Mandie Collection, The: 8 (5 page)

“Oh yes, I had completely forgotten about that,” Mandie said quickly, and turning to Mr. Bond, she explained, “We went outside and searched the shrubbery bushes this afternoon. Sallie found a dark green silk scarf in one of them, but we don’t know where it came from, how long it has been there, or even if it is related to the turkey theft.”

Mr. Bond looked at her and asked, “You found a silk scarf in the shrubbery? Surely, someone must know they are missing such an item as that. Did you inquire of the ladies if it belonged to them?”

“I plumb forgot about it,” Mandie said, shaking her head. “It’s still in my coat pocket. But I will ask my mother and all the others about it when they come home tonight.”

But Mandie didn’t get the opportunity to ask the adults about the scarf that night because they were so late coming home that Mandie and her friends had already retired for the night.

Sallie had the room next to Mandie’s room, and they left the door open between the rooms and talked for a while, but Sallie soon drifted off to sleep. Mandie kept thinking about the green scarf, wondering
where it came from. Then suddenly she realized she had still left the scarf in her pocket.

“I’d better go get it,” she said to herself. She slipped softly out of her bed to go downstairs to the hall tree. Turning back the cover, she pushed Snowball off the bed.

Taking care to be quiet, she walked barefoot down the long hallway and on down the stairs. The lamps along the way were all still lit, which meant that the adults had not returned home. Snowball followed her and began to meow. She quickly picked him up and carried him to try to shut him up. The white cat put his head on her shoulder and hushed.

“Be quiet!” Mandie whispered to Snowball when she reached the hall tree and shifted him to one arm while she reached into the pocket of her coat hanging there. “Wrong pocket, nothing there,” she said to herself and then put her hand into the other pocket. “Empty?”

She quickly set Snowball down on the floor and frantically searched both pockets of her coat. The scarf was gone!

“I know I put it in my pocket!” she exclaimed as she bent to search the floor to see if it had somehow fallen out. There was no sign of the green scarf.

“First the turkey disappears and now the scarf disappears!” she muttered to herself. Things were really getting scary. She felt goosebumps run up her arms. “I’ll check it out in the morning,” she said to herself as she snatched up Snowball and ran back to her room, taking the stairs two at a time.

CHAPTER FOUR

OLD TREASURES

The next day Mandie was so intent on searching every inch of the house that she forgot about the scarf again. If the turkey was anywhere in the house, she would find it.

“Let’s search the attic,” Mandie told her friends. The three had gone to sit in the back parlor after breakfast.

“The attic?” Jonathan questioned. “Do you really think someone could have carried the turkey up there?”

“Well, you never know,” Mandie replied.

“The attic would be a good hiding place for almost anything,” Sallie said. “It is so full of everything.”

Mandie laughed and said, “That’s right. There’s so much stuff up there, you could probably find dozens of places to hide a turkey—pan and all.”

Jonathan stood up as he said with a big grin, “Just remember. If we find the turkey up in that dirty attic, I will not eat it.”

The girls also rose, and Snowball, lying on the floor beside them, stretched and joined them.

“It’s going to be a big job,” Mandie warned her friends as they went up the stairs. Snowball followed.

Mandie had searched the attic lots of other times for various reasons. Therefore, she knew most of what the place held. But it
seemed like every search uncovered things she had not seen before. And she secretly enjoyed exploring the huge room with its mysterious contents.

Snowball also liked to nose around the place. Sometimes he was a help, and sometimes he was a hindrance. He ran quickly up the steps ahead of his mistress and was waiting when Mandie got to the top and opened the door. Darting around her legs, he disappeared into the piles of boxes, trunks, furniture, and other items stored there.

“Snowball, you don’t have to rush so. We have plenty of time to look around this place,” Mandie said to the cat as she went over to the windows and opened them in order to get to the shutters outside. When she pushed the shutters back, the outside light illuminated the attic. She pulled the windows back down.

“I suppose the best place to begin would be by the door and then work our way around the room,” Jonathan remarked as he stood gazing at the mess.

“It’s a big room. There are turns and corners and unexpected hiding places everywhere,” Mandie said. “Why don’t you start at the door and go to the right, Jonathan, and I could begin there and go to the left. Sallie, you could just go down the middle, or help Jonathan or me.”

Sallie smiled and replied, “I will help Snowball. He is sitting there on the trunk in the middle of the floor waiting for me.” She walked over to the trunk.

“Are we supposed to open everything—all these boxes and trunks, and furniture with drawers and doors, and all that?” Jonathan asked as he surveyed the conglomeration before him.

“Absolutely everything,” Mandie replied. She opened a huge trunk and bent over to look inside. It held old clothes and was only half full. Quickly bending over, she ran her hands through the aged garments and straightened up to close the lid. No turkey in there.

Jonathan was watching her as he stood before an old dresser. “If all you are going to do is open lids and close them, this won’t take long,” he said.

Mandie looked at him as she went on to another trunk. “That trunk was almost empty and I could see everything in it,” she explained. She raised the lid of the trunk before her. “Now, this one is crammed full, so I will have to take enough out to be sure the turkey is not
hidden between something.” She began pulling old quilts out of the trunk.

“I’ll search all the furniture if you will do the trunks,” Jonathan said with a big grin as he opened a drawer in the dresser and found it empty.

“Oh no, you have to take whatever you come to on that side,” Mandie replied, smiling as she looked at him.

Sallie had stopped examining the contents of the trunk she had chosen and was looking at Mandie and Jonathan.

Mandie shook out a quilt and was about to hang it across the lid and reach for another one when Sallie suddenly came running across the room.

“Mandie, look at that quilt!” Sallie exclaimed as she came to spread it out.

Mandie looked at the quilt and saw that it was patchworked with lots of symbols of some kind. “This? I wonder what all this means?” she asked in puzzlement as she held one side and Sallie the other.

“It is a Cherokee quilt!” Sallie exclaimed. “It tells a story in our language.” She bent over to scan the entire quilt.

“Cherokee?” Mandie asked and then added, “It must have belonged to my Cherokee grandmother. Sallie, what is the story? What does it say?”

Jonathan came to join the girls and inspect the quilt. “Very interesting,” he said.

“This would take me some time to understand the story, but my grandfather would be able to read it,” Sallie replied, thoughtfully looking at the quilt.

“But he and your grandmother have already gone over the mountain to visit their friends, and they won’t be back till sometime tomorrow,” Mandie said disappointedly.

“Mandie, that quilt must have been up here for years, so another day or two won’t hurt anything to wait for an explanation,” Jonathan reminded her.

“I suppose not,” Mandie reluctantly agreed.

“Are the other quilts in there made by Cherokee people, Sallie?” Jonathan asked as he looked into the trunk.

“We can look,” Sallie said.

“Let’s fold this one back up and leave it on the top after we go
through the other ones,” Mandie said. With Sallie’s help she folded it neatly and laid it across the lid of the trunk and pulled out the next one.

Sallie helped stretch the next quilt out and shook her head, “No, this one is not a Cherokee story.”

Mandie looked at the many tiny pieces of various cloth material forming the top and said, “No, I suppose someone just used all their scraps to make this one.”

“Yes,” Sallie agreed. “That is the way some quilts are made. Scraps from everything you make are saved and stitched together.”

Mandie quickly pulled out the rest of the quilts, but there was not another one resembling the first. They were all made of scraps, and some had been fashioned into flowers and bows on the quilt tops.

“Let’s put them all back in this trunk and leave that special one on top,” Mandie told Sallie and Jonathan. “Then when your grandfather gets back, we can ask him to come up here and look at it.”

“Why don’t you just take it downstairs?” Jonathan asked.

“Because my mother might not like it if I bring things down out of the attic,” Mandie told him.

“I suppose you’re right. It does really stink,” Jonathan said, wrinkling his nose.

“That’s the mothballs in this trunk you smell,” Mandie explained as she smoothed out the special quilt on top of the stack and closed the lid of the trunk.

“I suppose I’d better get back to work,” Jonathan said with a big grin, walking back across the room to the furniture he had been inspecting.

“So should I,” Sallie added, going back to the trunk she had been working on.

The next thing on Mandie’s side of the room was a huge wardrobe, evidently old and made of solid mahogany. Mandie stooped down to open its big bottom drawer. It was stuck. She sat on the floor, braced her feet against the edges of the wardrobe, and pulled with all her might. It still wouldn’t open.

“Oh, shucks!” she exclaimed.

“Need some help?” Jonathan asked, coming over to her. “I’ve got some drawers over there that are hard to open, too. Move and let me get a hold of that thing.”

Mandie moved aside as Jonathan took her place on the floor. He pulled and pulled, but the drawer was still stuck.

Sallie came to join them. “Maybe I can help,” she said.

“Jonathan, you pull on the handle on that side, and Sallie and I together can pull on this one,” Mandie said. She moved up to grasp the left handle and Sallie reached to help.

“All right, when I say go, pull with all your might,” Jonathan told the girls. He caught the handle on the right side with both hands. “Ready?” he asked. Looking at them as they nodded, he said, “Pull!”

The drawer came open with such force that all three young people fell backward, laughing.

Jonathan straightened up to see what they had done. “Look,” he said. “The drawer is empty, completely empty. All that work for nothing.”

Mandie raised up on her hands and knees to see. “But we wouldn’t have known it was empty if we had not got it open,” she said.

Sallie started to move forward to join them, then she suddenly stopped. “Look, Mandie!” she exclaimed. “There is something behind the drawer.”

“That must be why it was stuck,” Mandie said, stooping lower to look into the area behind the open drawer. “Let’s pull the drawer the rest of the way out so we can see what’s back there.”

Once again the three grasped the drawer and pulled. This time it came all the way out of the wardrobe and dropped onto the floor. Mandie lay down and reached into the opening. She felt a lumpy stack of paper and firmly grasped it, then she jerked it until it came free from the frame inside.

“What have you got?” Jonathan asked as Mandie pulled it out.

Mandie looked at the crumbling, yellowed papers in her hand and said, “Looks like a lot of paper, maybe from a notebook or something.” She examined it sheet by sheet, carefully turning through it.

“Is it just blank paper?” Sallie asked.

“So far,” Mandie replied, continuing to look at the papers.

“I think we should put the drawer back in its proper place,” Jonathan said, moving over to the drawer on the floor.

“I will help you,” Sallie offered as she joined him. “It is so big it may be hard to put back.”

Mandie laid the papers aside on the floor and came to help her friends with the huge drawer. She bent down to look inside. “Can y’all see those runners inside? You know the ones on the bottom of the drawer have to fit those to make it slide back in. Otherwise, if it jumps the track it will stick again,” she told them.

Jonathan tilted the drawer to look at the bottom. “Wait,” he said, reaching under the drawer. “I believe part of the papers you found are still stuck to the bottom of this drawer.” He turned the drawer over on its side.

“You’re right!” Mandie exclaimed. She reached for the cluster sticking to the bottom. When she straightened up, she saw that she was holding what looked like the cover of a book and a lot more of the yellowed sheets of paper.

“A diary,” Jonathan said with a big grin.

Mandie frowned and looked at him. “It may be a diary, but it’s all blank as far as I can tell.” She flipped the sheets and suddenly saw faint handwriting on some of them. “No, wait! There’s writing here. Look!” She laid the paper out on the floor.

The three crowded around the papers and tried to read the writing.

“It’s too dark in here to see this,” Mandie said. “Let’s go over by the window where the light’s better.”

They moved across the room, each one carefully carrying part of the papers.

“I still can’t read this sheet,” Jonathan said, squinting to see.

“I can’t read this, either,” Mandie said, holding the paper at different angles in the light from the window.

“Neither can I,” Sallie said, frowning at the paper she held.

“It’s so dark and cloudy outside, it doesn’t give much light,” Mandie said. “We could light the lamp over there by the door, but I don’t think just one lamp would do any good. We need to go downstairs where there’s more light.”

“And quit our search? That turkey will be rotten before we ever find it,” Jonathan said with a big grin.

Mandie looked around the room. “Why don’t we just stack all this paper up by the door over there for the time being and continue our search for the turkey? Then when it’s time to eat, we’ll have to go
downstairs, and we can take the papers with us and look at them down there,” she suggested.