2: Chocolate Box Girls: Marshmallow Skye Read Online Free

was never seen again.
    ‘Shame,’ Honey had said at the time, ruffling Coco’s hair. ‘It seems to have vanished into thin air!’
    I think it may actually have vanished into the dustbin, with a little help from Honey, but all of us breathed a huge sigh of relief. Coco had to play the cowbells instead, and even then she couldn’t keep to the beat.
    ‘This will be different,’ Coco insists now. ‘Paddy will teach me. Properly. Please?’
    ‘I suppose,’ Mum says doubtfully, licking a curl of vanilla frosting from her fingertip and dotting golden-brown toasted mini marshmallows across the freshly iced cakes. Coco dives into the trunk and rescues the battered leather case, opening it up to reveal a glossy golden violin. She lifts it to her shoulder and saws the bow across it, and a sound like several cats being strangled fills the kitchen.
    ‘Ouch,’ Coco says. ‘It’s not as easy as it looks …’
    Mum offers the plate of still-warm cupcakes around,and I take one eagerly, biting into melting marshmallow sprinkles.
    ‘What about you, Cherry? Is there anything you’d like from the trunk?’
    ‘Not really,’ Cherry says. ‘It’s awesome, but … well, it’s just a bit too spooky for me.’
    ‘OK, Skye, so if you don’t want me to sell it, do you want anything from the trunk? The dresses, maybe?’
    I blink. ‘No way … those dresses … could I really have them?’
    ‘Why not?’ Mum says. ‘You love vintage clothes, don’t you? I think Clara would have wanted you to have them.’
    Half an hour later, the pine trunk is sitting next to my bed in the room Summer and I share. I lift the lid and push aside the crumpled tissue paper. For a moment I breathe in the faintest scent of marshmallow, a heady mixture of warm vanilla and sugar. Then it’s gone, replaced by the whiff of dust and age and sadness. Was it the aroma of Mum’s cupcakes, drifting up from the kitchen, or the remnants of some long-ago perfume? Although I’m not sure the scent would last all that time. It’s probably just my imagination.
    Last night, the whole idea of Clara’s trunk was so spookyI didn’t look too carefully at what was inside … but it’s like treasure.
    The trunk is filled with jewel-bright velvet shift dresses and petticoats made of white cotton lace. There are crinkled leather shoes with little heels, straw hats and cloche hats, and white gloves of soft suede. There is a feathered headband and silver bracelets tarnished dark with age, a beaded clutch bag, and folded carefully, right at the bottom, a soft woollen coat the colour of emeralds, lined with green satin.
    I slip the coat on, button it up, let the skirt spin out around me. This coat is soft and warm and barely worn at all, a million times better than my usual jumble-sale finds. Everything in the trunk is perfect, as though it were put away just yesterday and not ninety years ago.
    I try on the white cotton petticoats, the velvet shift dresses, one at a time … midnight blue, moss green, crimson. Clara Travers must have been small and slender because the clothes seem to fit. I don’t look like a child wearing adult clothes, not at all. A while ago I read a book about the 1920s, all jazz records and flapper girls. I pull on a cloche hat, peer out from under the rim, grinning, looking in the mirror for traces of a flapper girl from long ago.
    Judging by the cool clothes, I am pretty certain that Clara Travers liked to dance, that she listened to jazz music and learned the Charleston and had a dozen young men queuing up to dance with her in her bright flapper dresses and feathered headband. She was a cool girl, a party girl, I know it. Wearing these clothes, I suddenly feel a bit that way too … brave, beautiful, grown-up.
    Then I remember Grandma Kate’s story – that Clara was engaged to be married to a man much older than herself, and my smile fades.
    Who was Clara Travers? I wonder to myself. A rich girl with a trunkful of velvet dresses,