derek and I were sitting on a bench outside, waiting for Miami, Derek said, “I’ve been looking at all six letters, and every time Miami says her speech, I try to think how those numbers and that speech might be connected.”

“I forgot to notice, Derek, when we were in the study. Did you see the copy of
Romeo and Juliet
?”

“Yes, it was there,” he said. “And we were right. Miami’s favorite lines were circled in pencil. Flissy?”

“Yes?” I said very hopefully. I liked being in the dark with Derek.

“I had to take out the trash this morning,” he said.

“Oh, poor Captain Derek,” I said. “I promise I won’t tell your soldiers.”

“And when I poured the trash into the barrel, I saw this,” he said and he held up a tiny metal film canister. He lifted the lid off with his thumb. The canister was empty.

“That’s nice,” I said, “but it’s rather small.”

“Well, it’s plain and it wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else, but it might mean something
to us
.”

“What?” I said.

“Well, why would someone throw out an empty film canister?”

“Because they didn’t need it anymore,” I said.

“Yes, because they gave the film to someone else. Perhaps. And the film must have been about two inches tall and this little canister, when it held the film, might fit perfectly inside a little pincushion,” said Derek, looking up at a cluster of gray night clouds drifting towards the horizon.