The Forty Column Castle

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The phone rang in the middle of the night.

I banged around my bedside stand in the dark, trying to kill the unnerving noise until I figured out it was the phone and not the alarm. I fumbled the receiver to my ear and croaked, “Hello.”

“Marie-Claude,” Aunt Elizabeth said in the faraway voice of a long distance call, “you’ll never believe this. They say I’m an antiquities smuggler, and they’ve put me in jail. Not only that, they think I’m the head of a multimillion dollar smuggling ring.”

I managed a laugh. “You’re kidding, of course.” Even in my groggy state, I had a pretty good sense of humor.

Aunt Elizabeth sputtered incoherent noises. “Marie-Claude, stop laughing this instant. I’m in jail, and it smells, and it’s cold, and the bed is hard. You must come immediately and …”

The line crackled and went dead.

“Maybe you’re not kidding,” I said into the phone.

I dropped the receiver on the hook and groaned back onto the pillow. I wanted to snuggle into my fat, fluffy down comforter and go back to sleep. The night had turned cold, even though it was May in Boston, and I had the bedroom windows wide open. A breeze played in the lacey curtains.

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