The Cipher

by John C. Ford

  Smiles stared at her like she was dumb. “If she knew and didn’t say anything, then she probably thought it was best for me not to know about the letter, too.”

  “Or she was just being respectful. Waiting till you turned eighteen, according to the directions for the message. Did she even read it?”

  “Yeah.” The harsh voice again. “I guess. They emailed about it and everything, apparently.”

  “Smiles . . .”

  He turned to her, gearing to attack.

  Why was he getting like this?

  “If it were me,” Melanie said, “the emailing thing would make me more curious.”

  “We’re different people, then. Or maybe I’m just weird.”

  Melanie could feel herself getting hot but couldn’t help it. She could practically see his self-esteem shrinking before her eyes, and it wasn’t right. “She gave birth to you, Smiles. Did she even apologize for leaving you and your dad?”

  Smiles balled up his soggy napkins and paper plate.

  “I’m done, let’s go.”

  “I’m not.” She had half a kabob on her plate.

  “You aren’t eating that.”

  She wasn’t, but now he was pissing her off. “You’re telling me what I’m going to eat? I don’t know why you’re acting like this is all my fault somehow.”

  His stare hardened, his eyes gone bitter and dull. “I’m done with this.”

  And then he left.

  Melanie finished her kabob out of spite. She sat on the sticky red plastic, in the hot greasy air, and she chewed slow bites that piled uncomfortably in her stomach.

  She walked to the apartment building on a storm cloud of hurt. Melanie knew she shouldn’t act when she wasn’t thinking right, but she couldn’t stop herself. She rapped loudly on Smiles’s door, welcoming the pain that broke across her knuckles.

  Smiles pulled the door open and retreated back inside, but Melanie didn’t follow.

  “It’s over,” was all she said before slamming the door shut and walking away, bloated and sick.

  19

  DID I JUST do that?

  Yes, I just did that.

  The Camry’s tires throbbed over the cobblestone drive. Melanie got out and wafted toward the house, feeling like someone had filled her with helium.

  She lived with her parents in an embarrassingly nice Tudor home, which hardly stood out in the candy-land opulence of Weston, the town motto of which should have been “Jealous?”

  This was all wrong. Melanie had always imagined breaking up with a guy as a triumphant, girl-power moment. The way it sounded in pop anthems. Even if it wasn’t like that—even if she didn’t get over it right away—she would have three girlfriends close at her side, and they would heal their troubles together through the power of, like, sweet-potato pies, or the wisdom of Jane Austen, or maybe a magical bra. The fat and/or slutty one would keep them in stitches the whole time, and everything would be right.

  Apparently not.

  Melanie was happy to see the lights off and no sign of her dad’s car. They must have had a thing tonight. Her parents always had a thing—an opera, a benefit, a gallery opening.

  A stone path led to their front door with its black iron hinges and tendrils of ivy. Melanie trudged up the stairs and sunk onto her bed without turning on a single light. She had logged a lot of hours like this in the last couple of years: facedown on her floppy white comforter, lights off, doubting herself. But this was worse than fretting over a volleyball game or chemistry test; this was Smiles. They had known each other forever. Their fathers were best friends. Their lives were wrapped around each other like the roots of an elm.

  Melanie couldn’t fight it off anymore—a nauseating feeling that she had pushed things too far. She didn’t know what it was like to have a mother who left you. She had basically forced Smiles to make that call. And he had done it, which must have been scary as hell, and when it was over he had held her hand softly. Like the kiss he had given her by the fish tank. Melanie couldn’t replay their argument too clearly—it was still a thick brew of feelings—but now she was getting the impression that she had riddled him with questions.

  Why hadn’t she given him a little space? All this stuff about Alice—it must have felt like a threat to Rose, who had been such a good mom to him before dying in that terrible accident.

  Melanie had loved Rose, too, and she loved even more the stories that Smiles would tell about her. How she taught him to make daiquiris (virgin for him, double rum for her) in the summer when he was little. How, when he was even smaller, she would let him work the ATM like a video game. Her password was RSJR (i.e., Robbie Smylie Junior), and Melanie went heartbroken all over at the thought of Smiles’s stubby infant fingers pressing the code, his hands clapping when the money came out. Rose had programmed that same password into their home security system, and—

  Melanie bolted upright.

  No.

  I couldn’t do that.

  Would it even work after a person died?

  Rose had sent Alice an email about her mystery letter . . .

  If Melanie could access Rose’s email account, she could see it. And then Melanie would know what all of this was about.

  Without thinking, Melanie turned on her bedroom light and fired up her Mac.

  She was hoping that Rose’s email account would still be active (she’d been dead for almost a year now, but how would an email service know that?), and she couldn’t be positive she’d used the RSJR password for it.

  Melanie searched her Gmail account for messages from Rose. She quickly found two messages from roseyrose65@yahoo.com about a surprise party for Smiles they’d planned together. Melanie had never had the heart to delete them.

  Now that she had Rose’s email address, she went to Yahoo—the screen distressingly joyful and tidy, advertising a movie called Pants on Fire—and plugged “roseyrose65” into the Yahoo ID box. For the password, Melanie typed in “rsjr” and pursed her lips.

  A red message: Invalid ID or password.

  Maybe the password had to be at least six characters long. She tried “robbiejr.”

  Same error message.

  She tried “robertjunior,” “robbiesmiles,” “robertsmyliejr,” and “littlerob,” but none of them worked, either, and Melanie started wondering if Yahoo was tracking all her failed attempts to break in to the account. She was probably raising suspicion deep within Yahoo’s security programs in Silicon Valley, or Bangladesh, or wherever. Yeah, Melanie probably shouldn’t have been doing this from her own computer, but it was too late now.

  She had signed up for things on the Internet that required you to use both letters and numbers in your password. Melanie looked at her cell phone and found the numbers corresponding to JR.

  And then she typed “robbie57.”

  And then it worked.

  The email page freaked her out.

  Good Evening, Rose! it said, as if she had just stepped out of the grave to update her pals on how the afterlife was going. Melanie shuddered away the feeling that she was doing something blasphemous.

  Just find the email Rose sent.

  Smiles’s birth mother’s first name was Alice, that much Melanie knew. His dad had started his company back when they were still together, and he’d named it after her in a cutesy kind of way. Alyce Systems.

  Melanie brought up the “Sent Mail” folder and clicked on the “To” bar, which put the recipients in alphabetical order.

  Amongst the A’s, Melanie found it. A single message, sent to Alice:

  Rose Carlisle

  To: Alice T

  Thursday, April 3 11:53:04 AM

  Subject: Alyce

  I have your info on Andrei. We need to talk. Please respond—I’m not into head games here.

  Rose

  Melan
ie smiled wide. It sounded so much like her.

  Rose was so much fun, but there was something wild about her, too, something half-unhinged, and she had a ballbuster at her core.

  Her immediate thought about the message was a guilty one: Maybe Rose and this “Andrei” had been having an affair. It might explain the “head games” comment and the antagonistic tone. Maybe Alice had found out Rose was cheating on Mr. Smylie and was trying to exploit her knowledge somehow. But why? And what did it have to do with Smiles? Melanie had no clue, and she shouldn’t be speculating like this anyway.

  She was ready to close the account when she re-sorted the emails by date and saw that Rose had sent a second email immediately after the one she’d sent to Alice—to Melanie’s own father. A worried hum escaped Melanie’s lips. The email read: Marshall, I know you’re in Saint-Tropez for the week, but if you get this give me a jingle. If you can drag yourself from the topless beaches, that is J.

  Was it just a coincidence? The email was friendly enough, but she obviously wanted to talk to him right away—she wouldn’t have bothered him in Saint-Tropez otherwise. Could there be a connection between her dad, Alice, and whoever this Andrei person was? How could her own father possibly be mixed up in all this? Certainly he couldn’t have anything to do with an affair. Just the thought of him on a topless beach was enough to turn Melanie’s stomach. It was silly to even venture a guess—

  Headlights flashed on the street below. The car swept past—it wasn’t her parents—but it broke Melanie out of her runaway thoughts.

  This was pretty ghoulish, what she was doing.

  She printed out the email to Alice, shut off her computer, and hopped under her comforter. It was pointless to even pretend she could give this thing up—not now, not with her dad mixed up in it, too. But she resolved not to think of the affair angle, or make any other premature judgments, until she got some better information. If she was lucky, Andrei worked at Alyce Systems. It seemed possible, anyway, given the subject line. Melanie did her for-credit internship every Friday at the Alyce headquarters (with Bug Eyes, Jenna Brooke). They worked in the HR department, so tomorrow Melanie could search for employees named Andrei.

  Melanie stared up at the ceiling with a crazy energy racing in her head.

  There was something significant in that letter, she was sure. Something important to Smiles, to her dad, and maybe even to herself. The trauma of the night was fading already, replaced with a determination to discover what the letter was all about.

  It was like a test, and Melanie was excellent at tests.

  “If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann Hypothesis been proven?”

  —David Hilbert, 1900

  FRIDAY

  “As humans we must dream, and when we dream, we dream of money.”

  —David Mamet, The Spanish Prisoner

  23

  IT WAS SIX fifteen a.m. and someone was pounding on Smiles’s door.

  Not cool.

  He hugged his comforter tight and buried his head in his pillow. Usually someone knocking at his door with this kind of brute force meant yet another noise complaint from the semi-hot chicks in the apartment below, who had turned out to be disappointingly anal about such things. But he hadn’t left the stereo on last night or anything, so he spent the next ten minutes hoping they’d just go away.

  They didn’t, and at 6:25 in the morning—6:25 in the morning—Sir Knock-a-Lot was still going at it. Smiles wrapped the sheet around himself and stumbled to the door.

  Ben.

  “What the hell, dude?”

  “C’mon, we need to beat rush hour,” Ben panted.

  He was wearing a polo the color of leftover salmon. With pleated khakis and gray docksiders. Did nerds actually try to wear the lamest possible clothes? Was it some kind of elaborate in-joke they had been playing on society for decades?

  “I told you we needed to leave early,” Ben said.

  “Early means before noon,” Smiles said, but Ben obviously had no concern for such norms of etiquette. “Give me five minutes,” he groaned, since he was up anyway. “And no kidding, dude. For your own good? Change those pants.”

  When they got past Framingham, Smiles let it loose.

  The Infiniti hit eighty, then eighty-five, then ninety. Cruising speed.

  After rousting Smiles with the big scene back at the apartment, Ben was sound asleep in the passenger seat. Smiles had nothing to do but sit there and think about the phone call with Alice, his birth mother.

  It’s better left alone.

  It’s better left alone, she kept saying.

  It’s better left alone. I’m getting on a plane. I’ll have to end this call now. Click.

  He cranked the stereo to get the call out of his head, tapping out a Green Day song on the steering wheel and watching with some relief when Ben finally shifted upright.

  “So, what do you want to play at the casino?” Smiles said before Ben could nod off again. He needed some convo to get him through this drive.

  “I can’t gamble,” Ben mumbled, half-asleep. “I’d get too nervous.”

  Smiles shook his head. “There’s nothing to be nervous about. It’s all about numbers, and you’re a wiz with numbers. You could tear it up at blackjack. Rain Man style.”

  “What?”

  “Forget it,” Smiles said. Ben was already going for some book in his army backpack. He was so paranoid that he’d rigged the closure on it with an actual combination lock. His high school locker had probably looked like Fort Knox.

  “So what’s that million-dollar problem you’re trying to figure out, anyway?”

  Ben stared at him. “You really want to know?”

  “Why, you don’t think I’m smart enough to get it?” Actually, Smiles knew he wouldn’t be. “Just dumb it down a little. Gimme the highlights.”

  Ben inhaled. “It’s called the Riemann Hypothesis.”

  Smiles flew by an SUV, focusing tight on Ben’s words so he wouldn’t get lost.

  “Probably the biggest mystery in math,” Ben said, “is the pattern behind prime numbers. No one can figure it out. You know what prime numbers are, right?”

  “You better break it down for me, Einstein.” Smiles might have been more embarrassed about his lack of knowledge if Ben hadn’t woken him up before sunrise.

  Ben flicked off the stereo. “Okay, well, most numbers are the product of at least two other numbers. Like 21. You multiply 3 times 7 and get 21, right?”

  “Right.” Smiles was all over that one.

  “But the number 7, that’s a prime number. ’Cause you can’t multiply two other numbers to get 7. Except 7 and 1, and 1 doesn’t count.”

  “Okay.” Smiles was totally getting this.

  “Some prime numbers are huge, with, like, a hundred and fifty digits in them, but they occur more rarely the higher you go. And they don’t occur in any pattern. Or, at least, any pattern that anyone’s figured out in the whole history of math. Which is weird, because everything in math has a pattern.”

  “That’s the problem, figuring out the pattern? They’ll give you a million dollars for that?”

  “More or less.” Ben sounded offended. “It’s only the holy grail of math problems. Some of the best mathematicians have spent their whole lives trying to figure it out, and no one’s gotten it.”

  “Why do they call it the Rainman whatever?”

  “The Riemann Hypothesis. It’s named after this guy, Bernhard Riemann, who actually did a lot of the work behind Einstein’s general theory of relativity.” Ben waited a beat, like he expected Smiles to break out into applause for the great Mr. Riemann. “Anyway, he had this hypothesis about how it works . . .”

  Ben was getting excited talking about this. His voice was rising and he was rocking back and forth in his seat. Smile
s had seen him do the rocking thing in his apartment—one of those little tip-offs, like the pants, that things were a bit off with the kid.

  “No one’s been able to prove or disprove Riemann’s hypothesis, though,” Ben went on. “It has to do with zeta functions, which are a little complica—”

  “Yeah, better skip the zeta functions.”

  Now that he’d gotten Ben all wound up, Smiles had a sudden urge to shut down the conversation. They were treading close to the topic of Alyce Systems. All this talk about prime numbers was jogging his memory, and he was sure now that his dad’s discovery—the one that had revolutionized computer encryption—was based on prime numbers, too. Ben probably knew all about it.

  Smiles didn’t want to ask him, though, because if the conversation went in that direction Smiles was headed straight for the black hole. He was out for a good time at Fox Creek, not a reminder of his ailing father and how he’d never measure up. He tugged the steering wheel to the right, barely making the off-ramp. A horn blared behind them.

  Ben white-knuckled the armrest. “What was that?”

  “I need some Taco Bell,” Smiles grumbled.

  The rest of the drive felt like work. Traffic snarled as the morning wore on, and Ben wasn’t providing much in the way of company, unless spraying the passenger’s seat with churro crumbs and scribbling in his notebook counted for anything. The only voice that spoke came from the deadened female vocals of the navigation system.

  That and the one in Smiles’s head: It’s better left alone. I’m getting on a plane. I’ll have to end this call now.

  Smiles’s mood didn’t improve until they saw Fox Creek rising out of the flat green landscape. If you put a McMansion on horse steroids and placed it in the middle of a farm, that’s sort of what Fox Creek looked like. Smiles loved it.

  He ignored the self-parking sign and drove straight to the glass-canopied casino entrance.

  “Don’t even think about leaving that wrapper in the car,” he said to Ben, and grabbed his duffel bag from the backseat. The valet handed him a ticket, and Smiles led the way through revolving doors to a marbled lobby area. Beyond it, the casino rang to the tune of a thousand slot machines. He dumped his bag on the floor, basking in it all for a second, before spotting the hotel reception to their left.