It was an odd thing to notice, as I was cresting the hill and turning into my driveway. A small light flickering at the top of the neighbor's house just over the rise. Trees and rolling hills obscured most of the neighboring house, but I could see the flicker from this spot on the road. What was odd was that it was quite distinct, little flashes with no seeming pattern. I filed it away for future reference, and refocused my thoughts on coming home to my wife.
I pulled into the garage, grabbed my briefcase, and headed inside. As I entered the house, I saw my wife walking into the kitchen.
"Hi honey. I'm just about to start dinner. I'm marinating some chicken thighs, and we'll have roasted veggies and spuds. Sound good?"
"Sounds fine to me. Let me change and then I'll give you a hand." I dropped my briefcase off in my office, then marched upstairs, shucked off my tie, shirt, and pants, changing into sweatpants and a tee shirt. I headed back downstairs to find my wife just putting pans into the oven. I gazed lovingly on her posterior as I approached her, and as she closed the oven, I hugged her from behind.
Naomi has a great butt, a little broad, but not fat. In fact, that describes her body overall, as well. She has wide hips, wide shoulders, a kind of wide waist and nice breasts that fit her frame well. She's not fat, or even chubby, she's just got a sort of a wide body, and given that she's in it, I'm very happy with it. She has straight dusty blond hair that she keeps at shoulder length, and light brown eyes.
She lingered in the hug for a moment, and then turned to face me. We kissed for a few moments, and then she went back to dinner prep, getting the veggies and spuds ready to go into the oven. We chatted about our days - she's a second grade teacher at a nearby elementary school, while I'm an engineer who coordinates operations in a large manufacturing plant where we make the devices that keep optical signals humming along the internet. It was much like any other evening, we had a little wine, ate a good meal, watched some mindless television, and then she was ready to retire, so she went upstairs, and I went to my office to review some documents for work.
* * * * *
"Hi, this is XXXXX bank calling, trying to reach Roger Clifton."
"Roger isn't in, he's at work, but this is his fiancee. Can I help you."
"We're just calling about a suspicious charge. Mr. Clifton hasn't used this card for over two years, and suddenly there's a couple of charges on it. We just wanted to verify that they were legitimate."
"What were the charges? Maybe I can help you with that."
"The first was on the seventeenth, yesterday, at The Fine Whine, that's W-H-I-N-E, for $42.55, the second today, about two hours ago, at Celebrity Floral, for $65.23. Are these charges he would have made."
"Oh, you know, he probably wanted to surprise me and not put flowers and wine on our joint card. I'm sure that was him."
"I see. Well, sorry if we ruined his surprise, ma'am."
"That's all right. I'll pretend I had no clue."
"Very good. I'll mark this off as resolved, and keep the card active."
"I think that would be best. Thanks."
"Thank you, and thanks for, well, thanks to Mr. Clifton for being a XXXXX bank customer. Have a nice day."
* * * * *
I took care of the work faster than I thought I would, and again thought of that little flickering light I saw from the road. I pondered the local geomorphology for a moment, and realized that it would also be visible from our attic window. Naomi was asleep by then, so I quietly lowered the attic stairs, fired up the flashlight on my cellphone in lieu of the attic lights (to keep my night vision working), and climbed up to look out the window to see what I could see.
The attic is large, and we only used a small part of it for storage, because it isn't easy to get stuff up there. Things were mostly as I remembered them from the last time up here, perhaps a year and a half ago. There was a fine layer of dust on everything.
As I walked towards the attic window, I noticed something different. There was a folding chair there, and a small table. Odd, I didn't remember those being there. I looked out the window, and just above the treeline I could see the cupola of the house where I saw the flashes coming from. I looked down at the table, and saw an open steno notebook and a pencil laying on it. I also noticed the complete lack of dust on the table and seat of the chair. The notebook was open, and the top sheet was blank, but showed impressions from recent writing on the page above.
I sat down, and on a whim, I took the pencil and very lightly rubbed the edge of the tip against the pad, using the impressions left in the paper to show the last thing written on the sheet above. It was difficult to make everything out, it appeared that there were at least two lines of letters, well spaced out, as well as a number of stray marks. I tore the page off, put everything back where it was, closed up the attic, and went back to my office, where I could examine this in better light.
Looking at the paper, I could see a number of potential partial messages written. The most prominent one, probably the last, said "o one kno?s who the fa," something unreadable, "even me." Other snippets of words, "tic testi", "eans to?e at my?ge and di". This was definitely odd. I thought perhaps I should just destroy this and forget about the little flashes, then I glanced over at the shredder. We have a high security shredder, I need it for work, trade secrets and all. I lifted the top, and saw a large collection of shredded bits, all the same color as the paper I had just looked at.
All right, so Naomi is up to something, I thought. She's the only one who would go up there, and whatever she wrote down, she wanted to destroy. Hmmm. I went back up to the attic, and looked at the notebook. The inside of the cover had a handwritten (in Naomi's hand) list of all the letters of the alphabet, and what had to be their Morse code representations. I checked the few I knew, 'S' was indeed dot dot dot, and 'O' was dash dash dash. I put the notebook down again, as it was, and thought.
Normally, when I had a weird problem, I'd call my best friend Bill. But I couldn't do that here, because Bill is Naomi's brother. Bill and I have been tight since kindergarten, and have been best friends for our whole lives. Naomi was a little pain in the neck when we were kids, but we knew each other our whole lives. Naomi was three years younger than us, and given my closeness to Bill, completely off limits.
As we grew, Naomi developed into the nicest person, reasonably pretty but not super pretty, smart but not super smart, always involved in charities and volunteer organizations. Bill and I went off to separate colleges, he studying business despite my constantly reminding him over the phone, text, and internet that "friends don't let friends major in business," and me double majoring in applied physics and electrical engineering, specializing in optics. Bill went on for an MBA, and I started my graduate study at yet another school for what turned out to be another six years, working on my Ph.D in optoelectronics.
Three years into that program, Bill texted me that Naomi was about to start her M.Ed. program at my school. We had lunch the day she moved into her apartment, and hung out occasionally the first few weeks, and then she asked me out to dinner. I thought it was just friendly, and showed up in sweats and a tee shirt to a romantic Italian place to find her dressed to kill. She rolled with it, was chill, and we talked. I thought she may have had a crush on me from our childhoods, so I was nice, and we smooched a bit that first night, but that's all.
We started dating, it was a little weird, but we talked through it. Over time, it became clear that she was sad that I didn't have a girlfriend after three years there, and wanted me to be with someone, and I thought she needed someone after her move. But we were both falling for each other during the process of working this out, and we stayed together, moved in together, finished our degrees about the same time, and got married just after that. I promised Bill in no uncertain terms that I'd be good to her, take care of her, and all that stuff. After a while, he went from being the overprotective older brother to realizing that it was great that his little sister and his best friend were a couple.
So calling Bill about this message thing was out of the question, but I had the resources at work to find out what was what.
* * * * *
"My fiancee ordered flowers for me, and they never came. We should get a refund."
"Let me check our records, ma'am. What was his name again?"
"Roger Clifton. The flowers were ordered on the seventeenth."
"Hmmm. All right. Here it is, a dozen red roses and three orchids. Delivered the eighteenth."
"I didn't get them."
"Are you at 3527 Hastings Street? They were delivered there to the,erm, recipient and signed for at 2:35 PM."
