A Message in the Tide
A coded note washes ashore
Early one grey morning, a local boy called Tom Fenwick was walking along the Hollowmere beach.
The had gone out, and it had left a line of seaweed and broken shells on the wet sand.
Among them, half buried, he spotted a small glass bottle with a pushed tightly into its neck.
Inside the bottle was a folded piece of paper, so Tom ran all the way to the harbour to show it to Mira Vale.
Mira pulled out the and carefully unrolled the note, which was water-stained and yellow with age.
The words did not make sense at first, because they were written in a simple .
She sat down at her desk to study the strange lines more closely.
After a while, she noticed that the first letter of each line spelled out a hidden message.
Mira wrote the letters down one by one to reveal what they said.
The decoded message read: where the meets the tower, the truth waits.
She read it again, feeling a cold run down her back.
Arthur Penrose came over to look, leaning on his cane.
"This paper is old," he said quietly.
"About twenty years, I would say."
The was neat and , the kind people learned at school long ago.
Arthur stared at the careful loops and curves, and his face went pale.
"I know this hand," he murmured.
"It belonged to Elena Hart, the clockkeeper who vanished."
At the bottom of the note, in the same careful ink, were two small : E.H.
Mira felt her heart beat faster, for those were the very from the stolen clock.
The message spoke of a hidden place where the sea meets the base of the tower.
"She wrote this to warn someone," Arthur said, "or perhaps to hide the truth until it was safe."
Mira thought about the stormy night when Elena had disappeared, twenty years before.
Someone had sealed this bottle and thrown it into the sea to keep the message safe for years.
It had been placed there on purpose, to be found one day by the right person.
And if the note had waited all this time to reach them, Mira realised, then its writer might still be alive.