Part 16: National Treasure

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Previously in the Vines Inquiry— Frank continued his conversation with his favorite (living) relative, Aunt Toni. On her recommendation, he became determined to feel comfortable at home. To take up some space.

Frank was alone, made only more swallowing by The Big House. Vines Manor. This was the real deal. His story should be as ingrained into this place as his blood on the slippery rocks out back. As the sweat of a thousand turbulent sleeps.

But then, why did he feel like a tourist? One that had walked into The Comfort of Strangers and not Under the Tuscan Sun, at that. 

Vast, foreign and familiar; Frank thought he must be feeling similar to a parent dropping their kid off at a school they used to attend. He’d become an expat with no immune system to call on. Small changes, even those done over the course of the more than a decade he’d been gone, felt cataclysmic. He couldn’t pinpoint it; the invisible toxin in the air that made the wood slats feel like they were shifting under his waterlogged boots. 

Richard’s office; a two-story rectangle sat tall on one of the square sides. It also acted as the foundation to one of the manor’s seven towers. The whole back wall, from just above an old iron radiator to the crown molding was window with muntins made of light-colored wood that felt right for a dewy spring morning. They helped to lift some of the winter gloom that could take Carlisle Island in its grip.

Stacked books, most half-teetering, climbed up the windows—mixed masses of topics all like ivy looking for the meager yuletide sun. Several had cups of coffee with a few sips left balanced atop them, long since gone cold. The only thing that broke the academicamedia that his father seemed inexorably drawn to was a digital alarm clock on his desk. The brown and black one with red numbers that Frank had seen in every ‘90s sitcom ever.

He interrogated his father’s office, a bastion of mysteries, determined to make himself at home—even if he had to burrow in inch-by-inch.

Why were the books stacked like this? What was the geometric reasoning behind the seventeen (Frank counted) coffee cups strewn about?

The answer to a young Frank, and maybe one a bit more sane, was that Richard was a squirrely professor. As boys, Richard encouraged the twins to indulge in his fascination. To soak up as much Anything as they could. Frank only remembered Dick’s progress being tested, but both brothers spent short Sundays and long weekends splayed on the ratty couches of their father’s first-floor domain. 

When strangers from shores afar came to visit, they always eventually made it to Richard’s office to discuss business, current events and whatever else might have been uttered behind closed doors. As a kid, Frank had no confirmation that something was hiding in plain sight beyond the normal adult world stuff that every child must find nebulous; but now, that rash was blistering.

He moseyed around, mostly unsure what he was looking for. He heard his father in his head, answering his question. “Trouble, I’d guess,” as he squinted at Frank through his thin-framed, round glasses. 

A deep thinker, and a smarty-pants to boot, Richard sr. had a habit of running his hand through the wavy rat’s nest on top of his head. “Keeps the brain cool,” he’d say to the boys. 

Dick would look at him over one shoulder while Frank traced the muntins with his eyes, seeing how far up the window he could get without messing up. 

“Francis, can you see alright?” Richard would say. Frank would shake his head and hear his father, echoey and distant; like he was talking through a string-n-can phone. “Always something with that one.” 

Frank tapped his fingers along the stems of various leatherbound tomes that filled the shelves on the wall opposite the window. Above, a loft accessible by ladder was stocked to the max with even more. He browsed for a book about dream interpretation, but fell on an academic paper written by “Stella Voorhees…” 

!?! he thought. 

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Harlow’s older sister and Dick’s high school girlfriend. He remembered her as a bit of a Type-A; or as Harlow might say, ‘an overachieving Slender Man bobblehead but don’t you dare think you can talk about her like that.’

He had no idea she’d been published. The paper, printed on thick stock with the three-dimensional impression of a typewriter, was titled “And Sometimes, Why? Betty Spaghetty as a metaphor for Race and Class.” (Inquiry Archives Entry 857.9-16).

“Inquiry Archives.” He read it again. 

HAIL! 

The cry blasted in from Frank’s memory. He dropped the bound paper, startled by the sound that had been shouted into his ear as if by a chorus of dozens. 

“Am I asleep again? Now that’s a question!”