Albert spent no time wondering about Derek or Carrie. He turned his attention back to the box and immersed himself again in its curious secrets.
He’d questioned everyone he knew about the box. He even called his parents and sister to see if they knew anything about it, half expecting it to be some sort of bizarre, belated birthday present, but no one knew anything about it. Everyone seemed to have the same opinion: that someone left it there by mistake.
He supposed he could just break the box open. He could smash it or saw through it. It was only wood. But he did not want to damage it until he’d had a chance to find the sender. After all, it might be important to somebody. Besides, he didn’t want to destroy any of the markings before he could decipher them.
Each of the box’s three messages was written using only straight lines roughly gouged into the wood. This left some characters frustratingly ambiguous. On one side, for example, there were ten characters arranged in three rows. To Albert, they appeared to read,
I Z
V I I
I O O S T
but it was difficult to be certain. It was impossible to tell whether some of these characters represented numbers or letters. The straight vertical lines could have been the number one or the letter I, for example. Or even a lower-case L. The S could have been a five. The two Os in the bottom line were drawn as squares, and could have been zeros instead, or for all he knew they could actually have been intended as squares. There was simply no way to know for sure, which made the clue that much more puzzling.
He had pondered over these three lines for hours now, trying to decipher them. The middle line could have been the Roman numeral seven, but with nothing else to go on, and no idea how to decipher the other two, he had no way of knowing for certain. It could be a V and an eleven. For that matter, the lines comprising the V were slightly crossed at the bottom. It could even have been a sloppy X.
Frustrated, he turned the box around.
Perhaps the most haunting of the messages was written on the side opposite the keyhole. Here there were five lines. The first four were complete words. From top to bottom they read HELP, COME, TOGETHER and YESTERDAY. The fifth line was not a word, but just three letters: G, N and J.
These lines were much easier to read than the previous three, even with their straight-line lettering, but with the legibility came a haunting feeling. Help. Come. It was as though someone were calling out to him for something. But what could yesterday mean? Was it literal? If so, he’d received the box the previous evening, so yesterday would have been two days ago. Or did it mean the past in general? Help come together yesterday. It made no sense. And how did the last line fit in? Perhaps it was someone’s or something’s initials.
The final side of the box was carved with only seven letters, scrawled across the surface diagonally from corner to corner, in larger letters than the other messages.
B R A N D Y R
He thought that he recognized these letters. It looked like a name. Brandy R. He knew a Brandy R. Or at least he’d met a Brandy R. Brandy Rudman was his lab partner in Chemistry. She was a sophomore, one year ahead of him and likewise a year older, nearly twenty, while he was barely nineteen, yet she could have passed as a sixteen-year-old high school student, small and girlish with a soft face and small, modest figure. She was very pretty. He had not expected to find a lab partner so quickly, but she was sitting in front of him on that first day and when the instructor told them to pair off she turned around, scanning the other students in the class until her pretty eyes fell on him. “You mind?” she asked simply, to which he replied a startled “Sure.”
It was just dumb luck for him. He’d been attending classes for not yet a day and a half at a school where he recognized no one and instead of being the last lonely student standing around looking for a pair that would allow him to join, as he’d expected to be, he found himself paired off almost at once and with a very pretty young woman. And by even greater luck, she had so far turned out to be a very lovely person to know as well, friendly, kind, outgoing and fun.
His Chemistry lab was scheduled for Tuesdays and Thursdays at ten o’clock in the morning. Today was Thursday. That morning he stuffed the box inside his green backpack and took it with him to class, intending to see if she knew anything about it, but she was as ignorant of its origins as everyone else he’d spoken with, his last chance at an answer severed at its root.
“Must be another Brandy R.,” she’d concluded, peering down into his backpack at the strange, wooden box. “I’ve never seen it before. It was in your car?”
“Yeah. All the doors were still locked. Nothing broken.”
“Weird.”
Weird was right. It was also disappointing. A part of him had hoped for an excuse to get to know Brandy a little better.
Albert turned and looked at the clock again. It was after five now. He needed to go eat dinner. He usually tried to go before Derek returned. The less time he spent with him the better.
He stood up and stretched. Some time away from the box would do him good. He was becoming frustrated with it again. Perhaps everyone was right, perhaps the box was never meant for him and he would never understand where it came from or what it meant. But that thought became like a looming darkness. He did not want to be left ignorant. He wanted to know about this box. He wanted to understand it. He didn’t like to leave mysteries unsolved. It simply wasn’t his nature.
He was reaching for his shoes when the phone rang. It would probably be somebody looking for Derek. Somebody was always looking for Derek. It was funny how Albert was always looking to avoid him.
He sat down on the bed and answered the phone.
“Is Albert there?”
It was a woman’s voice, feminine, petite, pretty. “Speaking,” he replied.
“Hi. This is Brandy. From Chem.”
Albert stood up again, surprised. They exchanged numbers the first day of class in case either of them missed and needed notes, but he never expected her to use it. “Hi.”
“Hey, did you find anything out about that box?”
“No. Not a thing.” His heart sped up a notch when she told him who she was. Now it jumped again, shifting from second to third.
Brandy was quiet for so long that he began to think the line was disconnected, but before he could ask if she was still there she said, “There was something in my car when I left class today.”
Fourth gear. He started walking across the room, pacing as he sometimes did when he was on the phone. “What did you get?”
Instead of answering, she said, “You’re in Lumey, right?”
“That’s right.” Lumey Hall was the most expensive dormitory on campus. He’d spent the extra money for the semi-private bathroom and coed environment. From his first tour of the Hill he did not like the prison-like feel of the community halls elsewhere on campus, so he forked over nearly twice what other freshmen were paying in the Cube. Over here, two rooms made up a suite and a bathroom connected the two, so only four people shared facilities, instead of an entire floor. Also, unlike any other building, Lumey was entirely coed, hence the fact that there were girls living right across the hall from him. And since Lumey was usually reserved for students with a junior standing or higher, he was very fortunate to obtain his room. It turned out that the freshmen dormitories were overcrowded. In the next few years they would probably have to build a new one.
“What floor?”
“Second floor. Room two-fourteen.”
“Meet me in the second floor lounge. I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”
“Okay.”
She hung up without saying goodbye and he stood staring at the dead phone, his mind a cyclone of thoughts. He was about to get information about the box. Maybe together they would figure out what it was and who gave it to him.