Chapter 2
Twenty minutes turned out to be twenty-five. Albert would be the first to agree that five minutes was hardly an eternity, but Brandy knew something about the box, something she was not willing to disclose over the phone. Now every minute passed like an hour as he sat in the second floor lounge of Lumey Hall, waiting to see what she knew.
There was something in my car when I left class today. Those words kept ringing in his ear. He remembered how he’d unlocked his car the previous evening and found the box sitting in the driver’s seat. It was a frightening experience. He did not even see it until he opened the door. Brandy at least found her package in broad daylight, but it still must have been unnerving, perhaps even more so since whoever left it there was bold enough to get into her car in the middle of a busy school day.
The box had Brandy’s name on it. Now Brandy had found something too, and in exactly the same way, no less. Perhaps it was no accident after all that he found himself in possession of the box.
At the other end of the room, two boys were playing table tennis. One was a skinny blond kid, his face a spattering of pimples. The other was of an average build with a red goatee that wasn’t quite thick enough yet to completely cover his chin. Nearby, a skinny girl with raven black hair cut short enough to stand on end sat in one of the plush chairs watching them. She was close enough to them in such an empty room to indicate that she was with them, but her eyes kept drifting from the boys to the door to her watch and back again, suggesting that she, too, was waiting for someone.
The steady plink-plunk sound of the ping-pong ball could be annoying at times, but tonight Albert found it and the occasional outbursts of frustration and excitement from the boys relaxing, almost hypnotic. It was a perfect distraction for his senses. Too much silence made him think too much and just lately that made his head hurt.
He was sitting off to one side of the room, positioned so that he could see out of the lounge and down the hallway to the main doors. Lumey was built on the slope of a hill, so on the back side of the building the first floor was the ground floor, but on the front—the side he was facing now—the main doors led in on the second floor. The visitor parking lot and the meters were located on this side of the building. Therefore, he’d determined that this was the direction from which Brandy would most likely enter.
He spotted her as she was climbing the steps. She was wearing a dark shirt and jeans, different from the shorts and tank top she’d been wearing that morning in lab. She was clenching a black leather purse in her left hand and carried a cigarette in her right.
Albert thought that there was something stiff about her. She looked tense. He watched her as she paused at the ashtray outside the door. She drew one last time from the cigarette and then crushed it. As she did so, she turned and looked around, as though she expected someone to be watching her.
Of course there was someone watching her, but he didn’t think that it was him she was looking around for.
Perhaps he was imagining it. Maybe she heard something somewhere, someone yelling or a car horn blaring. Maybe he was simply looking for things that weren’t there. Puzzling over the box for so many hours had caused his imagination to run a little wild.
At last she opened the door and walked in. Almost immediately, her eyes found him. Albert stood up and greeted her and immediately the smell of her cigarette tickled his nose. He was not a smoker and did not like the smell of cigarettes, but his mother smoked and he was used to it enough that he was not really bothered by it. He always said it would have to be a pretty fine line between yes and no to turn down a date based on whether a girl smoked.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said as she sat down.
“It’s okay.”
She did not relax at first. She held her purse in her lap and looked at him. Albert realized right away that there was something cold about her, as though he had done her some grave evil of which he was not yet aware. Her eyes were a soft and gorgeous shade of blue behind the gold-rimmed lenses of her small glasses, beautiful enough to be hypnotizing, but when she leaned forward they were focused so fiercely on him that it made him want to shrink away. “I’m just going to say right now that if this is some kind of practical joke I’m not going to be happy. There are laws against breaking into someone’s car, you know.”
Albert stared at her, his own dark eyes wide and shocked. Those words struck him like a hammer. He’d never even considered a practical joke. That cast a whole new light on the subject. What if someone was trying to pull something on him? What if someone somewhere was laughing his ass off at his silly obsession with that nonsense box? “If it’s a practical joke,” he said, almost numb with the realization of that possibility, “then we’re two cheeks on the same butt of it.”
Brandy watched his expression as he spoke, her eyes stony and piercing. Finally, after a moment, she laughed. It was a quick sound, a huff of air, almost a sigh. In an instant her features melted back into that sweet, ladylike girlishness that he’d seen so often in the classroom. She relaxed back into her chair, her posture slightly slouched, comfortable. She gazed at him through her glasses, her eyes once more soft and sweet. Her hair was very light blonde, a little past shoulder-length, straight and smooth with short bangs. She was wearing a simple, short-sleeved shirt, black with red patterns around the neck and sleeves. Albert couldn’t stop himself from noticing the low neckline. She was not big-breasted, but neither was she shapeless. She was quite pretty, blessed with a girlish figure and a soft and delicate complexion.
Overall, she was a sharp contrast to him. Whereas her hair and eyes were light and fair, his were dark and deep. Her nose and chin were soft and round, while his were straight and pronounced, almost pointed. He was rather short, although still a couple inches taller than she, and a little stocky, and he appeared bulky compared to the soft curves of her petite figure.
“I’m sorry,” said Brandy. “I don’t mean to accuse you of anything. I wasn’t trying to be a bitch.”
“No, don’t worry about it.”
“It’s just kind of scary, you know. Somebody got into my car while I was in class.”
“I understand. I mean this is some pretty weird stuff.”
“I almost threw it away. I didn’t want it, really. It kind of gave me the creeps.”
These words were like a slap in the face. She almost threw it away? “What did you get?”
She opened her purse and withdrew a small brown pouch. “I feel silly even bringing this to you, but I guess it sort of belongs to you.” She opened the pouch, which appeared to be made of soft, aged leather, pulled closed with a simple piece of coarse twine, and then emptied it into her left hand. She turned her eyes up to his as she held it out to him. “It’s a key.”
Albert stared at it for a moment before taking it from her. It was a flat piece of brass with a simple ring for a grip and a single tooth on each side. Just looking at it, he could understand why he was unable to pick the lock with the pocketknife. Even though the key was flat instead of round or grooved, it still required teeth to work the tumblers inside the lock.
He reached out and took it from her warm palm. He felt a million miles away, as though he were staring at it through a television set instead of holding it in his own fingers. It didn’t feel real. He turned it over, almost mesmerized, and suddenly he was drawn back with a slap. Seven letters were scratched onto this side of the key, just like on one side of the box. But instead of B R A N D Y R, the key read A L B E R T C.
“Albert Cross?” Brandy guessed.
“Seeing as how you’re the only Brandy R. I know and I’m probably the only Albert C. you know,” he replied, “I’d say it’s a pretty good bet.”
“Do you think whoever gave us these things got them mixed up? Mine had your name and yours had mine?”
Albert shook his head. “But then we wouldn’t know where to find the other half.”