The Romeo and Juliet Code (9 page)

And then one day, another letter arrived from Portugal. I had my hands on it and, as usual, Uncle Gideon grabbed it. And when he went hurrying off into the locked room with it and closed the door behind him, a great idea came into my head.

Danny always said that I was his little bright-idea girl. I’d be sitting on the sofa with him in our lovely flat in London, lying against him, feeling happy and safe with Winnie on the other side of me, embroidering. Danny would pat my head and say, “My little think tank. What are you up to now? What’s going on in there?”

And I had to admit that sometimes my ideas could get me into situations. Like the time in London when Winnie and Danny were gone for two days. I wasn’t to leave the flat and I wasn’t to tell anyone that I was staying there alone. One day, I decided to dry all my blue woolen knickers (underpants) on the railing of the little balcony outside my bedroom. I had them all washed and laid out nicely, when a big wind came up the way it does sometimes in London and it blew all my knickers off the railing and down into the neighbors’ walled-in garden next door. And there’s no way to get into a walled-in garden like that unless you go down and knock on the neighbor’s door, which I did. I said, “Excuse me, my knickers are in your rosebushes. May I go and fetch them?”

My idea involved Derek. And so I went directly to him. I started in by knocking on his door and saying that I had finally finished reading
A Little Princess
by Frances Hodgson Burnett and I wondered if he would like a go at it. He didn’t answer and so I opened the door and went into his room and stood there in the dark.

“Derek,” I said, speaking right into the shadows. He was lying in bed with his back to me, staring at the wall.

“
Captain
Derek,” he said.

“Captain Derek,” I said. “Actually, I was rather hoping the captain part was optional.”

“Possibly,” he said.

“Anyway, another letter has come from Portugal.” And now I started whispering. “And Uncle Gideon has got it in that locked room. And oh, Derek, I want so much to see one of the letters. Won’t you help me?”

Now Derek was listening. He even rolled over and looked at me. “What do you mean?” he said.

“I need to go in that room,” I said. Through the slightly parted curtains, I could see Auntie and The Gram way down the beach, digging for clams. “Now will be a perfect time. I hope you will not think me rude, but I need you to fall out of bed and scream and cry as if you are hurt.”

Derek looked pleased. He even sat up.

“And then Uncle Gideon will come rushing in to help you and he’ll forget to lock the door.”

“Hmmm,” Derek said. “You’re smart, I see.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I can’t do long division, and Lily Jones says it’s ever so simple. Never mind about that. Will you scream and yell? Yes or no.”

“Maybe,” he said, “but you have to promise to let me see the letters too.”

“I won’t steal them,” I said. “I’ll only copy them over. I have a pencil in my pocket and some paper.”

“Oh yes, you
are
clever,” said Derek, smiling at me. It was the first time that I was to see Derek’s smile. And it was a lovely, big, beaming one that went nicely with his grainy, brown-sugar eyes and the sweet music playing in the background. And his smile gave me a British coal fire feeling. I had to close my eyes for a minute because it went through me like British smoke, that delicious smell you breathe in when you are running along the pathways between all the little coal sheds and walled-in gardens behind the row houses in England.

“Thank you ever so much, Derek. Once I see these letters, I promise I won’t bother anyone about them again,” I said. And I went out into the hall and stood quietly behind a door. I had become quite good at sneaking about this large, dark house full of rifts and lies.

Soon enough, I heard Derek thump out of bed and then begin crying out and calling for help. Just as I hoped, Uncle Gideon came rushing from the locked room, only closing the door behind him, calling out, “Derek, my God, are you all right?”

“Ohhh, I must have broken something,” I heard Derek say as I slipped into the unlocked locked room.

British children are not normally nosy or clever or snoopy at all, but I just
had
to know. I had to see those letters.

Once inside, I could see the room was a study, with a globe on a small table and maps on the wall.

Bright, colored thumbtacks on the map of Europe. Books on the desk. Even a copy of
Romeo and Juliet
lying there open.

I quickly searched the drawers and found a small stack of letters, all of them from Portugal and with the blue rectangle in the corner saying B
Y
A
IRPLANE
. I reached for the first one. The envelope had been carefully slit open. I pulled the letter out and held it up to the light. Then my ears started ringing as if the ocean were roaring inside me. I looked down at the contents. It was all numbers. It read
12-5 21-2-10 64-35 17-7-41-47-110-14. 52-47-46-77-72-16 23-1 80-53-20 70-71-15-5-72-31-53-82
and went on and on. It was quite long and I quickly copied all the numbers over carefully. At the bottom of the page in small letters, it said,
a favorite in Miami
.

My head felt like it was spinning round and round like a boat caught in a whirlpool in the mid Atlantic. I stuffed the paper in my pocket and waited by the door, listening.

I could hear Derek saying, “But I can’t move my leg. It really hurts too much.”

“Please, Derek,” said Gideon, “let’s see if I can get you back up in bed and then I will go and call the doctor.”

“No, no. No doctor,” shouted Derek. But it was too late. Soon I heard Uncle Gideon down on the landing, ringing someone up.

Then I slipped quietly out of the study. I went and stood in a somber way by Derek’s bed. He was looking up at me from his pillow. I didn’t exactly feel like smiling. I felt confused and shaky. Uncle Gideon was on the phone saying, “Derek, has fallen out of bed. Can you stop over this afternoon?”

“Now you owe me one,” said Derek. “I’m going to have to have that doctor poking me again.”

“Dreadfully sorry,” I said and then I pulled the piece of paper out of my pocket and showed it to Derek.

“Oh, Flissy,” he whispered, “oh my goodness. Do you know what this is? The letter is written in code. It’s in code!”

That summer, there were days when the sea was beautiful and calm and green. I could sit on the porch alone in the quiet heat and just stare at the water all afternoon. Oceans can look lovely sometimes, but that loveliness can be deceiving. After all, there were sharks lurking in the water, and German submarines could have easily been prowling about the coast. Why would someone write in code? Why would someone send a letter full of numbers?

That very next evening, I brought up Derek’s dinner tray. I opened the door and looked at his bed. It was empty. My eyes rolled round in the dim light. “Derek?” I said. “Have you gone lost on me?”

“No,” he said, “not really.” There he was, sitting at his desk across the room, no longer wearing pajamas. He was dressed in summer trousers and a striped pullover, looking up the word
code
in his encyclopedia. He was tall and thin and it was nice to be able to see all of him for a change. He kept his one useless arm in his lap.

“People use code when they have a secret. When they don’t want anyone to know or see what they have written,” he said.

“Because they are hiding something,” I said, putting the tray down. “I thought so.” My heart sank then like a ship shot full of holes. My Winnie and Danny had lied to me. They were in Portugal, not in London at all. Why did they lie? What were they doing?

“If we want to know what these messages say, we will have to try to figure out how to break the code,” Derek said. “And that’s going to be very hard because there are as many different codes created as there are birds in the sky or birthdays on the calendar.”

We sat there quietly for a long time listening to the wind ruffling and whistling under the shingles on the house, the shutters banging back and forth. We were both thinking about all those strange numbers on that page. If I had been a little starfish caught in a tangle of sea lettuce and kelp, I couldn’t have been more discouraged than I felt just now.

Then, to cheer things up and especially because I was rather pleased to see Derek out of bed, I said, “Speaking of birthdays, did you know that the president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, has his birthday one day after mine? His birthday is January thirtieth.”

“
I
have an assigned birthday,” said Derek.

“An assigned birthday?” I said. “And whatever is that?”

“Well,” said Derek, “I was assigned a day. It was kind of picked out of a hat for me.”

“But doesn’t everyone get a birthday naturally when they are born?”

“Yes, but I didn’t come with paperwork,” he said.

“Well, what day were you assigned, then?” I asked.

“I was assigned January twenty-ninth.”

“Oh, but that’s
my
birthday,” I said. “How very strange. I wonder why. It’s not a particularly marvelous sort of day to have for a birthday, is it?”

“Not really,” Derek said. “It’s just an ordinary day in the middle of winter. Usually very cold outside and sometimes it snows.”

“It’s not like having a birthday on February twenty-ninth, a leap year,” I said. “Then for three years your birthday completely disappears, which could be rather interesting.”

“It’s because I did not come with paperwork,” he said again.

“No paperwork? What do you mean by that?”

“Never mind,” said Derek. “I don’t like talking about this.”

“Oh, nobody likes talking about anything here. I do want to go home,” I said. “But I don’t know where my passport is or even where my home is because home is where your parents are, and I have misplaced my parents.” I had never cried in all my life in front of a handsome, lanky, freckle-faced boy and I wasn’t going to start now. So I began trying to count all the bottle caps collected in jars on Derek’s desk. I got to 178 and then got all mixed up and was about to start over.

Then Derek said, “Well, look, I’d rather not say this.”

“Fine,” I said.

“But I’m not actually officially a real Bathburn,” he said.

“You’re not?” I said, looking up. “You’re not Gideon and Miami’s little brother?”

“Well, yes I am, and no I’m not. What I mean is, I was adopted and I came with no paperwork. Officially, my real name is Derek Blakely.”

“Oh, Derek,” I said and I sank to the floor at his feet near the desk, where he was sitting. I felt foggy and glum and sad for him and surprised. I put my hands up to my eyes just in case I might be going to cry this time. “But, Derek, don’t you know your
real
mother and your
real
father?”

“No,” said Derek, “I don’t know anything. I can’t remember back that far. I’ve been here since I was one.”

“That’s very awful,” I said. “I do hope you have lots of friends.”

“Well, I do, or I did,” he said, “but no one wants anyone coming out to the house now.”

“Because you had polio,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “But it seems like there are other reasons too. I’m not sure.”

Then we sat in the dark room without saying one more word. The house felt suddenly even more somber and gloomy, and my beautiful Winnie and Danny had somehow become lost in the darkness of it.