by Spencer Baum
“The Letter to Julius Adams,” she said, the sound of her own words getting lost in the swelling of the hum all around her.
“We get to keep this for one month,” Ms. Stephenson said. “I’m supposed to put it inside a glass case, and I will. I’m also supposed to take your picture with it, so if you don’t mind, please stand over there in front of the encyclopedias and hold the letter so we can see it.”
Gretchen did as she was told. Ms. Stephenson grabbed a camera from the bottom drawer of her desk and took Gretchen’s picture.
“I thought that today, while it’s just you and me,” Ms. Stephenson said, “we’d take it out of the frame, and give it a look.”
“I’d like that,” said Gretchen. Gerrard’s spiral doodles, surrounding the few words on the page, were swimming before Gretchen’s eyes.
Ms. Stephenson took the frame and loosened the wooden backing. With the care that it deserved, she removed the letter and handed it to Gretchen.
Gretchen’s fingertips grew warm where they touched the letter. Gretchen had read the words on this letter many times before. In all the books about Gerrard, the text of this letter was published. A picture of the actual letter was not.
The Letter to Julius Adams was considered important because it was Gerrard’s final communication with the world before he disappeared. The scholars thought the letter was significant in its triviality. Gerrard said nothing of note in the letter, except that he was alive. To many, the letter was another piece of evidence that before he died, Peter Gerrard went mad.
The scholars were wrong. They were wrong because they were looking for meaning in the wrong place. Gerrard had written the trivial letters, words, and sentences of this letter to mask its true message. Its true message was written in the spirals.
All along the edges of the paper, spiral doodles, neither decorative nor functional, covered the open space. These were Gerrard’s final message, and he had encoded it in a way that only someone like Gretchen, someone who heard, could understand it.
The spirals moved before her eyes like ocean waves, carrying Gretchen away from the present, away from her life in Shuberville, and into the world of Peter Gerrard, where the normal rules of reality didn’t apply, and a far-away mountain held a powerful secret.
Chapter 9
Kevin was the last one out of Cassandra’s house. As he closed the door behind him, he heard Jackie slide the deadbolt into place. After they stepped off the property and into the surrounding woods, Jackie made the mud shift and slide behind them to cover their footprints.
“My mom has a safe in her lab,” Kevin said. “It’s been locked shut ever since she died.”
“Is that why we’re going to get the Sticky Fingers book?” asked Joseph. “What happened – did you forget the combination?”
“I never knew the combination,” said Kevin. “My dad didn’t either.”
The words came out with only a measure of anger, a welcome contrast to the fury this topic usually stirred in Kevin. For the first time in years, Kevin felt hopeful that he might finally learn what was inside his mom’s safe.
After his mom died, Kevin found himself doing lots of adult things, things his dad couldn’t manage alone. Closets had to be cleaned, books and biological specimens had to be boxed, letters had to be opened and answered, and all the while, Courtney Browne’s safe, a small steel box with a combination lock on the door, sat in the closet, sealed shut. Kevin was hopeful that a slip of paper or an old computer file would turn up and give them the combination. Weeks went by. It was a Sunday afternoon when his patience ran out. He asked his dad to call a locksmith.
The next day a professional locksmith came to their house, and gave a grim prognosis.
“This is an unmarked Swiss Banking Grade Safe,” the locksmith said, barely able to contain his admiration. “It’s not meant to be opened by anyone who doesn’t know the combination, even a licensed professional.”
“What does that mean?” asked Kevin’s dad. “You can’t open it?”
“The locking mechanism inside this safe is surrounded by sound-reducing layers of rubber and lead. Even with my equipment, I won’t be able to hear enough of what’s happening in there to crack this. And supposing that I could, it would take days and days of work because the combination is six digits long. The only way this is getting opened is in an explosives lab.”
“How much does that cost?” said Kevin’s dad.
“What’s inside this safe, if you don’t mind me asking?” said the locksmith.
“We don’t know,” said Kevin’s dad.
The locksmith laughed. “Explosives present a new problem. I recommend explosives if we know there are diamonds inside. Since you don’t know the contents, we’ve got a problem. The walls of this safe are an inch thick and the lock is the best quality in the world. Explosives can blast it open, but unless you’ve got something solid in there, whatever’s inside will break into a million pieces.”
The locksmith left. The safe remained shut. Over the months, Kevin learned to forget. He quit looking at the safe. He tried not to think of it. He tried to move on.
They arrived at Jackie and Joseph’s house just before noon, retrieved Safe Cracking For Fun and Profit from the bookshelf, and were back out the door, Kevin in the lead. On foot, Kevin’s house should have been a half hour’s travel. They ran, and covered the distance in a few minutes.
“The Lab” was still the name of the room that once belonged to Kevin’s mom. Over the years, as her Peter Gerrard hobby turned into an obsession, Courtney Browne evolved from an outdoor enthusiast to an amateur scientist to a semi-professional scientist to a respected field researcher and expert on Peter Gerrard. The spare bedroom in Kevin’s house evolved along with his mother, gathering more and more professional lab equipment over the years.
No scientific research had been performed in the room since the day she died, but the tools that made it a laboratory remained. Courtney Browne’s workbench, a pocked and stained maple antique, was now an over-sized stand for her microscope. Her computer and its already out-of-date software hid on a small cart in the corner. The drafting table where she once captured all her ideas on paper was becoming Kevin’s preferred place to do homework.
Kevin and Jackie now sat at that drafting table, Jackie surfing the Internet on her phone, Kevin immersing himself in the words of Sticky Fingers Smith.
It’s an act of love to put something in a safe. It’s an act of love to crack a safe, too. Things are put into safes because the world wants them, and the owner doesn’t want to share. In that sense, safe cracking is an equalizer.
“When does he get to the part about how to open a safe?” Kevin said.
“Not until the end,” said Joseph, who sat at the workbench, hunched over the microscope, for some reason having decided to put the stolen copy of The Shuberville Tribune underneath it.
Kevin flipped through the pages of the safe cracking book, stopping at the last chapter: “The Wheel Pack, The Fence, and Safe Cracking by Mathematical Deduction.”
Each number in a safe’s combination corresponds to one wheel inside the locking mechanism. Each wheel has a groove cut into its side and a tab of metal sticking out from its face. When the combination dial hits one number in the combination, stops, and turns the other way, the metal tab grabs onto the next wheel in the locking mechanism. In a correctly dialed combination, all the wheels of the lock are spun in a precise manner such that the grooves on each wheel line up, creating an extended groove across the entire lock. A small metal bar above the wheels falls into this groove, and the door opens.
“This sounds complicated,” Kevin said.
“It gets worse,” said Joseph.
“Here, let me see that,” Jackie said, grabbing Safe Cracking for Fun and Profit. She skimmed the open pages of the book. “How hard can this be? We’ve got super sensitive hearing.”
Jackie went to the closet and pressed her ear against the safe. She slowly turned the dial.
&nbs
p; “I heard something!” she said. She pulled her head away to observe the number on the dial.
“Seventeen,” she whispered.
Jackie pressed her ear against the safe again and began turning the dial the other way, stopping when she heard another click.
“How many numbers are in the combination?” she said.
“Six,” said Kevin.
Six times Jackie stopped, leaned back, observed the number on the dial, and began turning the other way. After the sixth stop, she tried to open the door. It didn’t budge.
“I knew it wouldn’t be that easy,” said Joseph, reaching for the safe cracking book. “I remember some long, horrible process with paper, pencil, and days of work.” Joseph flipped a few pages and handed the book to Kevin.
The sound of tab touching wheel is simultaneously the most exhilarating and exasperating sound in the world for the safe cracker. It is the sound of progress, one measly, infinitesimally tiny step at a time.
Kevin took the book back to his mom’s drafting table and read through to the end. With each successive page, his hopes of getting inside the safe drifted farther away. Sticky Fingers outlined a painstaking process of going number by number, listening carefully, and graphing a chart of number combinations that brought about clicks.
A click can be a stopping and turning point, or it can be a miscellaneous collision between two tabs of metal that aren’t going to connect. A well-designed safe takes advantage of the exponential growth of possible combinations that come with an increasing number of wheels in the locking mechanism. An experienced cracker can open a common three-digit safe in less than an hour. A good six-digit safe may take him a lifetime.
Kevin looked up from the book to see Joseph listening to the safe and spinning the dial.
“I definitely hear the clicks,” he said. “Come try this Kevin.”
Kevin approached and pressed his ear to the steel door. It was warm where Joseph and Jackie had listened. He turned the dial.
“Click” wasn’t enough of a word to describe what he heard. A clap, a scrape, a click, a twang, and a vibration, one after the other, the vibration resonating for seconds after the click – this was the sound inside the safe.
The sound of tab touching wheel is simultaneously the most exhilarating and exasperating sound in the world…
Kevin turned the sound into a mental image. Two metal tabs, each connected to a wheel, colliding inside the safe, and scraping past each other. The twang, the vibration --this was contact, but not productive contact. He needed the tabs to connect and stay connected. He needed the second wheel in the locking mechanism to roll with the first.
He turned the dial the other direction. The sound of smooth motion, a wheel spinning, looking for contact…he heard years of spinning this dial to no avail. He heard years of nothing. The safe locked away in a closet, never to be mentioned by Kevin or his dad. His mom had opened and closed this safe every day, and he had never paid any attention. Her fingers turned this dial with expert skill, stopping and changing at all the right places. The door always opened for her.
Kevin thought of the last time this safe had been opened.
He could hear his mother working, her fingers turning the dial. A long spin, a stop, a short counterspin, a stop. She opened the safe.
Kevin had been in his bedroom, holding a ruler over a bean sprout grown in a coffee cup. His dad was playing music downstairs. A quiet woman singing over a solo guitar. His dad was making a sculpture of the sun. To this day, it was the only piece of art his dad never finished.
Kevin wrote down the date and measurement of the bean sprout. Everyone in his class had to keep a log of their bean sprout.
A loud crash, a body falling, a dish breaking.
Kevin ran from his bean sprout to see what happened. His mom was on the floor, sitting up, looking dazed. A brown book lay face down in the corner of the room. The shattered remains of a coffee mug lay across the floor.
“What happened?” Kevin asked.
“I don’t know,” said his mom. She looked in his eyes, saw that he was scared. “It’s nothing. I’m fine. I just – I must have been lost in what I was reading and tripped over my own feet.”
Kevin’s dad came upstairs. “What’s going on?” he said.
“Mom tripped over her feet,” Kevin said.
His dad cracked a smile. “Are you alright?” he said.
“Yes,” said his mom. Her eyes were pensive. She looked confused. “My internal clock must be off, that’s all.”
Kevin’s mom had just returned from England, where she had gone to visit an expert on the work of Peter Gerrard.
“Do you hear something?” she said.
Kevin and his dad stood still.
“I’ve got Jessica Tannen on the CD player,” said his dad.
“No, not that,” said his mom. “It sounds like wind, no, it sounds like a flute, many flutes.”
Kevin’s dad closed his eyes.
“I don’t hear flutes, Honey. When I listen, I hear what I always hear,” said his dad, referencing the hum without speaking its name. “Tell me more about what you hear.”
Kevin remembered the sense of panic that had come over him that day. If both his parents became Hearers, any chance of a normal life for him would be gone forever. Fortunately, his mom put an end to it.
“You know, it’s nothing,” she said. “I think I took a nasty fall and that’s it. Just a nasty fall.”
Flutes. Kevin heard flutes inside the safe. He pressed his ear flat against the steel door. It was a familiar sound. It was a butterfly on his shoulder, the last taste of sweet sap from a fallen elm tree, the memory of his mom’s voice breaking into a dream.
Kevin spun the dial and heard another click. This time two wheels connected, no twang, no vibration. The door was one step closer to opening. The flutes grew louder.
He sunk his shoulders and lost himself in the sounds. He was listening less for the clicks of a locking mechanism and more for those flutes. He was chasing that sound.
Another click. Another step closer. He didn’t know how he was doing it. He just knew that if he followed the sound with his mind, his fingers would find the path to get there.
The final click, followed by a crash. It reminded Kevin of the elm tree in the park, falling to the ground with a sudden violence. The lock had come together. The bolt slid out of the way.
Kevin leaned back and opened the safe.
You Will Understand Everything When You Read It
Courtney Browne took her son, Kevin, to the library on Saturdays. It was on one of these Saturday outings that Courtney discovered her passion. While Kevin, only six at the time, looked through a stack of children’s fantasy books, Courtney opened a thick text that someone had left on a table: The Origin of Insect Societies by Peter Gerrard.
She had heard of Gerrard before, live in Turquoise for long enough and you’re bound to, but she had never paid him any attention. The first section she read gave evidence that termites were building complex, functional skyscrapers long before the first humans ever set foot on the earth. As she raced through the chapters, skimming information about the ruthlessness of an ant colony and the camaraderie of a beehive, she wondered how she had lived for so long, unaware of the amazing things happening under her feet.
That afternoon, Kevin left the library with a paperback titled Invasion of the Brain Sharpeners, and Courtney left with the text that became known in the Browne house as “Mom’s Big Bug Book.”
She stayed up all night to finish The Origin of Insect Societies, journaling her thoughts as she read. She spent the next morning in the backyard, looking at bugs.
A year after her first encounter with Gerrard’s text at the library, she published her first professional research article. It was about insects unique to Northern New Mexico, and was well-received in Etymology Review. She applied for and received a research grant to travel from Canada to Mexico and follow the migration of the Monarch Butterfly, just as Peter Gerrard
had done in the 19th Century. Shortly after her notes from that trip were published, she received an offer to travel to England and meet eminent biologist Tristan Nelson III.
“I’m amazed at your work,” Nelson told her. “I have no doubt that had you started earlier, had you devoted your life to research as others have done, you would now be one of the greatest scientists of your generation.”
“That’s kind of you to say. Thank you, Dr. Nelson,” said Courtney.
Nelson wore beige and brown tweeds. His voice was soft and weak with age. They sat in his office at King’s College. It was nearing midnight on a Thursday. Only the cleaning staff joined them in the building.
“So many have attempted to follow Gerrard’s footsteps, but you captured the essence of what made his research so spectacular,” said Nelson. “It’s more than a passion for bugs that sets his work apart. It’s humility and awe at the accomplishments of the insect kingdom. That is what made Gerrard the greatest Etymologist of all time, and is why you are his legitimate heir.”
“His heir?” said Courtney. “What does that mean?”
Nelson unlocked a door at the back of his office, revealing a one-room library of antique books. Nelson ambled to the back of the library, motioning Courtney to follow him. He pointed at a metal safe on the bottom deck of a bookcase in the corner.
“I’m too old to bend down that far,” Nelson said. “I will tell you the combination and you will open it.”
Courtney squatted in front of the safe.
“Three turns to the right, stop at 24,” Nelson began.
For nearly a minute Courtney spun the combination lock per Nelson’s instruction. When she stopped at the sixth number, something inside fell with a startling weight, and the door on the safe swung open.
“Go ahead, take it,” said Nelson. “It’s yours now. But there are conditions of ownership.”
Courtney reached inside and retrieved an ancient leather-bound book.
“What are the conditions?” she asked.
“The first and most important condition is absolute, unequivocal secrecy,” Nelson said. “There are people who desperately want this book, and would have no qualms about killing you to take it. You must tell no one I gave it to you. No one.
