| To Saralinda: Part 4 |
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To Saralinda: Part 6 |
The bedroom decor is all in white and gold with rose pink cushions on the little chairs, pink fabric on the miniature canopy and pastel pink roses on the water-stained wallpaper. There is a feeling of serenity here despite the chaos of overturned furniture and the thick layer of dust everywhere.
Keith walks around the area with an expression just short of a little boy’s delight. He stoops to right an overturned bookcase and begins to replace books on the shelves. I want to make a wisecrack but the look of concentration he has as he puts each book back in place stops me.
I wander off in the direction of the bed. Toys are scattered among the wreckage nearby. I squat down to take a closer look and poke a finger through the mess. I find pieces of broken doll furniture, a tiny vase with minuscule blue silk roses in it, and a doll’s foot sticking out from a pile of crumbled cement from the ceiling. I am about to whoop in triumph when I notice that it looks more like a man’s boot. Darn. I dig it out anyway.
It’s a male doll, all right. He looks like a black-haired, blue-eyed Ken rip-off, complete with cheesy grin, all decked out in royal attire.
Black hair. That’s too amusing. I can’t resist the temptation. “Hey, Keith!”
He’s looking through a water-damaged drawing tablet resting on his lap. He turns his head and gives me a wide-eyed blink. He looks as if his thoughts have suddenly been snapped back to the here and now from wherever they were wandering at. “What?”
“Check this out.” I wave the doll at him. “Looks like Allura’s fondness for dark-haired guys began early in her formative years.”
He is clearly not amused. “Verrrry funny, Lance.”
“Maybe we could dress him up in a little red suit and give him to Allura, too.”
His expression turns into one of disgust. “There’s already a Keith doll floating around out there. Everyone on the team’s been made into action figures to go with all the rest of the Voltron toys beings sold, remember?”
“Oh yeah, that’s right.” Good old Voltron has survived a steady onslaught of robeasts only to fall victim to mass market merchandising. I think Pidge has one of everything that’s come out, including a pair of really tacky-looking slippers with Green Lion heads on the toes.
“I bet the Lance doll sells better than the Keith doll does.”
He gives me a slight grin. “Actually, it’s the Princess’s doll that sells the most. It’s never in stock at the toy stores. Took me three whole months before I finally got -”
All of a sudden he realizes what he’s just said and who he said it to. I give him a big grin. To my surprise, he returns one in kind.
“Lance, old buddy, old pal, old chum...?”
“Yeah, Cap’n?”
His toothy display takes on a slightly maniacal twist. “You do realize if that particular piece of information goes any further than this room, you’ll be eating your meals through a straw for the rest of your life, right?”
I drop my grin. “Umm, right, Cap’n.”
“Good man, Lance.”
“Thanks, Cap’n.”
He returns his attention to the sketchbook, and I begin to think of loopholes. There are plenty of ways to pass the information on through a third party. But then again, I really don’t care for the implications of his threat. Better let that one alone. For now.
I set the little prince doll aside and return my attention to the junk on the floor. After a moment I steal a glance at Keith. He’s studying a crayon drawing of a vase full of flowers. From this distance it looks very well done. I get up and walk over to take a peek over his shoulder.
“She was quite the artist even then, wasn’t she?”
The vase is a little lopsided, but the highlight and shading on it is pretty accurate. I grunt in the affirmative.
“And look at this one,” he says and flips three pages back to a pair of kittens tangled up in a scribble of string. “This reminds me of one of the images of her recent work. She scanned a bunch of them and snuck them onto my laptop as a slideshow screen saver a few weeks ago. It was a nice surprise.”
I grin at his comment. No, Keith, it wasn’t Allura who did that...
“Oh yeah, I remember those. You showed them to me.”
“Funny how she still denies that she did it.”
“Must be an artist thing.”
“Must be.”
“By the way, I just thought of something. Do we even know what sort of doll to look for? Did you get a description from Coran?”
Keith nods. “Yes. It’s a child doll, made to look like a little girl of about four years old. She’s eighteen inches tall with strawberry-blonde hair and green eyes. She had on a mint green dress and black patent leather slippers, but the Princess may have changed the clothes on her. He wasn’t too sure about that.”
“Okay, I’ll check over here some more. You want me to put the prince in the pack?”
He wrinkles his nose in distaste. “No. Maybe we can collect some more things in another trip if she’s interested in having them. Saralinda’s the only thing I’m after for right now.”
“And not the sketchbook?”
“Well, I’d like to keep the sketchbook, but she might get quirky about it.”
I shrug at him. “You could always ask.”
“True.” He hands me the sketchbook and I tuck it into my backpack. He gets to his feet. “Let’s search here, then we’ll go across the hall to her parent’s room.”
“Gotcha.”
Keith has changed his mind about retrieving some of the Princess’s things partway through our archaeological dig. He winds up packing away the sketchbook, the prince, a small lead crystal goldfish with a fin missing, a teddy bear the size of a palm, and collects every stray crayon he can find.
I bet all this stuff will get tucked away in his secret shrine dedicated to Allura. I just know he has one. The doll he bought is no doubt sitting in its own little niche with flowers and candles all around it. And he has a set of High Priest robes with a big gold letter ‘A’ on the front of them which he wears to perform ritual offerings in the morning before he goes to practice...
The very thought of it makes me laugh. Keith gives me a sideways glance as he wipes the dust off of another crayon and hands it to me. I laugh even harder. He throws a look of annoyance over his shoulder at me as he disappears through the door of the room. I put the crayon in amongst the rest stuffed in the side pocket of the pack and follow him. We cross a short hall and enter King Alfor’s room. The place is a disaster area. The bed against the north wall is all but buried in rock and dust. The south wall is nearly gone, and part of the floor adjacent to it has broken away. The toppled dressers have all their drawers flung open and pieces of clothing are still hanging out of them as if the room had been abandoned only yesterday.
I catch a glint of gold by my left foot and stoop to retrieve it. A chain pulls loose from the dust, bringing a small gold locket with it. It’s meticulously engraved with an intertwining flower motif and has a hefty, diamond-ringed sapphire set into the center that’s the color of Allura’s eyes. I hold it up for Keith to see. He pulls his gloves off to take it from me.
“This must have belonged to the Queen,” he says, more to himself than to me. He pries it open with a fingernail. Inside is a pair of tiny pictures of Allura, one of her as an infant and one at age two. Keith beams and points at the baby picture.
“Look, it’s baby Allura! Wasn’t she cute?”
I feel a smile come to my face as well. “Yeah. But you know she’ll slay you if she knows you found that.”
His expression turns wistful, then he shrugs. “Maybe so, but I still have to give it to her. This belonged to her mother. Look around and see if there’s anything else to find.”
There’s things to be found, all right. Between the two of us we recover a small fortune in royal jewelry scattered across the floor not far from where I located the locket. It all gets stuffed into the pack. Keith discovers a small family portrait of Alfor, his wife and baby daughter. Allura’s a little older in this picture than the one that’s in the locket. She’s chubby cheeked with wisps of gold hair tied in a pink ribbon atop her head and a dimpled, toothless grin. Alfor and Alyssa have smiles of loving pride on their faces. Keith’s smile is sad this time as he regards the image before handing it over for me to put away.
We peer through a doorway on the east wall and find what looks to be a library. But there’s a large fissure running the length of the room, and the shelves that haven’t fallen over completely tilt at crazy angles to the floor. The floor itself slants visibly toward the crack in the middle on both sides. We don’t even try to enter it. Keith doubles back to re-examine the hole that’s opened up on the south edge of the bedroom instead.
It’s a pretty big pit looking to be some thirty feet across and about as wide, and deep enough to keep us at a respectful distance from the edge because the ground has that sandy sort of feeling the closer we get to it. Keith hazards a single step forward and shines his helmet light into the areas that he can see from his vantage point.
“Lance, I have a theory.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“The bombing starts the walls and ceiling to crack. Coran realizes there’s a serious problem and orders everyone to grab their belongings and clear out of the area. He goes to the royal chambers to recover some of the King and Queen’s things. There’s another hit, the wall the bed is against begins to crumble...”
“Allura comes into the room, hanging onto her doll, because she’s scared,” I reply, picking up on his thread of logic. “Another hit, the ceiling is beginning to cave in a little -”
“- there’s no time to waste. Coran drops the things he’s gathered to scoop up the Princess instead -”
“- Allura drops the doll, and he can’t waste the time to retrieve it -”
Keith nods. “Crash goes the wall and ceiling, crack goes the floor...”
“And there goes Saralinda, over the edge with whatever else was sitting against the southern wall.”
“That might be it. We’ve got to find out how deep this hole goes. Time for the rope.” He frowns around the room. “Doesn’t look like there’s anything stable enough to hook it onto.”
“The west wall is solid. What if I bust a hole through the wall right by the doorframe and tie the rope around it?”
“That may be best. I don’t like the idea of pounding a stake. Don’t think it’ll do us any good with most of the floor around here in the condition that it is.”
“Me neither.”
I start on breaking through the wall while Keith tests the integrity of the floor near the edge by tapping with the rod. The rock underneath crumbles away like so much loose dirt. He brings a heel down on the unsupported tile and it snaps loose. He continues the process until he’s broken away a good amount of the unstable rock in a rough crescent shape. Then he walks over to look down into the pit, pauses for a moment and gives a whoop of excitement that makes me jump right out of my skin.
“Woo-hoo! Lance, Lance! I found her! There she is!”
“Where?” I hurry over to look.
The pit is well over a hundred feet deep, with a pool of murky-looking water at the bottom. Pieces of furniture float on its surface, which has been disturbed by the rock that Keith has just knocked into it. Keith taps my arm and points to his left. I follow his finger to a tiny outcropping of rock jutting out of the side of the pit about forty feet below us and the same distance over from where we’re standing. Saralinda is lying on the ledge with her one arm bent in such a way that she seems to be waving at us.
Ah, so there you are, my dear. At last! Now Keith will give you to Allura and he’ll kiss her and she’s going to reduce to this huge dollop of pink marshmallow goo and Lance the Magnificent is going to take his nice red motorbike on a breakneck spin all across the countryside. Victory is within my grasp!
“You got the rope secured yet?” Keith asks.
I blink at him. “Huh?”
“The rope, Lance. I need the rope to climb down there.”
“Oh yeah, right.” I wrap the rope around the section of doorframe several times, tie a secure knot, yank on it with all my weight to test it. Then I turn and give Keith the thumbs-up sign. He shucks off all his extra gear, hooks the rope through his belt loops, tosses the excess over the edge and begins his descent.
| To Saralinda: Part 4 |
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To Saralinda: Part 6 |