“You’re a lifesaver,” Gwendy says. “Thank you.”
Bea picks up a sheet of paper from the corner of her desk. “I also printed your schedule for tomorrow.” She gets up and hands it to Gwendy.
The congresswoman scans it with a frown. “Why does this feel like the last day of school before Christmas break?”
“Pretty sure the last day of school was a lot more fun than this.” Bea sits down at her desk again. “How’s your mom feeling?”
“Still good as of last night. Six weeks out from chemo. Markers in the normal range.”
The older lady clasps her hands together. “God is good.”
“Dad’s driving her crazy, though. Want to hear the latest?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “He wants to withdraw all their savings and bury it in the back yard. He’s convinced the bank’s computer system’s going to crash because of Y2K. Mom can’t wait for him to start back at work again.”
“All the more reason for you to get home. You flying out tomorrow night?” Bea asks.
Gwendy shakes her head. “Bumped my flight until Saturday morning. I need to wrap up a couple things before I go. How about you? When are you and Tim headed out?”
“We leave Monday to visit my sister in Colorado, and from there we go to see the kids on Wednesday. Speaking of the kids … would it be too much trouble to ask you to sign a couple of books for them? I’m happy to pay. I’m not asking for them for free or—”
Gwendy puts her hand out. “Will you please hush? I’d be happy to, Bea. It’d be my pleasure.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Peterson. I’m very grateful.” And she looks it, too, not to mention, relieved.
“Just go relax and enjoy that family of yours.”
“All of us under the same roof for an entire week? It should be … interesting.”
“It’ll be a blast,” Gwendy says.
Bea rolls her eyes. “If you say so.”
“I say so.” She walks into her office, laughing, and closes the door behind her.
8
GWENDY TOSSES THE REPORTS back onto the stack and sits at her desk. She reaches for her day-planner, but her hand freezes in mid-air before it gets there.
There’s a shiny silver coin sitting next to the keyboard.
Her outstretched hand begins to tremble. Her heart thumps in her chest, and it suddenly feels as if all the air has been sucked out of the room.
She knows before she looks that it’s an 1891 Morgan silver dollar. She’s seen them before.
A familiar voice, a man’s voice, whispers in her ear: “Almost half an ounce of pure silver. Created by Mr. George Morgan, who was just thirty years old when he engraved the likeness of Anna Willess Williams, a Philadelphia matron, to go on what you’d call the ‘heads’ side of the coin…”
Gwendy whips her head around, but no one is there. She glances about her office, waiting for the voice to return, feeling as if she’s just seen a ghost—and maybe she has. Nothing else in the room appears out of place. Reaching out with her other hand, she lets the tip of her index finger brush against the surface of the coin. It’s cool to the touch, and it’s real. She’s not imagining it. She’s not suffering some kind of stress-induced mental breakdown.
Heart in her throat, Gwendy uses her thumb to slowly slide the coin across the desk, closer to her. Then she leans down for a better look. The silver dollar is in mint condition and she was right—it’s an 1891 Morgan. Anna Williams smiles up at her with unblinking silver eyes.
Pulling her hand back, Gwendy absently wipes it on the sleeve of her blouse. She gets up then and slowly wanders around the room, feeling as if she’s just awakened from a dream. She bangs her knee against the rounded corner of the coffee table but she barely notices. Abruptly changing direction, she stops in front of the closet door, the only place where someone could possibly hide. After taking a steadying breath, she silently counts to three—and yanks open the door.
She recoils with her hands held in front of her face, nearly falling, but there’s no one waiting inside. Just a handful of coats and sweaters hanging on wire hangers, a tangle of dress and running shoes littering the floor, and a brand-new pair of snow boots still in the box.
Exhaling with relief, Gwendy pushes the door shut and turns to face her desk again. The silver coin sits there, gleaming in the overhead lights, staring back at her. She’s about to call for Bea when something catches her eye. She crosses to the filing cabinet in the corner. A bronze bust of Maine Civil War hero Joshua Chamberlain sits on top of it, a gift from her father.
Gwendy pulls open the top drawer of the cabinet. It’s stuffed with folders and assorted paperwork. She closes it. Then she does the same with the second drawer: slides it open, quick inspection, close. Holding her breath, she bends to a knee and pulls open the bottom drawer.
And there it is: the button box.
A beautiful mahogany, the wood glowing a brown so rich that she can glimpse tiny red glints deep in its finish. It’s about fifteen inches long, maybe a foot wide, and half that deep. There are a series of small buttons on top of the box, six in rows of two, and a single at each end. Eight in all. The pairs are light green and dark green, yellow and orange, blue and violet. One of the end-buttons is red. The other is black. There’s also a small lever at each end of the box, and what looks like a slot in the middle.
For a moment, Gwendy forgets where she is, forgets how old she is, forgets that a kind and gentle man named Ryan Brown was ever born. She’s twelve years old again, crouching in front of her bedroom closet back in the small town of Castle Rock, Maine.
It looks exactly the same, she thinks. It looks the same because it is the same. There’s no mistaking it even after all these years.
From behind her, there’s a loud knock at the door. Gwendy almost faints.
9
“ARE YOU OKAY, CONGRESSWOMAN? I was knocking for a long time.”
Gwendy steps back from the door and lets her receptionist into the office. Bea’s carrying a small tray with the turkey club lunch on it. She places it on the desk and turns back to her boss. If Bea notices the silver coin sitting next to the keyboard, she doesn’t mention it.
“I’m fine,” Gwendy says. “Just a little embarrassed. I was doing some reading and I guess I dozed off.”
“Must’ve been some dream you were having. It sounded like you were whimpering.”
You don’t know the half of it, Gwendy thinks.
“You sure you’re okay?” Bea asks. “If you don’t mind my saying, you look a little rattled and a lot pale. Almost like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Bingo again, Gwendy thinks, and almost bursts out giggling. “I went for a longer than usual run this morning and haven’t had much to drink. I’m probably just dehydrated.”
The receptionist gives her a long look, clearly unconvinced. “I’ll go grab a couple more waters then. I’ll be right back.” She turns and heads out of the office.
“Bea?”
She stops in the doorway and turns back.
“Did anyone stop by the office when I was at my meeting this morning?”
Bea shakes her head. “No, ma’am.”
“You’re certain?”
“Yes, ma’am.” She looks around the room. “Is something wrong? Do you need me to call security?”
“No, no,” Gwendy says, escorting the older lady the rest of the way out of the room. “But maybe you should call a doctor, since I can’t seem to stay awake past lunchtime these days.”
Bea once again offers a faint smile, not very convincingly, and hurries off.
Gwendy closes the door and walks a direct line back to the filing cabinet. She knows she doesn’t have much time. Bending to a knee again, she slides open the bottom drawer. The button box is still there, practically sparkling in the overhead lights, waiting for her.
Gwendy reaches out with both hands and hesitates, her fingers hovering an inch or two above its highly polished surface. She feels the hairs on her arms begin to tingle, hea
rs the faint whisper of something in the far corner of her brain. Steeling herself, she carefully lifts the box out of the drawer. And as she does, it all rushes back to her …
10
WHEN GWENDY WAS A young girl, her father hauled the old cardboard box marked SLIDES out of the attic every summer, usually some time around the Fourth of July. He set up his ancient slide projector on the coffee table in the den, positioned the pull-down screen in front of the fireplace, and turned off all the lights. He always made a big deal of the experience. Mom made popcorn and a pitcher of fresh lemonade. Dad narrated every slide with what he called his “Hollywood voice” and made shadow puppets during intermission. Gwendy usually sat on the sofa between her mother and father, but sometimes other neighborhood kids would join them, and on those occasions, she sat on the floor in front of the screen with her friends. Some of the kids grew bored and quickly made up excuses to leave (“Oops, I’m sorry, Mr. Peterson, I just remembered I promised my mom I’d clean my room tonight.”), but Gwendy was never one of them. She was fascinated by the images on the screen, and even more so by the stories those images told.
As Gwendy’s fingers close around the button box for the first time in fifteen years, it’s as if a slideshow of vibrant, flickering images—each one telling its own secret story—blooms in front of her eyes. Suddenly, it’s:
—August 22, 1974, and a strange man in a black coat and a small neat black hat is reaching under a Castle View park bench and sliding out a canvas bag with a drawstring top. He pulls it open and removes the most beautiful mahogany box …
—an early September morning, and Gwendy stands in front of her bedroom closet, dressing for school. When she’s finished, she slips a tiny piece of chocolate into her mouth and closes her eyes in ecstasy …
—middle school, as Gwendy stares at herself in a full-length dressing room mirror, and realizes she isn’t just pretty, she’s gorgeous, and no longer wearing eyeglasses …
—sophomore year of high school and she’s sitting on the den sofa, staring in horror as images of bloated, fly-covered corpses fill the television screen …
—late at night, the house graveyard quiet, and she’s sitting cross-legged in the dark on her bed with the button box resting in her lap, eyes squeezed tight in concentration, using her thumb to press the red button, and then cocking her head at the open window, listening for the rumble …
—a mild spring evening and she’s screaming hysterically as two teenaged boys crash into her night table, sending hairbrushes and make-up skittering across the bedroom floor, before reeling into the open closet, falling and pulling down dresses and skirts and pants from their plastic hangers, collapsing to the ground in a heap, and then a filthy hand with blue webbing tattooed across the back of it lifts the button box and brings it crashing down, corner first, into the crown of her boyfriend’s skull …
Gwendy gasps and she’s back in Washington D.C.—and without a moment to spare. She scrambles across her office floor on all fours and vomits into the wastebasket next to her desk.
11
DUE TO THE EXORBITANT cost of maintaining two residences in separate states, many first-year congressional representatives are forced to rent overpriced apartments (a large number of them located in leaky, unventilated basements) or share rented townhouses or condos with multiple roommates. Most do so without complaint. The hours are long, and they rarely find themselves at home anyway except to shower and sleep, or, if they’re lucky, eat the occasional unrushed meal.
Gwendy Peterson suffers from no such financial dilemma—thanks to the success of her novels and the resulting movie adaptations—and lives alone in a three-story townhouse located two blocks east of the Capitol Building. Nevertheless, on a near daily basis, she feels no small amount of guilt because of her living situation, and is always quick to offer a spare bedroom should anyone need a place to stay.
Tonight, however, as she sits in the middle of her sofa with her legs curled beneath her, picking at a carton of shrimp lo mein and staring blindly at the television, she is over-the-moon grateful for her solo living arrangements and even more appreciative that she has no overnight guests.
The button box sits on the sofa next to her, looking out of place, almost like a child’s toy in the sterile environment of the townhouse. It took Gwendy the better part of the afternoon to figure out how to smuggle the box out of her office. After several failed attempts, she finally settled on dumping her new boots onto the floor of the closet and using the large cardboard box they came in to conceal it under her arm. Fortunately, the security checkpoints set up throughout the building were put in place for arriving personnel only and not for those departing.
A commercial for the new Tom Hanks movie blares on the television, but Gwendy doesn’t notice. She hasn’t moved from the sofa in the past two hours except to answer the door when the deliveryman rang the bell. Dozens of questions sift through her mind, one after the other in rapid-fire succession, with a dozen more waiting in the shadows to take their place.
Two questions reoccur most frequently as if on a continuous loop:
Why is the box back?
And why now?
12
GWENDY HAS NEVER TOLD a soul about the button box. Not her husband, not her parents, not even Johnathon or the therapist she saw twice a week for six months back in her mid-twenties.
There was a time when the box filled her every waking thought, when she was obsessed with the mystery and the power contained within, but that was a lifetime ago. Now, for the most part, her memories of the box feel like scattered remnants of a recurring dream she once had during childhood, but whose details have long since been lost in the never-ending maze of adulthood. There’s a lot of truth to the old adage: out of sight, out of mind.
She has, of course, thought about the box in the fifteen years since it vanished from her life, but—and she’s just come to terms with this revelation in the last sixty minutes or so—not nearly as much as she probably should have, considering the immense role the button box played for much of her adolescence.
Looking back, there were weeks, perhaps even months, when it never once crossed her mind and then, boom, she would watch a news report about a mysterious, seemingly natural, disaster that occurred in some faraway state or country, and she would immediately picture someone sitting in a car or at a kitchen table with their finger resting on a shiny red button.
Or she would stumble upon a news teaser online about a man discovering buried treasure in the back yard of his suburban home and would click the link to see if any 1891 Morgan silver dollars were involved.
There were also those dark instances—thankfully rare—when she would catch a glimpse of old grainy video footage on television or hear a snippet of a radio discussion about the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana. When that happened, her heart would skip a beat and set to aching, and she would tumble into a deep black hole of depression for days.
And finally there were those times when she would spot a neat black bowler’s hat bobbing up and down amidst a crowd on a busy sidewalk or glance over at an outdoor café table and spy the shiny dome of that black hat resting next to a mug of steaming coffee or a frosty glass of iced tea and, of course, her thoughts would rush back to the man in the black coat. She thought about Richard Farris and that hat of his more than all the rest of it. It was always the mysterious Mr. Farris that swam closest to the surface of her conscious mind. It was his voice she’d heard back in her office, and it is his voice she hears again now, as she sits on the sofa with her bare legs tucked beneath her: “Take care of the box, Gwendy. It gives gifts, but they’re small recompense for the responsibility. And be careful …”
13
AND WHAT ABOUT THOSE gifts the box so willingly dispenses?
Although she didn’t actually witness the narrow wooden shelf slide out from the center of the box with a silver dollar on it, she believes that’s where the coin on her desk came from. Coin, box; box, coin; it all made perfect sense.
Does that mean pulling the other lever—the one on the left side by the red button, she remembers as if it were yesterday—will deliver a tiny chocolate treat? Maybe. And maybe not. You can never tell with the button box. She believed it had a lot more tricks up its sleeve fifteen years ago, and she believes it even more now.
She brushes her fingertip against the small lever, thinking about the animal-shaped chocolates, no two ever the same, each exotically sweet and no bigger than a jellybean. She remembers the first time she ever laid eyes on one of the chocolates—standing next to Richard Farris in front of the park bench. It was in the shape of a rabbit, and the degree of detail was astounding—the fur, the ears, the cute little eyes! After that, there was a kitty and a squirrel and a giraffe. Her memory grows hazy then, but she remembers enough: eat one chocolate and you were never hungry for seconds; eat a bunch of chocolates over a period of time and you changed—you got faster and stronger and smarter. You had more energy and always seemed to be on the winning side of a coin flip or a board game. The chocolates also improved your eyesight and erased your acne. Or had puberty taken care of that last one? Sometimes it was hard to tell.
Gwendy looks down and is horrified to see that her finger has strayed from the small lever on the side of the box to the rows of colored buttons. She jerks her hand back as if it’s wrist-deep in a hornet’s nest.
But it’s too late—and the voice comes again:
“Light green: Asia. Dark green: Africa. Orange: Europe. Yellow: Australia. Blue: North America. Violet: South America.”
“And the red one?” Gwendy asks aloud.
“Whatever you want,” the voice answers, “and you will want it, the owner of the box always does.”
Gwendy's Magic Feather Page 3