The Romeo and Juliet Code (5 page)

I hurried towards a table at the front of the church, where someone was in charge of the money.

“We’re having a raffle today,” a lady said. “It only costs ten cents. Have you got ten cents? Just write out someone’s name and phone number and put it in the box. And you could win something if your ticket gets drawn.”

“What do you win?” I asked.

“Oh, all sorts of things. There’s a list of the prizes on the sheet over there. Are you British? You’ll be helping Mr. Churchill with his war if you put a name in.” She pushed a piece of paper at me and smiled.

“I am very fond of Mr. Churchill. He’s our lovely prime minister in England,” I said.

British children are usually ever so polite, and they always obey adults whenever they can. If an adult tells a British child to put a name in for a raffle, they do it. And so I did. I paid ten cents for Mr. Churchill and I wrote a name and a telephone number on the piece of paper. I stuffed it in the box, not realizing then how such a small act might one day come round to haunt me.

Soon enough, The Gram was back and the other woman was handing me a flyer. “We’re doing a variety show this fall at the town hall. Could you pin this up in the grocery for us, dear?”

After that, we didn’t meander about at all. We walked down a shady street and turned a corner, and there were all the shops in Bottlebay, Maine. We got right down to shopping. The Gram let me pick out a tin of Earl Grey and some cold cuts for my proper British tea. I fancied a box of biscuits, but The Gram waved at the air and said, “No, no, Flissy. We make all our cookies out at the house.”

She bought the groceries while I went over to pin up the flyer on the bulletin board. As we left the store, The Gram seemed to be in a shall-we-get-out-of-here sort of mood, as if she didn’t want to answer any more questions.

It was on the way home in the windy car that I began to think things over. Why had The Gram told her friends that Danny worked as a salesman? And why did she seem to avoid talking about him? And what about the sea captain? Why didn’t he come out of his room, anyway? Was someone even in there? I mean actually, really, truly?

Once we got out of town, The Gram kept looking over at me again and beeping the horn and saying, “Well, we made it, Flissy McBee. We’ll soon be home.”

The ride was bumpy and the sky darkening. I tried not to, but I fell asleep as we drove along. When we finally pulled into the driveway, I awoke and found a blanket covering me, and lying in my lap was a little sack. I looked in it and there was the box of biscuits I had fancied at the store.

By now, it was dusk and as we climbed out of the car, the house was all dark. The moon hung out over the ocean, and clouds of mist and spray floated in the black air.

“Where are the electric lights?” said The Gram. “You know we only had those installed recently. I hope they haven’t shorted out in the wind. Hello! Miami, are you there?”

We went in the back door, and The Gram turned on the kitchen light and set the grocery bag on the blue metal table. I went on down the dark hall, hearing music coming from the front parlor. A sad record was playing. The parlor was completely dark. I stopped at the entrance and listened.

When the clouds roll by

and the moon drifts through

When the haze is high

I think of you.

I think of you.

When the mist is sheer

and the shadows too

When the moon is spare

I think of you.

I think of you.

My eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness and I could see someone sitting in the armchair in the corner, someone lost in the music. Then the hall light was turned on behind me, and I could see instantly it was Uncle Gideon sitting in there alone.

“Fliss?” he said. “Oh, I thought everyone had gone to town. Um, well, I’m just listening to a record, just, you know. This song is, um, a Bathburn favorite. Actually, the record belongs to Derek, but, well …”

“Sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“No, no, no, Fliss, it’s fine. You’re fine. It’s always nice to see you. Really.”

“The record belongs to Captain Derek, then?” I said.

“Yes, he collects records, you know.”

“Oh, well, then, Captain Derek
really
is here?”

“Oh, yes,” said Uncle Gideon. “Of course he is. And hopefully he’ll be down soon. Time will tell, Flissy. Time will tell.”

The sweet, sad song played on, and Uncle Gideon grew quiet then and seemed to become lost again in his own thoughts.

The postman was early that morning and I ran barefoot down the long wooden steps to the beach. The postman always walked up the shoreline instead of along the road above. He had his postman’s cap off and his hair was all breezy. “He’s young, that one,” The Gram had said to me earlier. “That’s why he takes the long way around, because it’s more fun and he hasn’t yet learned not to waste time. Like you, Flissy, when you walk in circles to cross a room when a straight line would get you there faster.”

Today, the postman was pleased because all week he’d had nothing but rubbish for us and now he had some
real
mail. It makes postmen feel miserable and foolish when you come running towards them and all they have to give you is an unpleasant looking electric bill. But today he looked all chipper and important and he held out a letter. The envelope was covered with brightly colored stamps, and in the corner was a little blue rectangle with the words B
Y
A
IRPLANE
and P
AR
A
VION
. Those are the sorts of letters that usually come across the ocean. The letter was addressed to Gideon Bathburn. I looked for a postmark and I thought it said something like
Portugal
. One side of the envelope was stamped with a triangle that said P
ASSED BY CENSOR
#82.

“Thank you, Mr. Henley,” I said in my best British English. “Thank you ever so much.” And then I tore up the steps.

Uncle Gideon seemed suddenly to be at the top of the stairs on the porch. I thought he tried to appear awfully casual, whistling and swinging his arms back and forth. I looked down at the letter again and recognized my Danny’s handwriting. His
H
s and
R
s always looked like little waving people. I held on to the letter tightly. “This is from Danny!” I said when I got to the top of the stairs. I couldn’t stop jumping up and down. “It’s from Danny!!!!”

“No, it’s not,” said Uncle Gideon. “Give it to me now, and don’t go off with my mail, Flissy. Ever.”

“Let me see it,” I said.

“No,” he said loudly, grabbing the letter in a brusque way. He tucked it into his pocket. Then he turned immediately towards the house. But soon he stopped and looked back and said, “Flissy, perhaps we can play Parcheesi later. What do you say?”

“No,” I said. “I want to see the letter from my father.”

A terrible look of pain came over Uncle Gideon’s face. He turned round abruptly and went into the house, the screen door snapping shut behind him with a loud, flat slap. I heard him climb the long stairs, walk down the hall up there, pause for a moment, and then he unlocked the locked door quietly and stepped in, closing the door behind him.

I thought so
, I said to myself. I knew it was my uncle Gideon who had been stealing about in the middle of the night, turning locks and closing doors.

Really, I felt very sorry indeed for my curiosity. Winnie always said that my curiosity was my best feature and also my worst feature. But Danny used to make his
H
s and
R
s into little drawings of people on paper for me, people who talked and made alphabet jokes. Because I knew his
H
s and his
R
s, all sorts of questions started piling up inside me, the way seashells and sea glass and pieces of driftwood pile up along the beach after a storm. Why couldn’t I see a letter from my Danny? Why was it from Portugal, instead of from England? No one here exactly answered
any
of my questions. So I got out my knitting, my wool and my needles, and I started in.

British children, well, girls really, knit all the time. If you were ever to ride an English omnibus, you would look about and see all the girls and women knitting. Danny always said, “I’ve never seen a British baby knitting yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me.”

Today, I was knitting a pair of red socks for Wink. Poor, poor Wink. He hated Bottlebay, Maine. And he had a terrible thing happen to him. Before we left London, someone slit him open along his seam in front and put a small object inside him and sewed him back up before Danny and Winnie and I got on the boat. I could feel the little object in there next to his crying box when I hugged Wink. But then by the time we got to Maine, the metal object was gone, and Wink was all sewed up right again.

Aunt Miami and Uncle Gideon often played Parcheesi in the darkened parlor in the morning. The next day, they sat at a table in the curtained bay window. As I stood in the hallway just outside the room, Uncle Gideon was saying, “Oh, come on, Miami, give up. I’ve got you now.”

“You’ve cheated, again,” said Aunt Miami, “and I want a rematch.”

“Whining and pining will get you nowhere,” he said.

“
You
should talk,” she said. “You’re the one who lives in the past.”

“Won’t you come and have a go at Parcheesi, Flissy? Isn’t that what they say in jolly old England? ‘Have a go’? We’ll start afresh. You might very well like it, even though I
am
the undisputed champion,” said Uncle Gideon, wiggling his eyebrows up and down, trying to be funny. I hadn’t realized he even knew I was standing in the hall.

Miami threw some cards from another game in his face and they fluttered about and fell all over him. He looked very docile sitting there with cards on his shoulders and cards in his lap. But he didn’t fool me.

“Fliss, we need you. Parcheesi with three is much more of a challenge. Please?” he said.

“Probably no,” I said, going into the room and flopping down on the sofa. “I’m quite busy, actually.”

“Extremely urgent, is it?” he said, smiling.

“Oh, all right,” I said. “But it’s too dark in here to see the game board clearly.” I stood up and went over to the curtains. I saw the curtain cord hanging there along the window and I pulled it and the curtains went swishing off and away from the many windows. The room was suddenly filled with morning sunlight.

Uncle Gideon looked at me quickly. Then he stared down at his hands. Finally, he said quietly, “Lovely, Fliss. Perfect. Pull up a chair.”

“Beware,” said Miami, whispering to me, “he sneaks around and seems to know everything and he
always
wins.”

“Oh, come now, it’s only a game, you two,” Uncle Gideon said later, after he had crushed us both at Parcheesi and we were sitting there feeling like two smashed-up fishing boats side by side on the beach. Uncle Gideon looked over at us in a terribly cheerful way.

Then Auntie got out a photo album and we saw pictures of Danny when he was eleven years old, the day he climbed the huge boat launch in the harbor and hung upside down by his knees over the water, smiling at the camera. In all the photographs, my Danny always seemed to be in the center, beaming in his handsome way, and Uncle Gideon always seemed to be lost in the background.