WHEN I opened my eyes to a roomful of sunlight and sea breezes, Eve was
gone. My watch had stopped. What with one thing and another, I had
forgotten to wind it. But I knew by the look of things that the morning
would never see seven o’clock again!
Stealing downstairs a quarter of an hour later, I beheld Eve seated at
the kitchen table consuming food. No one else was in sight except a
large gray cat folded up comfortably by the stove.
“Where is she?” I whispered, poking my head cautiously through the
doorway.
“Gone to market,” Eve said, resugaring her oatmeal. “I told her you had
a basketball wrist and the doctor said you needed lots of sleep.”
“Oh, Eve!” I ventured toward the stove and helped myself to oatmeal.
The gray cat rose and began twining himself about my feet. “I didn’t
see any cat last night,” I remarked.
“He comes and goes, Aunt Cal told me. I asked her, by the way, if I
might call her that and she said she didn’t mind.”
Eve continued to talk as I ate. “I told her about the suitcases getting
mixed,” she remarked presently.
“You did!” I regarded her admiringly. I had been worrying about this
ever since I woke up, wondering how I was going to make my mistake
sound plausible. “What did she say?” I demanded anxiously.
Eve grinned. “Oh, just that she could not possibly understand such
carelessness and not knowing one’s own baggage and so forth and so on.”
I nodded gloomily. I was off to a bad start with Aunt Cal, there was no
doubt of that. First this suitcase business and then oversleeping.
“She left word,” Eve continued, “that in case you rose in time, you
were to take the suitcase over to the bus station and make inquiries of
the driver when the morning bus gets in.”
“What time will that be?” As I spoke, I glanced at the clock and was
horrified to see that it was long past eight.
“About nine. It only makes two trips a day so we’d better be starting
soon or we’ll be late.”
Fishers Haven in the morning light was somewhat more prosaic than in
the golden glow of the evening before. Just a straggling little village
with a sprinkling of comfortable homes and a half dozen stores or so,
it made no pretensions to the importance of a seaside resort. But Eve
did not seem to find it prosaic. She was interested in everything from
the list of sundaes in the drug store window to the funny little
cupola-like balconies on top of some of the older houses, built so that
the wives of fishermen could look out to sea and watch for the return
of their men.
“Just think how thrilling when they saw a sail,” I said.
“But pretty tragic too if it didn’t turn out to be the right one,” Eve
returned. “And the next day maybe the same.”
We reached the bus stop ahead of time and sat down on the wooden
platform to wait. Shortly after nine, the bus rolled in. To my relief,
I saw that the driver was the same one who had brought us over from
Berkshire Plains the afternoon before. A detached person in leggings,
he listened to my tale without emotion. “So,” he broke into the middle
of my story, “you think this guy with spectacles took yours?”