Free A Rather Remarkable Homecoming by C. A. Belmond Page B

Rollo’s father, and Grandmother Beryl!”
    “It means this house belonged to Beryl’s family when she was only a little girl,” Jeremy said. “I never knew that.”
    “Just look at all the notations. Pages and pages of them!” I said admiringly. “Some bright little mind really spent a lot of time on this. It’s full of oaths and secret passwords and very meticulous entries for a whole summer, like a diary.”
    I rapidly scanned a few random pages, and saw that these were not so much diary entries as they were rather formal “minutes” of the club’s meetings. It seemed to me that there was something about the handwriting that was familiar; yes, it bore a strong resemblance to Great-Aunt Penelope’s adult script that I’d seen in her letters. These “minutes” were all written in a tone of great solemnity and pride, recording whatever daring-do adventures, outings and escapades that she and her siblings had experienced—jaunts into town by auto, or treks with bicycles across farms, even a special boat trip to an island area where the “club” watched schools of dolphins leaping like well-coordinated ballet dancers up and over the ocean’s waves.
    I could just imagine the plump, girlish hands and earnest face of Aunt Pen as a child, busily scribbling all of these passages.
    “Oh, Jeremy, it’s so cute!” I said, reading choice bits aloud and showing him some of the funny doodles and drawings that illustrated a few of the entries. “Can’t you just picture Aunt Pen and Grandma Beryl and their brother Roland scampering around? Look, here’s an inventory of the seashells they found, and a record of who won a local archery contest,” I enthused. “Boy, they explored all up and down the coast. They put you and me to shame! We just pretended to be international secret agents when we were kids. Listen to some of these headers: An Adventure by the Seashore; A Voyage into the Woods; The Mystery of the New Neighbors; The Secret Garden of the Summer People .”
    “It’s a snooping society, all right,” Jeremy said. “Apparently being a nosey-Parker is definitely in your genes.”
    “It’s very clear that Great-Aunt Penelope was the ringleader of this outfit,” I observed. “Let’s see,” I calculated quickly, “she would have been thirteen then. The same age you were when I visited.”
    “Then Rollo’s father would have been eleven,” Jeremy mused.
    “And Grandmother Beryl was eight,” I said.
    We spent the afternoon exploring the little room, but everything else was just ordinary playthings. Finally Jeremy glanced at his watch. “We should head back into town,” he said. “I booked us into that restaurant for dinner.”
    “Good,” I said, tucking the notebook into my purse. I glanced around the room again.
    “Anything else you want from here?” Jeremy inquired.
    I hesitated. “Somehow I don’t want to tell Harriet about this secret room yet,” I said, looking around. “I would feel as if I were ratting out the club.”
    “That’s okay. But, I think we should keep the croquet set and that rocking-horse that was in the bedroom I used to sleep in,” Jeremy said.
    “And the teak credenza,” I said. “That’s a good piece. And those beaux arts lamps.”
    We turned and made our way cautiously down the wooden staircase. Once outside, Jeremy heaved the door shut behind us. He had a small combination lock that he carried on his keychain for his health-club locker back in London. He used it now to padlock the door.
    “That way nobody else can go sneaking in there,” he said.
    We made our way around the garage, which was empty, except for a fastidiously arranged rack of saws and hammers and other hardware tools that Grandfather Nigel had left behind, some hanging on hooks, others fastened securely with leather straps, all of which had not been disturbed ever since he’d left them there.
    “Gee,” I noted. “I never realized how well-prepared Grandfather Nigel was for any disaster