Trunk Club

Despite the fact that it was a rainy, freezing fall day, Lyla decided to go for a walk. She stopped suddenly at the Delgado's house when she noticed two movers carrying the trunk of a mature Maple Tree out the front door.

“Watch it Frank! Hey, does this go to the estate sale?” yelled the mover in the doorway, his brother carefully lowering his end of the steamer trunk down the front steps. “No. I want to keep this one,” said the young Maple Tree in the driveway. “Grandma wanted me to have it.”

The trunk was placed beside the tree & there it remained for years and years. The tree, having no way of opening it, simply grew beside it. Decades went by. No one touched the steamer trunk. The maple's roots tangled with the old trunk until it almost seemed a part of the tree.

Eventually the tree lifted the trunk into the air as it grew taller. Generations passed, the house was torn down, and the driveway crumbled to gravel. People remarked on the tree that was strangely rectangular halfway up its height.

One day a boy decided to climb up to inspect the strangely shaped tree. A crowd gathered around. “Hey,” he yelled. “I think it’s a box or something.” The group decided to chop the tree down. After some work, they all peered at the steamer trunk that had been freed from the wood.

The trunk revealed a wealth of paraphernalia. At the bottom was a string attached to a false door. Once pulled, it revealed a hidden compartment. In it, Lyla’s diary, revealing her greatest secret—a map indicating 100s of other steamer trunks filled with stolen goods.