I wasn’t quite finished with the story I was telling by the time 2025 ended and so decided to continue it until it reached an ending point. Then I will start a new one. Besides, I kind of want to see where Penelope ends up. And so we have…
Day 180: She also knew letting Trinity know she had anything extra was a bad idea.
She also knew letting Trinity know she had anything extra was a bad idea. If Trinity wanted it, she would take it. If she thought it would hurt Penelope to lose, she would take it even if she didn’t want it. So Penelope hid the bank book. She still had the box. It came with her when she left the house and was now sitting on the desk in her new bedroom.
“I suppose I can put more than just desk drawer junk in it now,” she said. Her eyes strayed back to Jerome’s box. “Or at least the box sent over with his books.”
Penelope frowned and looked back to Mrs. Merriweather’s note. “She found a box of miscellaneous charms,” Penelope read. Part of it sounded like it was with Jerome’s things and partially like it was just near by. The jewelry looked more like something a woman would wear, but there was no reason that Jerome couldn’t have collected the charms even if he didn’t mean to wear them.
“He could have been studying them,” she said as she laid out another charm bracelet next to a long necklace she previously untangled. “Kind of like I am doing now.”
Penelope thought of the bags of junk jewelry she collected for a costume party. There were charms mixed in. “And no reason he couldn’t have picked them up the same way.” She somehow doubt Jerome’s friends convinced him to play fortune teller in a mall booth, but he could still have purchased lots of junk jewelry as she had.
“I wonder if the shop has more,” she thought.
When she went into the second hand store the owner had large bags of costume jewelry. They were mystery bagged lots. He told her and her friends that he went to estate auctions and just put the bags together from the different places once there were enough of them. Penelope smiled as she delicately picked her way through another knotted chain. The store owner talked of hidden treasures and a couple of her friends were excited. She was fairly certain that anything of value was taken out before the bags were put together. Since she was looking for costume jewelry for her costume and the bags were cheap, it didn’t matter to her.
“Still the charms were in there.”
She untangled the last chain and set it down. As she untangled them, Penelope made certain to turn the charms facing upwards. Some of them, were familiar. They looked like the charms she had on other pieces. Leaving the jewelry where it was, Penelope went back to the bedroom where she left her notebook and the charm book she was using to identify them earlier. She brought both back to the kitchen.
While Mrs. Merriweather sent over a book designed to teach someone how to create basic charms and by it’s nature listed the basic ones so the student knew what they were creating, the other book was different.
“More like a charms dictionary,” she told herself as she began to flick through the pages to look at the charms she couldn’t identify. When she found a definition, she put it in her notebook, along with a quick line sketch of the symbol.
Most of the charms were protective in nature. It made Penelope wonder if everyone feared attack.
Ten til Midnight 