The Secret of Zormna Clendar by Julie Steimle (great reads .TXT) 📖

crystal wineglass she had been cleaning. “What is it?”

Standing next to the newly uncovered player piano in the living room, which was cluttered with tacky shepherdess curios Zormna had said could be tossed, Jennifer held up a photograph within an antique frame.

“Is this you?”

Zormna’s breath caught in her chest. Quickly, she set the glass on the end table next to the couch and hurried over. She took the photograph from Jennifer’s hands, examining it.

The color in the picture had faded from repeated exposure to sunlight, but the image was still clear. It was of a young blonde couple with their little child, standing in a park. And, more startling, Zormna remembered that day.

Her eyes tracked to the face of the woman. It was her mother, exactly as she remembered her. The same sky blue eyes. The same dimples with her smile. The same soft, sunshine hair. And her father, in the picture, smiled exactly the same as when she last saw him. His rich green eyes shone like precious stones. That cleft in his strong chin and his butter-yellow hair were no different. And holding their hands, so small, was a little girl.

For barely a second, Zormna’s knees buckled. She could hardly speak. Her fingers began to tremble. She rubbed the dust off the glass, touching the images, yearning to reach her parents through time.

“Where did you find this?” Her voice stuck to her throat.

Jennifer motioned to the floor, those ever-inspective blues taking in Zormna’s reaction with the same nosy interest.

“It was lying between the wall and the piano.” Looking at Zormna then the picture, Jennifer asked, pointing to the little girl, “That’s you, isn’t it?”

Zormna shivered with barely a nod.

Jennifer McLenna licked her lips like she was tasting the silence to determine its flavor. Finally she said, “How did your parents die?”

Clearing her throat, trying to regain her composure, Zormna traced the images of her mother and father with her finger. “Uh, well, I told you earlier that my parents were murdered.”

“Yes,” Jennifer said. “But…how, exactly.”

How much could she trust Jennifer? Zormna was not sure Jennifer was the kind of girl who would be able to handle the nasty pieces of reality. The girl had grown up in such a quiet, peaceful sort of place, after all.

She sat down on one of the sofas. Dust hurled into the air, despite having once been covered with a sheet. Jennifer waved the dust out of her face and sat beside her, studying Zormna’s expression intently—which was not good.

“Look, my parents were killed when I was five,” Zormna said. “But I remember it because…I just do. I…I was there.”

Jennifer took in a sharp breath.

“We had been planning to come here to live with my mother’s aunt just before it happened.” Zormna kept her eyes to the carpet. It was hard enough verbalizing something she did not want to remember, even though she relived it her in nightmares—especially recently. “It was a mob. They came to our apartment. They killed my parents. But I survived because they hid me.”

“Hid you?” Jennifer stared wide. “Like how? And why did a mob come your home?”

Zormna rubbed her forehead and face, so weary thinking about it. “There are people in my country that hate my family. They’ve always hunted us. And as far as I know, I am now the only one left of my family line.”

“No way.” Jennifer looked pale.

Zormna weakly shrugged, staring at the picture.

“How did they hide you?” Jennifer whispered.

Shrugging again, Zormna said, “Long story, really. But…well, my mother knew they were coming. She had prepared a place under the bed where—”

“Under the bed?” Jennifer sounded entirely skeptical. “That’s the first place anyone would look.”

Groaning, Zormna snapped, “Our beds were different. They had ventilation equipment under them. It was a space saver. Even if they looked there, they would not have found me. They would have had to have taken off grills and filters and equipment and stuff.”

“Then how did your mother—?”

“My mom is smart. She made a way for it to seem like all the fixtures were there, but also made them roll out quickly when she needed them to.” Zormna frowned at her. “Besides, they did check. They started pounding on everything, searching for me.”

Jennifer’s went even paler.

Zormna stared at the picture again. Her parents’ smiles were frozen in time. The last thing she had remembered of their faces were their fearful eyes on her. And they final hugs and kisses.

“There was nothing I could do,” she said. “Just wait.”

“Wait for what?” Jennifer whispered again.

Closing her eyes, Zormna shook her head. She could almost hear the pounding in her ears now. “For them to find me.”

Jennifer stared.

In the silence, Zormna could hear the hum of the water heater starting up again. Outside sounds of kids playing echoed in.

But then Jennifer said, “But they didn’t find you. Or you’d be dead, right?”

Zormna nodded. “No, they didn’t find me. The police arrived and they ran off.”

“They were never caught?”

Zormna shook her head. “Not one of them.”

Jennifer scratched her head and asked a little louder, “So then, how did you get away? The news would have reported a murder. And if you were the sole survivor—”

“The news didn’t report that I survived,” Zormna said.

“What?” Jennifer stared more.

Explaining, “My uncle was a police officer. He was one of the first on the scene, with his partner. He smuggled me out.”

“But people would have known if you weren’t, you know, dead with your parents, right?”

Shaking her head, Zormna said, “My uncle said very few knew they had a child.”

Jennifer gasped. “But people would have figured out you were their kid, right? He was your uncle. You were living with him.”

Zormna shook her head again. “No one knew. I never left his apartment the entire year I lived with him. Only his partner knew I was there. And when my uncle was killed on duty, his partner took me to the military school. And I have been there ever since.”

Astounded, Jennifer gaped at her. It may have been too much for a sheltered American to take.

And to be honest, Zormna did not want to think about it anymore. It just brought back her worst memories.

Tucking the picture under her arm, Zormna rose onto her feet and trotted back into the kitchen. She plucked up the glass she had left on the end table along the way. “Thanks for finding the picture.”

She then resumed her unpacking.

*

Zormna was exhausting! Jennifer pressed her hand to her forehead as the blonde walked out of the room, feeling a headache coming on.

What kind of person unloads a story like that and then just walks away as if it were nothing? Jennifer sat in the living room trying to come to grips with the fact that the blonde had survived a brutal mob attack, a mob which was probably still hunting for her. And this blonde was now humming (off key, mind you) in the other room!

Maybe Zormna was manic depressive. Maybe being a latch-key kid for a year had a lot to do with it. Jennifer decided that had to be it, with a final exasperated huff. Zormna’s great aunt had been a lunatic after all.

Irritated, Jennifer went back to clearing the piano top of silly figurines. Crazy people were the worst.

 

Zormna finally called it a day at around three in the afternoon. After hauling down some boxes from the attic to sort for the garage sale, she and Jennifer left them in the living room, only a fifth-way sorted.

“I will need to get food for the cupboards and refrigerator,” Zormna said to Jennifer as she locked the door.

Jennifer laughed. “Not happening. You are not moving in here.”

“I can stock up for the future, though,” Zormna insisted. “Canned goods and other nonperishables.”

Jennifer noticed Zormna had slipped the picture of her family under her arm and took it with her.

“And who is going to drive you?” Jennifer asked, following after her.

Shrugging, Zormna replied, “Todd, if he wants to.”

Shaking her head, Jennifer snorted. “You are so using my brother.”

Zormna shot her a sharp look as she went down to the red wagon. She loaded up the last of their things. “It isn’t using if he wants to come along. Besides, I will buy him an ice cream from that dairy shop his friends talk about.”

“Moo’s Milky Malteds? Not fair! Why do you always offer him stuff like that and not me?” Jennifer chased after Zormna to the curb, ignoring the little Asher girls who had been watching all day. Their faces had been pressed against the front window glass, peering in at them as they sorted. At least dorky Darren had enough sense to keep his spying less obvious.

“Todd is quick to help,” Zormna replied, putting in the last of the things from the McLenna house into the wagon. “You treat it as a chore.”

Jennifer hung her shoulders and rolled her eyes. Cleaning a house was a chore.

“But you can come along if you can convince him to take us shopping,” Zormna added.

Sneaky.

Jennifer saw the crooked smirk curling in the corner of that smug blonde’s mouth. Indeed. Zormna Clendar knew how to play the game. She would be a formidable adversary.

 

Chapter Eleven: What’s On TV

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“What we see depends on what we look for.”—Sir John Lubbock—

 

 

Despite how her parents had made it clear Zormna was not allowed to move into the place, the girl spent more of her free time at her great aunt’s house since they had cleaned it. At first Zormna just sorted through the boxes. The planned garage sale, Jennifer surmised, would probably take up another Saturday in the future—a date she dreaded. The thing was, Zormna took her sweet time sorting through all the junk.

And she still continued to secretly stock the shelves.

In her exploration of the various rooms, Zormna had unearthed a number of random things. One was this huge set of encyclopedias which she immediately lugged back to the McLenna home and kept on a makeshift shelf in the attic. Zormna had also unearthed a set of electrical tools from the garage, which she promptly deposited in this other room on the second floor. That room was full of junk. Apparently that crazy aunt of hers never threw away anything electrical—so there were ancient toasters and old TVs and stuff crammed in there.

“They should go to the dump,” Jennifer once suggested.

Zormna shot her a dirty look and said, “That’s wasteful. They could be fixed.”

And Zormna tried to fix a number of things in the room, including the ancient vacuum tube TVs. The scary thing was, Zormna succeeded in making them both work in just a few hours. With the electrical tool stuff from the garage, she had managed to solder wires and parts together. The only thing she had left to do was adjust the color and she fiddled with that during grainy episodes of Gilligan’s Island and Sesame Street.

“We’ve got a great flat screen TV at home, Zormna,” Jennifer grumbled as Zormna determinedly shifted the color from green to bright orange and back again. “We’ve got huge couches to sit on. This room is cramped and dusty. Besides, watching TV alone is dumb.”

But Zormna ignored her, fiddling with the knobs. She got some blue in there and skin color for a flicker