"Well, I didn't know she was a cop, so we're even."
I snorted. "Even? No, I'd say a career in law enforcement is harder to hide than a . . . glorified compass. I think she wins that one." I stopped laughing as my head was thrust back into the seat rest. Des had floored the accelerator.
"She wins, huh?"
"Des, cut it out!" The sound of the air rushing over the never-quite-closed passenger window became a jetlike whine as a distant pickup in the next lane grew impossibly quickly, then hurtled backward past us. "I hate it when you pull this shit! You're scaring me. Des?"
Two tanker trucks were side by side ahead. From their perspective, they were laboring up the grade, barely gaining on the summit. From mine, they were an onrushing wall of metal.
"Tell me who won, then."
Des called them her "black rages," but I thought of them as white. When she was in their grip, her voice was as calm and cool as a marble slab.
I no longer even registered the windshield before me. I saw only the gleaming bulletlike rear of the nearest tanker, on which the reflection of Des' car ballooned like something spurting through a wormhole.
"You won, you won! You always fucking win, OK?"
She laughed and applied the brakes. I lurched forward, palms on dashboard, as the car fishtailed. "And don't you forget it," Des said through gritted teeth as she cradled the wheel and steered the rapidly slowing car over the rumble strip and onto the shoulder, where it shuddered to a stop.
Unable to breathe, I watched the tankers get blessedly smaller as they chugged on up the grade. Then Des' mouth was on mine, breathing for both of us.
Once again, Des somehow had maintained control—of the car, of herself, of me.
I asked Des, early on, if she ever hid any caches herself.
"Yes," she said, "but since I know where those are, what fun would hunting them be? And it's not as if you've finished your current task. You're not half done decrypting those clues."
I had rediscovered my childhood love for ciphers and codes when I realized that many hiders posted not only their cache coordinates but also clues that would help the finder, clues that often were encrypted using this simple substitution cipher:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M
N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
A becomes N, B becomes O, and so forth. It was easy to learn, and soon I could just read "vg'f," for example, as "it's," and "gur" as "the." And how Des used to laugh at my indignation when the encrypted "clue" turned out to be the same information already written out above in standard English. "It's like those idiot car owners," I told her, "who buy a personalized plate only to spell out MY MINI, or something, as if that weren't obvious."
"I agree," she said. "People that uncreative shouldn't be allowed to drive."
That was our last dinner together before I went with my parents to visit our Southern cousins over Memorial Day weekend, so I wasn't with her when it happened, had to read about it in the paper that I kicked out of the way when I lugged my mom's latest Tupperware CARE package into the apartment, half-pissed that Des hadn't returned my calls all weekend. I sat at the butcher's block with the unrolled paper and a ham biscuit and a cup of Irish breakfast tea, snapping the newly liberated rubber band against my thigh as I glanced at the local front and wondered—before I had the chance to think about what I was wondering—where they dug up such an out-of-date photo of Des. Her high-school yearbook? Then the story around the photo hit me, not word by sequential word, but at once, like a rogue wave, leaving me gasping among the fragments. Dateline Oakland, Maryland. Fatality. Muddy Creek. Flood stage. Five inches of rain. Lone hiker. Slipped. Apparently. Fell. Waterfall. Fifty feet. Rocks. Body recovered 6:45 p.m. Visitors reminded of danger. Family notified. Services pending. Agencies assisting. Maryland Natural Resources Police. State Park Service. State Police. "Right coordinates, wrong time," Des said into my ear via her apartment voicemail, which she re-recorded frequently in hope of annoying her mom, who never called. "Be careful leaving a message." Southern Garrett Rescue Squad. All to be commended. Oakland Volunteer Fire Department. I set down my cell phone, lifted my teacup by the handle and brought it down hard against the edge of the block. Fragments flew. Hot liquid spattered my chest. Blood welled from my knuckle. I gripped the jagged porcelain handle to gouge my palm, to cut, to hurt, but felt nothing as I lifted the cell in my other hand and speed-dialed again, just to hear Des' voice, and again, and again, the right coordinates but the wrong time, long past the start of my shift, long past sunset, the right coordinates, the only light in the room the microwave time, the wrong time.
The pews were thronged with impeccably dressed, well-coiffed young women, the demurely sniffling products of the best diets, dentistry and tennis lessons that money could buy, as well as, apparently, the latest cloning technologies. Who would have guessed that as an undergrad, Des had been the president of a fucking sorority? And here were the sisters, generations of them, what a turnout. Maybe they were earning activity points. I stood at the back of the church with the other latecomers and groundlings, marveling.
And when did they start showing PowerPoint presentations at funerals?
When the world loses its focus, these are the things you focus on.
I looked for Trooper Terry, the only friend of Des I knew, but she was nowhere in sight.
The "ladies of the church," as the gray-mustached pastor put it, had a spread ready for us afterward, in the social hall. I shuffled dutifully past the long table with the rest of the throng, known by and knowing no one, and I put several random food-shaped objects on my coaster-sized wax-paper plate and made arrangements of them. With a couple more corn chips, I might have had a reasonable approximation of the international biohazard symbol. I slid my artifacts off the plate into a trash can and replaced them with two triangular pimiento-cheese sandwiches on wheat bread. Someone had sliced off the crusts. I wondered who she was and whether she thought that trimming the crusts would spare us something, us mourners; or whether she simply had a bread pudding in mind for later; and wondered miserably who in her sorority Des had fantasized about and how far she had gotten with any of them. Or vice versa.
"Ms. Milledge?"
I blurted "Yes" even as I looked up to see Des—an older Des, with crow's feet and smaller eyeglasses, and shorter, and in an expensive black pantsuit. Of course I had been hanging around hoping to get up the nerve to speak to Des' mother; I realized that now. She had been visible throughout the service, enthroned in the beribboned front pew. But what I intended to say to the woman was a mystery ("I knew your daughter, and I mean biblically" and "With your daughter, Mrs. Creech, it wasn't just the sex" both seemed to lack a certain something), and that she might approach me never had crossed my mind. For all I knew, she'd never heard of me, certainly never would have singled me out in a crowd. She was looking not at me but at my untouched sandwiches. I dropped the plate into the trash, dusted imaginary crumbs from my fingers and reached out a hand—which she grasped with a look of surprise, as if the handshake had been involuntary, like my response when I heard my name. "I'm so sorry," we both said, and then we let go, flustered. I was self-conscious about my own hand once withdrawn, as if I were obligated now to do something with it. I stuck both hands into my jacket pockets.
"May I," she said, sounding hoarse, then swallowed. When she started again, she sounded stronger, more like the vice president of product development. "May I speak to you a moment, Ms. Milledge? In private?" She indicated the nearest kitchen door with a slight palm-up gesture, hand at her hip. Oh shit, I thought as I led the way. She looked like Des, but her vibe was all Mom, and I felt busted, like in the rec room in eighth grade. I flushed, and to my shame, tears welled up; the women in the long, dark, institutional kitchen (trimming more crusts, no doubt) were blurs. Ahead was a welcome oblong of light, a screen door that I pushed open to enter a scraggly little rose garden. In the distance, a buff shirtless boy in denim shorts rode a Toro across the church's vast back lawn.
Mrs. Creech closed both the wood door and the screen door behind us and addressed the yard boy when she said, "Thank you for not making a scene."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Of grief," she said. "A lover's grief." She plucked a pack of gum from her black velvet Christian Louboutin clutch, unsheathed a stick and folded it into her mouth. "I wondered whether you'd be here, and what you would do, but you've been very discreet, and I appreciate that. Juicy Fruit?"
"No, thanks," I said. "I can't chew gum and stifle my flamboyant dyke hysterics at the same time."
"Ha!" she said, and crossed her arms, shivering in the 70-degree afternoon. "I knew you'd be funny. That's what she always went for, smart and funny. Only never quite as smart as her, and never quite as funny, either."
"Is there something I can do for you, Mrs. Creech?"
She stared at me, then blinked and shook her head, laughed. "Forgive me," she said. "Meeting Destiny's . . . single friends . . . always brought out the worst in me. Back when she bothered to introduce them, that is. I just want to give you something." I'd seen wallets roomier than her designer purse, but she rummaged as if it were Santa's bag. "I've been boxing up Destiny's—effects—and I thought you would like to have this, and this, and this."
A photograph, a locket, a notebook with a zippered cover.
The photograph was of me lying beneath her on my sofa, our lips locked, my hands on her ass beneath her shorts. I had set the timer on the camera and sat next to her; she jumped me just before the flash went off, spoiling what was to have been my ceremonial "This-is-my-new-bestest-friend" photo for my parents. Dad, who is Upstate South Carolina through and through, would have taken this at face value, but Mom would have understood, being from Charleston, and would have appreciated the tact. She's tolerant of almost anything, as long as it's tolerable: neither explicit nor public. There's knowing, and there's knowing, as they say.
The locket was cheap and plastic and implausibly green, like something from a Lucky Charms box, and inside was a thumb-sized photo of myself, one I'd never seen. I was looking down, my face so smooth and relaxed I must have been engrossed in a book, or a cipher. This preserved intimacy embarrassed me more than the sofa photo. I thumbed shut the locket and unzipped the notebook.
I recognized it, of course. I had seen it countless times since that first afternoon in the café, but Des never had given me much chance to examine it. It pissed me off, eventually, and I gave up asking. Holding the worn, loved thing—stained not by Muddy Creek, the cover being waterproof, but by coffee and grimy fingers and constant use—seemed like a violation of the dead, especially as it had a permanent curve, having ridden for ages in a well-rounded back pocket. But I leafed through it anyway. Inside were page after page of tiny coordinates and symbols in handwritten rows that spiked across the pages like EKG printouts. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of caches, meticulously recorded.
"Look how short he's mowing this grass," Mrs. Creech said, "and no rain due this week. He's just killing it."
I focused on the numbers until I was over the locket, and able to speak.
"Thank you," I said.
"You're welcome," Mrs. Creech said. "The GPS unit was smashed, of course."
I nodded. "I have my own. A present from your daughter."
"I see. She could be very generous, I suppose, in her own way. Well, they'll be wondering what happened to me in there. Goodbye, Ms. Milledge. You won't be seeing me again." She didn't offer to shake hands this time.
"Mrs. Creech?"
"Yes?"
"How did you know my name?"
She paused on the other side of the screen door; the mesh took 20 years off her age. "You haven't reached the back of the notebook," she said. She closed the wood door behind her, leaving me outside, and I realized I wasn't meant to go back in. I flipped to the back of the notebook and found
JENNY MILLEDGE
JENNY MILLEDGE
JENNY MILLEDGE
written over and over and over in a dozen different inks and pencils, and I cried then, standing amid dry roses at the rear of a Presbyterian church.
I eventually registered that my sobs were sounding louder even as they diminished. The mower had shut off. I looked up. The buff boy was there, a towel around his neck, looking earnest and worried and eighteen, tops.
"Hey," he said. "Uh. Are you OK?"
I dragged the back of my hand across my nose, snorted and nodded. "Oh, yeah. Sure. I'm fine."
He nodded, and we both stood there.
"Thanks for asking," I said.
"No problem," he said. "You, uh, live around here?"
"Hagerstown."
He nodded again. "Cool." He glanced around, leaned in slightly. I could smell sweat and new-mown lawn. "Hey. You want to get high?"
I laughed. "You're cute," I said, "but I like girls."
He tilted back his head, and his mouth slowly formed an O of comprehension. Then he nodded and gave me a thumbs-up sign. "Awesome," he said.
And so I left my girlfriend's funeral, our love ratified by a teenage horndog.
I kept pulling the notebook out of my bedside drawer, turning it over in my hands, then putting it back. Once or twice, I confess, I put it beneath my pillow and slept on it, as if by morning it would have changed into a shiny quarter. Finally, things got so bad that I actually opened it and started leafing through the pages.
All those coordinates, each one checked off with a date. Des was good at finding things. She'd found me, hadn't she? I flipped to the back, looked at my own name for a while, then tossed the notebook onto the bed as I headed for the kitchen. Something out of the corner of my eye as the notebook landed and bounced made me stop in the doorway and look back. It had splayed open, and the visible pages looked funny, had much less writing on them than I would have expected. I picked it up and saw that these pages were new—or new to me, anyway. Same handwriting, but no check marks, no dates, just a single coordinate on the right-hand page with a gibberish row of letters beneath; on the left-hand page, four more gibberish rows.
Des, you ever hide any of these things yourself?
Yes, but since I know where those are . . .
"Oh my God," I said, carrying the notebook into the kitchen and plucking a pen from the coffee can. This wasn't a cache Des had found; this was a cache Des had planted.
I copied the four clues onto a single sheet of paper, one atop the other, and stared at them in a most unproductive fashion.
zmteatuxgfkmi
lmhiahdawtycz
tioxrkiainxzf
fiqieyvmogmuq
Clearly Des had used a key more sophisticated than a simple A=N substitution, otherwise zmteatuxgfkmi would decipher into mzgrnghktsxzv. Hmph. I stared at the nonsense letters, wondering what to do next, until my eyes unfocused and the rows of letters merged into a rectangular blur. Rectangular? Yes, that right margin did seem mighty regular: Was each clue the same number of letters? Yes, thirteen letters, every one.
So what? So each clue was 13 letters long, which strongly implied that the number 13 was somehow a very strong hint to cracking the cipher. Yes, each row of the geocachers' favorite shift had 13 letters—simply because each row contained half the 26 letters of the English alphabet—but suppose Des had come up with her own grid, the alphabet along one axis, a 13-letter key along the other? I had seen such charts as a kid: Tableaus, they were called.
And for whom could these clues have been meant but me?
I started jotting 13-letter words and phrases, then moved to my laptop to create Excel documents.
First I tried DestinyCreech—an obvious 13-letter set—down the first column, the alphabet atop the top row. The other 338 cells I filled in by using the letters of DestinyCreech as my starting point and completing the alphabet on each row, starting over at Z, like this:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
1 D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C
2 E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A
B C D
3 S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R
4 T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S
5 I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H
6 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M
7 Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X
8 C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B
9 R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q
10 E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D
11 E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D
12 C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B
13 H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G
I tried solving the first clue. I wound up with shit. I tried DestinyCreech across the top row with the alphabet down the side. More shit. OK, so she wasn't so egotistical as to key in her own name. I had no such compunctions, typing in JennyMilledge next.
Nada.
I tried catchphrases, names of friends and relatives, breakfast cereals—anything I could think of that we had talked about, laughed about, that would fit into 13 letters. After a half-hour of that, I couldn't see my Excel sheet for the tears, so I moved on to the names of famous people. I never realized there were so many 13-letter lesbians. Alison Bechdel, Barbara Jordan, Radclyffe Hall, Sheryl Swoopes, Aileen Wuornos, Rosie O'Donnell, Camille Paglia, Gertrude Stein, Jodieee Foster. (Hey, a girl can dream.) Neither Ellen De Generes nor Melissa Etheridge has 13 letters, but both married 13 letters. Dismissed as coincidence!
When I realized this was just sad, I closed all my Excel sheets, and went for a run.
A run normally helps me think of nothing in particular, just registering the variations underfoot as cement turns to asphalt turns to brick turns to cement again, the dogs barking at me on cue behind fences and inside bay windows, the rolling sweat prickling and reddening my Scots-Irish skin. But of course I kept thinking of Des—her puzzles, her treasure hunts, her games within games. What was the point? What was her big fucking secret? I jogged in place, waiting for a bus to ease around the corner, my reflection sliding across its fuselage and startling me, the way the back of my head always startles me in the three-sided mirror in a department-store dressing room. I thought of Mrs. Creech at the funeral, the way she first spoke to my sandwich plate and not to my face, the way she had to piece me together from clues. Des' big fucking secret had been me.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four Page 9
