Saturday, February 21, 2009

Seven Secret Saturdays

The whole affair lasted only seven weeks. It began innocently enough, two people, nearly strangers to one another met in the classics section of a bookstore in a town where neither of them resided. They were a man and woman, and they had met but once before. The circumstances of this first meeting seem innocent enough to passerby, however, in the weeks to come these meetings would have to move more private quarters. A book club met on the first Saturday of each month, here, in the classics section and it proved that fateful day to be the perfect excuse for both of our players to be present. Whether this had been intentional or not does not matter to our story. We are most concerned with the reason for the meeting and less on how it came to be.
Abigail Adams, the woman with the famous name, but no famous or connected family tree, was approached by a mysterious man in a coffee shop one day. He handed her an envelope and walked away. It was a case of mistaken identity that would change her life completely. The man was a delivery man only and was told to deliver the envelope to a young lady who frequented that particular coffee shop and matched the description given to him. However, the vague description and lack of request for confirmation from his master led him to make his delivery to the wrong young lady.
Richard Post, was also delivered an envelope while attending to his weekly errands, however he was the intended recipient. His father, Preston Post, was summoning him to work on a special project. While Richard did not want to comply he felt he had no choice and followed the instructions given to him. He was annoyed that his father did not wish to contact him directly, but reflecting upon this, he realized that their relationship had never been one of direct contact. Preston Post was an operative in a secret world. Richard Post knew nothing of his fathers affairs and even in youth, when curiousity gets the best of young men, knew there were some things he'd be better off not knowing.
Abigail was puzzled by the invitation in the envelope. She was asked to meet a man in a bookstore she was unfamiliar with, and had no idea who might have sent the invitation. Thinking perhaps this was a prank being played upon her by her naughty brother, she laughed and put the letter aside. While finishing her coffee and her letters, she picked it up again, and saw the foreign seal in the letterhead, that she had overlooked before. How could her brother have gotten paper with a watermark in it? Perhaps this was enough to peak her curiousity, perhaps it was her unfeminine sense of adventure, or a lack of fear, but she decided to attend the bookstore that Saturday and find out for herself what this was all about.
Richard met the woman on Saturday. He found her out easily. She was wearing a red scarf, just as his instructions had predicted. She however, had no idea why they had been asked to meet. Richard and Abigail, both lovers of classic literature, and both with adventurous spirits, decided to join the discussion beginning to form by the book club, and ended up having a lovely day in the midst of books, coffee, and a budding new friendship. After the bookclub discussion was over and the members went their separate ways, Richard and Abigail talked over the invitation Abigail had received. When questioning one another, Richard discovered that he had met Abigail once before, she was an editor for a local paper and he had written an article about the towns elections several years ago. She had been the editor who had polished his story and accepted it to be published. This had been his one and only attempt at anything journalistic. His father had tried to encourage him to be interested in politics, even at only a local level, but Richard was much too romantic for all the challenges of understanding the world politico. He had gone back to writing his poetry. Richards main source of income was the teaching job at the young men's preparatory academy he himself had graduated from before going off to college in a foreign land.

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