Silent Lee and the Adventure of the Side Door Key

1. Returning to Aunt Gen's

The birdcage was in the attic, closed up inside a dusty wooden box. On the box was written in faded handwriting: My Birdcage. Handle With Respect. For true heirs of Generous Lee only. Silent, this probably means you. Tell your mother to stuff it. She can't have my birdcage even if she wants it, although she probably won't.

Silent read the label with a frown, puzzled not only by the oddity of the message but also by how old and faded it was. She had been away from Great Aunt Gen's house for only a month. But time was complex when it came to Generous Lee, who had lived mostly in a world that was a full century out of date.

Silent was raised in that world and rarely visited the present-day world her mother inhabited. She loved Aunt Gen's world almost as much as she loved Aunt Gen, and it had been quite a shock to have to leave both behind. (But more about that in a page or two . . .)

Sie (pronounced like pie and, of course, Silent's nickname) popped the latch, hinged the dusty box open, and lifted out the birdcage. Un- derneath it was an envelope labeled Birth Certificates (also in Aunt Gen's loopy old handwriting). She'd recently learned that modern schools expect you to have one, so she slipped the envelope into a pocket on her skirt. (Yes, her skirt had pockets—Aunt Gen believed clothing should, above all, be functional.) Then she turned her atten- tion back to the more interesting find, the birdcage itself.

It was bulky and hard to carry down the attic stairs. Sie was on the small side for fourteen, and her arms were aching by the time she arrived in the long, narrow living room of Aunt Gen's town-house. "I want this," she said, resting the cage on the floor for a moment.

"Really, Silent?" her mother's lips were pursed in disapproval. "I doubt that old thing will even fit in the taxi. Why don't you find a proper memento?" She glanced around the room. "There's a pair of silver candlesticks on the mantle. Bound to be valuable. Oh, and give me your house keys. You won't be needing them anymore." She held out her hand.

Silent just stood there.

"Keys!" her mother demanded.

"I don't have any. I want to take the birdcage. Please."

Her mother scowled. "If you must. At least I won't have to squeeze in next to it. I'm not going to ride back with you. But I don't see the point. You don't have any birds."

"Uh, no. I guess not." Silent recalled how Aunt Gen's brightly colored finches used to sing so happily in the sun by the big bow windows overlooking Newbury Street. Where had they gone? she wondered. And how did the cage end up in a box in the attic? Last time she'd been there—been home—the cage was on display in the living room, like usual. She would take it. And remember.

Her mother (whose name was Mauvaise Lee), a tall, unsmiling woman in a long gray raincoat, moved toward the front door. She was carrying her own mementos, a pair of sterling silver teapots. They were the largest pieces from Aunt Gen's silver set and thus the most valuable. The last time she'd visited, she'd taken a silver sugar bowl (Sie figured she'd hidden it in her overcoat pocket; there'd been an odd bulge), and Auntie had retrieved it at considerable expense a few days later from Suffolk Pawnbrokers on Washington Street. But of course Sie would not be able to buy anything back, now that Aunt Generous was gone. Why would my mother rob us, she wondered.

Sie knew everything in that house by heart because she had grown up there, always with her cheerful Great Aunt Generous to care for her. Her mother traveled constantly for work, so it had always seemed natural for Sie to live with Aunt Gen.

As her aunt grew too old to run up and down the stairs of the three-story row house, Sie grew big enough to do most of the housekeeping and to bring her aunt a tea tray beside the singing birds each day after school. She would even go out, basket on her arm, to shop at the fruit market, bakery, and butcher's on their block. But that was the other version of their block. It was in the world Aunt Gen preferred, not the noisy modern world in which her mother lived.

Until a month ago, Silent had attended the Girl's Academy of Latin and Alchemy—"GALA" for short—where the students and teachers seemed very old fashioned. But the classics were what mattered to Aunt Gen: Ancient Latin, Greek, Music, Geometry, English Composition, Alchemy levels one through seven, and electives in Oil Painting, Herbalism, Levitation, Spell-weaving, Warding, Illu- sions, and so on. She did quite well at the school. However, all that was in the past.

Sie had always found her classes stimulating, but her mother would complain about the school whenever she'd visit. "It sounds horribly out of date," she'd say, or, "What kind of career will she possibly be qualified for? I don't intend to support her, you know!" But Aunt Gen would just smile and say, "Don't you have to be in Cairo for breakfast?" and Sie's mother would rush off to the airport again and be gone for months at a time.

Auntie said her mother was a spy, but her mother said she worked for an international spice distributor. Spies or spices? Sie had no way of knowing for sure.

Her mother actually brought them spices, such as gummy lumps of olibanum for Sie's birthday (she had no idea what to do with them). For Christmas, Mother was absent but a tin arrived by mail, wrapped in brown paper. Inside were pungent saffron spears, the tiny stamens of a rare poppy that Aunt Gen said lived in the mountains of Afghanistan. But why was Mother in the mountains of Afghanistan? Another Christmas, the mailman delivered a wooden box with smelly powders labeled Anardana, Amchur, and Ajowan. In the end, all the gifts were shoved to the rear of the pantry and forgotten.

"Deep cover," Aunt Gen would say as she held her nose and ex- amined a gift at arm's length. "Whatever her mission, she must be under deep cover."

Standing there in Auntie's house, thinking about the past, made Silent sad. "I miss Auntie," she said.

"I don't," her mother announced. "Have you got the side door key? It's an old one, antique, on a string. I thought she'd lent it to you."

Silent shrugged. "I don't know. I—I must've left it here when Auntie got sick and you took me to stay with the cousins."