“Hey, it’s okay,” Tim said, reaching for her hand, “I understand.”
He gave her hand a squeeze and she sat back down on the bed. He looked at her and almost forgot how to breathe. “Oh! I should get dressed! You should… too,” she said haltingly, staring at his chest.
She stood up again and pulled her hand from his. Tim watched as she scurried from his room. He rolled over and groaned. At that moment he wanted nothing than to call her back and take her in his arms again. He didn’t even know when he started feeling that way about Anna, but now that he had acknowledged it, in his own mind, it was going to be very hard to concentrate on anything else. She’d laid with him in his bed before. Why was this time any different? Trying to focus his thoughts, he got up and got dressed. He grabbed the key to the storage unit and left his room. Anna was waiting in the hallway. “Hi again,” she said, with a shy smile.
“Hi,” Tim answered.
They stood there a moment, then Anna recovered first. “Are you ready to go?”
Tim nodded and followed her downstairs. He grabbed Adam’s keys on the way to the garage. They didn’t talk in the car. The ride to the storage unit was uneventful. It was barely six in the morning, on a Saturday. When they arrived, Tim pulled the car up to right in front of the unit instead of parking by the office like they had before. “We may need to load some things in the car. I don’t know how much there will be to go through, so I thought we might wind up taking the boxes back home.”
The sound of the unit’s door opening broke the silence of the morning. The unit looked the same as it had before. Tim scanned the boxes noting that the few he could see were labeled. “It looks like Adam was pretty organized when he packed everything for you,” Anna commented.
Tim nodded in agreement. He moved some boxes out of the way so he could reach the ones in the back. After a moment of reading the labels on the boxes, he finally spotted a few labeled “Fan Mail”. “Of course, they’re on the bottom,” he said.
He started to move the boxes that were stacked on top of the ones they needed. As he bent to pick up the last one, he stumbled, and it fell from his arms. The bottom of the box split, and things began tumbling out. He ignored the mess, deciding he could come back another day with a new box and clean it up. As he bent to pick up the first back labeled “Fan Mail”, Anna’s voice stopped him. “Tim, wait! Look at this!”
He turned around and saw Anna kneeling by the mess that had spilled out from the box. In the pile was another, smaller box. This one was different. It was not brown or cardboard and across the top was engraved “Nelle”. Tim stared at the box, torn. He wanted to know what was in the box, but he also knew time was of the essence. They needed to find Anna’s parents soon. Anna saw his hesitation. “You put those boxes in the car so we can take them home. I’ll bring this, too, so you can look at it later.”
Tim shook his head. “I have a strong feeling we need to look in this box. That whatever is inside will help us.”
Anna looked at the boxes of fan mail and back at the small box. “Okay,” she agreed, thinking, it was a small box and they could look through it quickly.
They walked to a small table that had been in his kitchen previously. He took two of the chairs stacked on top down so they could each sit. Ann placed the box on the small part of the table no longer covered by chairs. Tim reached out to touch the box for the first time. He ran his fingers along the edges, looking for a latch to open it, but didn’t find anything. After looking a moment longer, he said, “Well, we might not be looking in here after all, if I can’t open it!”
Anna repeated what Tim had done and had no luck either. “Well, maybe your grandparents know how to open it. It’s obviously from Snillotia, so maybe there’s a secret.”
It seemed there was always a secret where his mother was concerned. He absently traced the letters on the top of the box while he was thinking. The window that had been in his mom’s copied room had activated when a power was used on it. He concentrated for a moment and felt power rush to his fingertips, which were still resting on the lid of the box. The lid clicked open. He slowly raised the lid, noticing Anna from the corner of his eye, staring at him in surprise. He looked at her and gave a small smile then looked inside the box. There were a few trinkets, a few pieces of jewelry and a stack of papers. He lifted the first sheet out of the box. The paper was different then he was used to- thicker and uneven around the edges. He glanced at the bottom of the page and his eyes widened. “This is a letter from Eimaj!”
“Is that what they all are?” she asked, gesturing to the stack that remained
