Island Bound by Betty Levin

Author:Betty Levin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1997-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

20

CHRIS WAS WAITING OUTSIDE THE LIGHTHOUSE, HIS rolled sleeping bag by the open bulkhead.

She was on the verge of asking whether he was planning to move in when his look stopped her. “You got it open!” she exclaimed. “How? What’s inside?”

He pulled it from within the sleeping bag, and she saw at once that the box was busted. But it was mostly still intact, she realized on closer inspection. The raised and broken section revealed another layer beneath it.

“I smashed it on the rocks,” he told her. “Part of it cracked, and I was able to snap it off.” He had not acted out of temper. It had been a measure of last resort, which, when it produced real results, frightened him a little. Even though he was then tempted to repeat this violent approach, he was afraid of breaking more than the outside of the thing.

She examined the edge of the top layer. She had a passing thought that her father might be able to identify the substance. But she knew Chris wouldn’t agree to showing it, at least not yet. Anyway, first things first. It was more important to get to the inside of this mysterious box than to learn what it was made of.

They took turns, sometimes with the screwdriver, sometimes with the small knife blade. As they flaked off more pieces from the raised and broken section, they kept probing underneath to feel for the next seam. It took a lot of peeling before it finally came to them that the layer was continuous. The shell-like cover wasn’t a lid at all. It was a wrapping.

They were huddled close together, neither one of them willing to let the other dig too far or pull too hard. “Careful,” they kept warning, each ready to pounce on the thing, to have another go at it.

“What if it’s a trick?” Chris said while Joellen gripped it between her knees so that she could insert the screwdriver under a thicker portion that had the look of folded material. “It could be a practical joke,” he went on as the thing slid from her knee grasp and popped free. He held it for her, trying to keep it from bending under pressure.

“You mean, nothing inside?” she responded. “Who would go to all this trouble? Especially since whoever put it where we found it couldn’t have known about us.”

Chris shook his head. “A joke on someone else,” he said. “Someone that was supposed to find it and feel—” He broke off. Joellen had managed to pry back the thicker fold and with it yet another layer that came free at the same time. “Light!” he ordered. “Let’s see it in the light.”

She held it up. Here the clear sky, still bright, showed them what they had craved to find. Chris snatched it from Joellen and called for her flashlight.

“Get it yourself,” she told him. “You know where it is.”

But he wasn’t about to walk away from it any more than she was.

So

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