Part 16: National Treasure

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!”

Frank twirled his pointer finger, mocking one of his parents’ many dull and rambling dinner guests.

A common refrain when no one could figure the random and obscure line of thinking they’d chosen to walk during the meal. Frank had taken to tracing things on the wall with his eyes then too. Usually, a family crest that hung over Dick’s head. That column with the ivy. 

In the present, Frank plonked himself into his father’s chair, a battered leather monster on five wheels, and looked over the desk. Messy by any standard. He carefully lifted papers, taking peeks while trying not to disturb any order that might have been apparent to Richard. There were a few scrawled notes about Christmas errands and party planning, but mostly just chicken scratch so rapid that it looked barely more than scribbled lines. He squished a plushie stress reliever in the shape of Earth and moved on to one of the drawers.

It wouldn’t budge. 

Frank tugged again. He looked for a keyhole. Tried different drawers, all stuck fast. He felt underneath the desktop, searching for a lever, or a lock he couldn’t see. He wasn’t explicitly aware of his father being a huge National Treasure fan, but it was more likely than not considering the amount of historical fiction on his bookshelves. Richard Vines may have been an odd bird, but he was also a white guy over sixty. The Cold War was gonna be read about. 

Frank’s fingers traced over nothing but well-sealed slabs of wood that, by the weight of the desk (he’d tried to lift it right after no lever revealed itself to shameful results) had to have been in this room for decades^.

The desk had the Old World feel of a duke who lived alone in his tower constructed with the bones of local orphans. All more fitting were the desk’s exposed innards. Someone had blunted two of its corners, leaving a paler, rougher wood where comely endcaps should be. 

“Make myself at home,” Frank repeated to himself. 

He was coming in, and coming in hot. A paratrooper with a flamethrower, reclaiming uncharted territory sown with his blood. Okay, he was opening a drawer, but it was something. Frank hoisted one leg up and used his foot as leverage while he pulled. It moved! Gave a full inch, but would come no further…and slammed back when he let go.

It felt like he was tugging on a dense weight that was clipping onto something else. A kraken grabbing hold of the sea floor as it was heaved from the depths. Frank resumed the position, this time with a sturdy wooden ruler clutched in his teeth. He yanked, huffing hard enough to heat the chill from his bones. The drawer gave the tiniest way, and Frank jammed the ruler in.

Trapped in the drawer’s maw, the ruler vibrated as the mouth tried to snap back into place. Frank flicked it, triumphant. Boi-oing-oing-oing. The straight-edge snapped in two, and the drawer shut.

Slowly, as if strutting. 

Thank or curse that National Treasure impulse, he spotted a full suit of armor in the loft. Frank ran up the ladder and nearly took the suit’s sword before a cautionary itch overtook his more childish impulse. He chose one of the armor’s gauntlets instead. 

“Feels cruel. Or at least timely.” Somewhere, Harlow rolled her eyes while Aunt Toni shook her head and Rosalind cracked a knuckle.

Frank put his foot up again and used his un-armored hand to pull at the drawer. Once the inch was there, he shoved his armored fingers in.

Instantly, he could feel the pressure at his knuckles and thought he’d made an emergency room sort of error. He doubted Rosalind would appreciate the surprise visit to Hughes House, or that he’d survive whatever his mother did to him after she recovered from the embarrassment of it all.

Frank took a steadying breath, shook the image of missing digits from his noodle and pulled. And kicked. His whole body weight behind getting open a drawer that very likely contained… Well, probably nothing. But it would be open, dammit! 

A crack! Then, a grinding crunch. A sound like a rusted chain choking and tripping over a metal hook. The drawer gave up all at once, ending up crooked on its tracks. Frank sighed and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, scratching himself with the gauntlet.

He laughed— high and free. A stranger in a strange land conquering his first puzzle. Still just a drawer and he hadn’t ‘solved’ it so much as ‘forced.’ The stranger had…avoided a trap in 1313 Dead End Drive. He took off the gauntlet and threw it into the drawer. 

A razor sharp crumpling—like a soda can drawing blood as the cool girl crushed it against her forehead. The gauntlet stood upright, shooting Frank the bird, while the sound of devoured metal wheezed through the room.

A cast iron spiked mouth, like a rectangular bear trap, had devoured the armor hand and held it now in a vice of quarter-inch thick teeth. Frank looked at the trap as if it might answer or explain its actions. 

“I repeat ‘WUT?’”

The alarm clock on his father’s desk went off. Three quick, electronic beeps before the time turned to all 9’s. He heard two loud clicks, like planks of wood falling off a truck; one from each side of the room. 

The doors, thought Frank, afraid of the buried instincts that drove him to that conclusion.