The Lonely Whelk by Ariele Sieling

pounding
heart; Ivanna the Bard once said, A calm heart and a calm mind
can work together to achieve the goals of the soul, so he took
another deep breath and willed his beating heart to slow. He smiled
at Rock and glanced at the screens.
    A gentleman in a nice grey suit and rather
interesting tie appeared on the screen that looked out on the back
lawn. He put his face close, winked, and then the camera went
dead.
    “ Oh good grief,” Rock said.
“Not again.” He sighed and shook his head. “You can sit right here
and complete this paperwork. I’ll be back in a few moments — I just
need to deal with a small issue. Quin?”
    The two men disappeared.
    Clyde opened the envelope and removed the
piece of paper inside. It was blank. He frowned and flipped it
over. There was nothing on the back either. Holding the piece of
paper up to the light, spitting on it, and scribbling on it with an
invisible ink revealer all revealed nothing. So, Clyde glanced at
his watch, leaned back in his chair, and began to watch the
security screens.
    The screens, unlike the paper, revealed a
very interesting scene. The winking man ran about from location to
location, while Rock ran after him just a bit behind. After a
while, Rock caught the man and began to bring him back towards the
building. Suddenly, the man wrenched himself from Rock’s grasp and
bolted off the property. Rock threw his hands up in the air and
came back towards the building.
    Clyde reached out for the piece of paper and
carefully folded it. He pulled a knife from his pocket, cut a few
holes, and then unfolded it, revealing a snowflake. He then wrote
in neat letters, “I saw the whole thing,” folded it back up, and
slipped it into the envelope. Then Rock entered the room, breathing
heavily.
    “ Well,” said Rock, “I
chased him off. But it turns out he was hiding keys to the building
all over the property.” He held up a small silver key which was
nearly engulfed by his large hand. “I don’t know how he got them or
how many he hid, but I need to go find them. Care to
help?”
    “ Sure,” Clyde replied. He
counted along with the beating of his pulse and stood, leaving the
envelope on the table.
    Rock led Clyde out into the gardens behind
the Globe. “I don’t think he hid any of the keys off the property.
Let’s split up – we’ll spend twenty minutes or so looking and find
as many as we can, then we’ll finish up the interview and I’ll
review the security tapes to find the rest.”
    “ Great.” Clyde nodded
firmly. As soon as Rock’s back had turned, he let himself grin just
a little bit. This was fun.
    As Rock ran towards the front of the
building, Clyde closed his eyes and imagined a grid. He hovered
over the garden, and pictured the screens as mapping to each square
of the imaginary grid, and began to run the screen footage like a
film on the back of his eyelids.
    The man hadn’t hidden any of the keys in the
front. The first hiding place was: the small fountain.
    As he moved towards the fountain, Clyde set
up a rhythm in his head… one, two and three, four and five… and
stepped carefully to the beat. Maintaining a beat , Ivanna
the Bard had said, will allow the learner or the learned to stay
in tune to his knowledge and understanding by creating a pattern
upon which all other things may be learned and remembered .
    The fountain housed three keys: one in the
water, one under a loose stone, and one balanced on the statue in
the fountain’s centerpiece which was shaped like a water swallow
dive-bombing a squirrel. There were two keys by the statue of the
man with a hedgehog, one under each big toe. He found four keys
under bushes, three under seemingly random stones, and another six
in and around the fence that ran across the back of the property;
it wasn’t a very big garden, but it was beautifully landscaped.
Big, pink, cloud-like flowers floated amid a sea of dark green
leaves. A few little white flowers dotted the spaces in between. He
found