* * *
The next afternoon, I had a chance to go out to the shop and drag out the trunk again, one more time before they came to fetch it. I looked at everything, checked everywhere—nothing. Nothing in the books, that I could tell, nothing in the notebooks but class notes for beginning psych and business math. As far as I could tell, everything was as it seemed. I sat down on a high stool in the door of the shop, tired of looking, and discouraged.
I watched Patsy Cline chase Pecos Bill around the front yard, across the gravel drive, around and through the shrubbery, across the gravel again, Pecos stopping at times to crouch down on his front legs and feint a move left or right. He ran past me into the shop with her in close pursuit, and they both knocked into the trunk as they skidded past.
As I stooped down to right it I looked at the stickers again—shiny, bold images of ThaunderX, the images Shannon seemed to be talking about to Hannah Huckleston. Why would she talk about the stickers instead of the trunk, though? Did she just not have time to tell Hannah something about the trunk? I wondered if Shannon meant the stickers as a way to identify the trunk, or were the stickers important in themselves?
Around each sticker was a clear plastic border that was used to help attach it to the surface. I’d noticed these before; all stickers or labels sport some way of adhering to surfaces, seen it a million times. As I thought about the plastic border, the idea that had been brewing in my mind since the day before at Marjo and Carol’s began to form together into something I could understand.
What if one of these were like an encapsulated label? Those little envelope-like packages with the contents folded inside and sealed? What if one of these labels had something encapsulated underneath it?
I found a razor blade on the shop bench and set to work. I concentrated on the larger ones, since the smaller ones didn’t have enough surface area to hide anything behind them. I slowly slit around the side of the label, seeing if there was a gap beneath it, seeing if I could gently pry up the surface paper.
I went through five of them with no luck, and then on the sixth one on the side of trunk, I found I could pry up a space underneath it. I peered into the small space I’d made by carefully pulling the label away from the surface, although I could get only one side peeled up enough to reveal a gap; all the rest of the label was stuck tight to the trunk. I rummaged around on the bench for a flashlight, found one, and got down on the floor to be able to maneuver the light into the gap.
Pecos Bill joined me and happily stuck his nose in my face; I pushed him aside to peer under the sticker. I saw something. My fingers couldn’t retrieve it through the small slit, so I searched the workbench once again and found a pair of rusted tweezers and used those to retrieve the scrap—a folded book of extremely thin paper.
Carefully unfolding it, I saw two small sheets of almost-translucent paper filled with numbers. I had no idea what they were or what they could mean, and stood there a moment staring at the paper sheets in my hands.
I crossed the gravel yard and went up the steps into the office. Pecos followed me in and came to stand by me at the copier to sniff the corner leg of the machine. Hey, Bubba Man, I thought, I wish you could help me figure this out.
He looked up as if he could read my thoughts, his brown eyes staring into mine. Silence.
Guess you’re not going to start talking today, either, I thought. I flipped on the copier, and as it warmed up, I looked at the tissue-thin sheets. The penciled scrawl was long wavering lines of numbers, with breaks in the lines here and there, none at even intervals. At the end of the second sheet, there was a small stick-figure drawing of what looked like ThaunderX with her stance showing defiance and the thunderbolts in her hand looming large over her head. The vulnerability of it brought tears to my eyes.
I made two copies of the sheets and returned to the shop. I carefully refolded them, put them back under the label, and resealed it. The trunk was going to be picked up the next day, and I had no clue about what to do next.
A Binder Enterprises truck did pick it up the next day, and I still had no clue about what to do.