THE next day being Saturday, Stephanie left for her ballet class after breakfast—Dad was to drop her off on his way to a regional company conference. Mom had done some gardening before breakfast, but she needed to do some washing afterwards and had headed into town with the Wrangler and a trunk full of dirty clothes. So Matthew found himself alone with his adopted senior sister, and they were still not talking to each other.
Actually, Nora had felt bad all through that night, but she was so ashamed of herself to ask for forgiveness during breakfast and even failed to help her foster brother wash up afterwards. Having gone to her room, she tried so hard to understand how Patricia had snatched Leonard from her (although the reasons were so obvious). Then she slipped into old jeans, pulled on a pink T-shirt, grabbed her car keys and zoomed off to see Linda.
Funny enough, Matthew had skipped over to his PlayStation when he got free time after washing the dishes. He thought it a waste of his time to worry about what Nora had told him the day before or start a conversation with her. When he realized he was finally alone in the house, he stopped the game and closed the entrance door from within, since in her usual manner, Nora had left it ajar when she used it. Next, he went up the stairs and looked for his adopted senior sister’s spare key where she habitually kept it in the side-pouch of her pink ‘Welcome’ bag. Matthew abhorred pink in so many ways, and he showed his dislike by gingerly holding the handle of Nora’s pink door as he pushed it open, hoping to find a better world inside.
“Ow, great,” he dejectedly whispered when he peeped in. Apart from the teen magazines and fashion issues he observed lying around, as well as the many girlie dresses and accessories he knew to be in her wardrobe, a pink world was about to embrace him. Even her CD player was pink. A darker shade, but still pink.
“Now, where would she keep it?” he thought aloud as he walked shoeless into the room on a soft pinkish rug of artificial fur. Under the bed? Or in her wardrobe? It must be under her bed, so he took a peep, only to find so many girlie shoes and boots arranged in a row. More fashionable shoes and boots filled the lowest floor of her wardrobe and Matthew waded through these with his hands in search of the book.
He failed to find it and straightened up with lines on his forehead.
Then he found it.
She’d already thrown it into her pink wastebasket and he quickly retrieved it with pride, looking it over like newfound treasure.
“Matthew, what are you doing?” Stephanie asked him from the door, a glass of cold juice in her hand.
“Em . . . Stephanie! I thought you went to ballet class?” Matthew was visibly flustered by her sudden appearance. Like he’d seen a ghost.
“There’s none today,” Stephanie revealed flippantly. “Dad just dropped me off right now. What are you doing?”
“Em . . . just looking around.” Matthew laughed half-heartedly.
“You can’t fool me,” Stephanie said as a matter of fact. “Come on, I’m nine years old.”
“Right.” Matthew cleared his throat, the book behind his back. “I was . . . investigating.”
“Investigating?” Stephanie’s eyes were huge.
“Yeah . . . sure. For Mom. She says Nora’s on drugs and I should look around.”
“Look around? Was that why she was shouting at you yesterday?”
Matthew nodded solemnly and drew nearer to her. “Mom says we mustn’t tell Nora until she confirms this. Promise?”
“Uhuuuuuh.” Stephanie nodded and left the door.
Matthew breathed a sigh of relief and locked up Nora’s room behind him.
His own door stood open.
“What do you have behind you?”
“My book?” he replied, sitting down before his desk.
Stephanie sipped her juice as she studied the many Spider-Man posters on Matthew’s wall. “Why is he so . . . weirdly dressed?” she asked him.
“He’s a hero, Steph,” Matthew replied. “Now, I’ve got to study.”
“Alright,” Stephanie agreed and skipped out of the room. “Don’t worry about Nora,” she called back and Matthew smiled fondly.
His interest went back to the book.
It was slightly warm and he wondered why, running his finger over the worn edge of the black front cover. After a second examination, he concluded that it had been thrown into fire sometime in the past. He was yet to find out that he was very wrong about this.
The book’s binding was intricately and expertly done with a kind of ancient rope Matthew assumed to be animal skin, and when he flipped it open, he was confronted with a bold name fashionably written with ink on the first whitish-brown page.
Cardinal Marcos
A name he never glanced at twice but took to be that of a very important previous owner of the book. Below it was the name of a soldier in what looked like actual ballpoint ink and Matthew wondered how this Captain Ray John Hayfield had come to be in possession of this strange-looking book, probably after encountering the cardinal guy.
More surprises awaited him as he flipped open the next page. A blank page followed page one, but a list of names graced the page after the empty one and Matthew noted their military titles. He also decided that the pen used here was the same one Captain Hayfield had used to write his own name, and thus concluded that the fifteen owners, or more, of these names could be the captain’s own men.
He didn’t stop here. He turned to the fourth page, which had no names written on it, and with an indelible marker, which he usually used to draw, he wrote down two names here.