The Mysterious Aunt Trudie

Forbidden!

I stare at the wooden door, hand hesitantly wrapped around its brass knob. Butterflies twist about angrily in my stomach. My feet are rooted to the floor, unwilling to take a step forward. This is the first time I’ve stood in front of this door, ready and able to enter.

This room has been off limits since the moment Aunt Trudie adopted me and brought me here. It was her one and only rule. One I didn’t really understand, but was willing to follow if it meant I could stay.

When my parents died, I wasn’t sure what would happen to me. I’d heard terrible things about foster care. I was sure I would end up a statistic. So it came as a big surprise, especially to me, when Aunt Trudie showed up to adopt me. I had only seen her a handful of times. But, I believe being adopted herself made her more understanding of my situation.

Aunt Trudie was a strange and mysterious woman.

Sometimes, she would disappear for days at a time. Her best friend and lawyer, Thomas, would look after me. She would come back home, looking absolutely exhausted but satisfied as well. At times, she was distant with me. Though, I think that was because she didn’t have any children and didn’t know how to interact with me.

Even with saying that, I knew she cared deeply for me. It was all in the little things she did. Like learning how to do my thick and often tangled hair, which was so different from her own. I know it must of been hard raising a black child. The way she would awkwardly as how my day went, listening closely to each word I spoke.

I pull myself from my thoughts with a shake. Taking a deep breath, I turn the knob. Light spills in through the windows, giving the room a warm glow. Her canopy bed is made up, the burgundy covers straight with the corners tucked under the mattress. A black vanity table sits against the wall in front of me, evenly between her two windows. A large armoire dresser stands tall on the other side of the room.

I walk over to her bed first. There’s a picture of me sitting on her bedside table. It’s my highschool prom picture. I remember being extremely happy that day, which you can tell from the wide grin stretched across my face. Tears well up in my eyes as I look at the picture. I had no idea that she kept a picture of me beside her.

Knowing I have to get started on packing her things up, I put the picture down. Wiping the tears as they fall, I take a deep breath. “Don’t cry for the life I’ve lost, smile for the life I live.” I whisper to myself, a phrase she always used when talking about death.

“Come on Miya.” I say out loud. Throwing my shoulders back, I get to work.. Aunt Trudie wasn’t a material person, so there’s not a lot to go through. Within a hour, most of the room is packed up, leaving her vanity table.

The subtle scent of lilac drifts into my nose as I go to it. A smile stretches across my face as I pick up her perfume bottle, drawing in the scent. I can picture her sitting here, spritzing it on her neck.

Shaking out of my thoughts, I clear the table, carefully placing the delicate bottles away. I pull on one of the drawers, but something keeps it from opening. After pulling it a few more times, I finally yank hard enough for it to come out — the whole drawer.

I nearly fall back from the force of my pulling. Something thumps onto the floor causing me to look down. A small black book and a large folder lie at my feet. “What in the world?”

Placing the drawer on the floor, I pick up the little book first. Thumbing through it, I see unfamiliar names of people. Some of them have check marks beside them, other have x’s. As I go further, I recognize some names of banks, others look foreign. Large amounts of money have been written down next to them. Each bank has several pages dedicated to them.

With confusion, I look through the folder next. There’s a picture of a man clipped to several pages. This looks like some kind of file on him. Pages filled with all sorts of things from his address, the kind of car he drives, his daily schedule, even the name of his cat. There are also blueprints of a house, very detailed.

I don’t really know what I’m looking at, but my gut tells me it’s nothing good. This all looks like something you would see in a movie.

The door opens, tearing my attention away. So absorbed in what I found, I didn’t hear Thomas calling my name. “Miya, are you okay? I’ve called your name several tim-” His voice falters as he looks down at me.

“What is this?” I ask, standing up.

Thomas sighs defeatedly at my questions, resignation filling chocolate brown eyes. “I was wondering where she had hid those.”

“What was Trudie up to?”

Walking over to me, he bends down to grab the small book. “Trudie was a professional thief,” he blurts out. I stare at him in shock, not expecting those words to come out of his mouth.

“She… was a… thief?” I ask just to make sure I heard him right. He nods with another sigh, taking a seat on the bed. “And you knew about it and did nothing?”

He looks up at me. “Trudie… was diagnosed with kleptomania when she was a child. I believe it developed before she was put in the system. Her birth parents weren’t really… suitable to take care of kids, so she had to take care of herself. She would steal money, food, anything she needed to survive.” This is the first time I’ve heard of this.

“As she got older, she learned to control it a bit. But, there were times when the urge spiked.”

“…so she decided to became a professional thief?” I ask. A thought crosses my mind as I process everything. “Is that how she paid for everything?” Now that I think about it, I never saw her go to work. She never talked about her job either.

Thomas shakes his head. “No! I know what you’re thinking,” he tells me. “She never kept a dime of what she stole. Every cent was given to charity, every piece of jewelry or painting was given to public museums. Everything she spent in her life, for you, was with her own money. Money that she worked hard for most of her life to get,” he rushes out.

Everything is starting to make sense. The disappearing, the dozens of charities that she started.

“On a whole, what she did was against the law. But… she didn’t do it for personal gain. Yes, it satisfied her urges, but she was also doing good. She was the modern day Robin Hood,” he states proudly.

I shake my head at the absurdity of this. Unsure of what to think, I plop down on the floor. He crouches down, groaning a bit as his old knees reach the floor. “I know this is a lot to take in. But Trudie was not a bad person. She didn’t take from the innocent, hard working people. She stole from scammers, fraudulent insurance companies, the black market. And she was good at it.”

“It doesn’t change the fact that she was a thief,” I tell him, still in a bit of shock.

We sit in silence for a few moments before he sits fully on the floor. “This is for you,” he tells me, pulling out a black velvet sack. I’m almost scared to see what it is. Hesitantly, I take out what’s inside. A gasp leaves me. It’s a necklace. A beautiful sapphire embedded in a gold circle hangs from a simple silver chain. The sun bounces off the gem, making it twinkle.

“It’s beautiful,” I whisper.

“The man in that picture, his name is Markus Wright. He stole this necklace from a small village in Mexico. He killed four people to get it.” My attention whips to him as he speaks, horror filling me. “It’s worth twenty thousands dollars. To those villagers, it’s priceless. It’s been with them for generations, it’s a part of their culture. But that didn’t matter to him,” he tells me.

“Why are you giving it to me?” I ask, placing it back in the bag.

He sighs sadly. “Trudie knew she didn’t have much time left. These last few months were really painful for her. She hid it well when you came to visit, she didn’t want to worry you.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” He chuckles a bit at that, nodding in agreement.

“She wanted you to know about this life and she wanted you to decide what to do with the necklace.”

I look at him in surprise. “Really?”

“Yes. She said she knew it would be a bit hard to accept what she did, but you deserved to know what kind of person she was. You can sell the necklace and get the twenty grand. Trudie has someone in place for that. You can keep it for yourself, give it back to Markus, or give it back to the village.”

I grip the bag tightly. For the first time, I understand a bit more about the mysterious Aunt Trudie.

“The choice is yours.”