by Jude Watson
Then she reached down into the drawer. With some tugging and pulling, she found that there was a panel on the bottom. She lifted it up, then withdrew a metal box.
“This is what we’re meant to find,” she said.
Dan studied the lock. “An alphabet combination lock. So we need a word, not numbers.”
“Something only we would know,” Amy said. She bit her lip. “Whenever Grace has left something she hopes we’ll find, she also gives us a clue. There’s got to be a clue in this room.”
Dan looked around. “There’s not much here to go on.”
They went through the files carefully, but nothing leaped out at them. Then they examined the room, but it was as bare as it looked.
“There’s got to be something,” Amy said. Amy’s gaze rested on the painting. The blob of yellow bush was painted so badly. It was nice of Grace to hang it. Especially when she’d done much better paintings than this one.
Something only we would know . . .
She returned to the box. She spun the letters.
G-E-O-R-G-E
The lid opened.
Amy lifted out a notebook, and underneath that, another box, this one wrapped in kitchen twine. Dan hovered over her shoulder as she untied it.
She opened the top of the box. Inside sat an old journal, a little bigger than a paperback. It was leather bound, and she could see the ruffled, yellowed pages on one side. “It looks ancient,” she murmured.
“It smells ancient,” Dan said.
It was true. It smelled like old paper, musty and dry, but something else . . . something medicinal. Amy opened it carefully. There must have been plants or herbs pressed in its pages at one time — she could see the ghostly traces they’d left on the yellowed pages. There were beautiful ink renderings of plants and leaves and flowers. Carefully turning the pages, she saw a recipe for a poultice against “the ague,” the best method for bleaching stains out of muslin, a list of prices next to items like a bolt of linen, a cask of wine, tea. . . .
“It’s a household account book,” Amy said. “Definitely written by a woman. And a kind of diary. I mean, you can figure out her life by reading what she did every day. It looks like some of it is in Latin . . . or Italian? Both, I think.”
“Who owned it?” Dan asked. “And why did Grace hide it?”
Amy turned back to the inside cover.
A shiver ran down her spine. Dan let out a long exhalation.
“Whoa,” he said. “It’s Great-great-great-great et cetera grandma’s book!”
Amy turned to the back cover of the book. In a strong clear hand, faded over time, was written: Ret’d for safekeeping to the care of the village of Meenalappa. 1526 M.C.
“Madeleine Cahill,” Amy breathed. “She brought the book back to Meenalappa in 1526. After her mother died. And somehow it survived, all these years! Amazing.” She carefully leafed through the pages. “Look, Dan — there is a gap here. Five pages completely inked out.”
“Why would someone do that? To cover something up?”
“Maybe.” The ink was dark and black, line after line bleeding into the next until it covered every bit of blank paper. There was something somber and chilling about it. Something that reminded her of the dark days she’d spent after the funerals of Evan, Alistair, Natalie. . . .
“Or maybe these pages are a memorial,” Amy said slowly. “Remember the story? That Gideon was killed, and her four children scattered. . . . These five pages are her grief. And then look, she doesn’t write anything until July 10, 1508. . . .” Amy counted on her fingers. “That could be the date of Madeleine’s birth! Look, here she drew the Madrigal M.”
She pointed to the oversized, hand-drawn M in the middle of a page adorned with flowers and leaves. Again there were recipes and medicines, lists of ingredients and amounts. . . .
“Look,” Amy said. “She stops writing here — she has ten blank pages. And she’s copied out a poem. Then here — she writes, I miei viaggi. ‘My travels,’ ” Amy translated. “After that the rest of the book is written in code!”
“I’m guessing we’re here to crack it,” Dan said.
“Maybe Grace already did!”
Excited, Amy picked up Grace’s notebook. Only about a third of the book was written in. There were lists of Latin words and translations of old Italian to modern Italian. Then there were notations that didn’t make any sense at all.
“I think Grace tried to break the code, but wasn’t able to,” Amy said.
Dan groaned. “Why isn’t it ever easy?”
As she flipped the pages, an envelope fell out.
Amy’s heart fluttered. “It’s from Grace,” she said to Dan.
The note wasn’t long.
“The secret is out in the world,” Dan said. “The serum.”
Amy touched the letter G, so bold, so strong. “She was afraid this day would come.”
“Somewhere in there,” Dan said, pointing to the book, “is the answer to our problem. Grace gave us a way to fight J. Rutherford Pierce!”
By the evening, they had to give up. Olivia’s book was a fascinating glimpse into life in Ireland in the early sixteenth century, but they couldn’t see how what she wrote could help them. And they could not break the code.
“There’s too much Latin and Italian,” Dan said sleepily from his prone position on the floor. “And if I have to read one more poultice recipe, I’ll tear my hair out.” He raised himself on his elbows. “You know who we need to call. Atticus and Jake know these dead languages. They could —”
“No,” Amy interrupted.
Dan sat upright. “While we’re sitting here, Pierce is gaining power every day with the serum. We’re the only ones who can stop him. We have to use everything we can, everyone we can. You might want to protect everybody,” he said. “I get that. But if the whole world falls apart, what good did it do?”
Amy jackknifed to her feet. “Let’s just go to bed.”
Dan’s words pounded in Amy’s head as she tucked the book under her arm and followed him up the worn wooden stairs to their rooms. She wanted to tell him he was wrong. She wanted to say, You don’t know what it’s like to be in charge. She wanted to fling an accusation at him — You’re the one who wants to run away! You don’t get to have a vote anymore! But she was too exhausted to fight.
She pulled on the sweats they’d bought in town, brushed her teeth, and turned out the light.
Sleep wouldn’t come. She tossed and turned for an hour. When she closed her eyes, she felt herself falling, the dark, oily river rushing up at her. She felt Dan’s fingers weakening. Panicked, she reached for the light. She propped herself up on pillows and picked up Olivia’s book.
As she read, her eyebrows knit together. All these years, they’d wondered about the fascinating Gideon Cahill, the man who set out to stop a plague and developed a powerful serum. Who knew that his wife, Olivia, was just as fascinating and brilliant as he was? The journal made clear that it was Olivia who gathered the serum ingredients, Olivia who assisted Gideon in the lab, Olivia who kept the family together. Amy read Olivia’s words.
The power he sought for healing transmogrified into a beast. A beast with the power of great destruction. And so it must itself be destroyed. To each is its opposite. The opposite negates the other.
She looked again to the poem right before the coded end of the book. She’d read it that evening several times, but hadn’t understood it. She read it again, her heartbeat thudding in her ears.
Four souls, four elements, now dispersed.
’Twas as though my Family, cursed
and burdened — lo! to pass through years
of Strife, Calumny, Fears.
Yet beneath my beating Heart my Secret gave me joy and hope —
a future seen — not grasped. My Joy, you have strength enough to cope
and take up battle not with arms but wisdom gained from ancient land
kept close and passed from hand to hand
to mio maestro di vita, thee of timeless woman, universal man.
Then he to me bequeathed it, and with instruction bid
and I, through his own methods, hid.
Using this, gathered I the parts. And with one dram shall mend
what was torn asunder. And to the ash heap send.
I take and here record from what my guide hath guarded
with no edges glimpsed, dark sketched the key imparted.
My Joy, my Song, you have my charge. Now take what thee owns outright, count eight and on the sixth do pause.
Take that sixth, match to first that Romans brought, and end assault on Nature’s Laws.
Four souls, four elements. It was clear to Amy what Olivia meant. The four souls were the children: Luke, Thomas, Katherine, Jane.
Four elements: the four parts of the serum.
Dispersed: the children were each given a part of the serum, and all of them scattered, bitterly divided. Olivia had not been able to hold her family together. The serum had been too powerful. Just as for generations of Cahills, as Olivia had foreseen. Murder, plots, lies, revenge . . . stretching out for five centuries, pitting Cahill against Cahill.
Misery handed down, generation after generation.
Yet beneath my beating Heart my Secret gave me joy and hope.
That was Madeleine, the child Olivia was carrying when she fled the destruction of her home.
Then references to gathering . . . what? To make a dram — a bit of the serum?
No, Amy thought. Olivia hates the serum. That is clear.
My Joy, my Song, you have my charge.
She’s telling Madeleine to do something. . . .
Amy sat up in bed. Could it be? It made sense. It made perfect sense.
“Yes!” she cried. This was it, this was the answer. This was the key!
She ran across the hall to Dan’s room. She shook him awake.
He bolted up. “What’s happening? Where’s my pants?”
“Dan, wake up! I’ve been reading Olivia’s book.” Amy waited until the sleepy confusion left Dan’s eyes. “I think I know what Olivia was working on. She was formulating the antidote for the serum. That’s the key to stopping Pierce!”
Chapter 16
Attleboro, Massachusetts
The house felt so big without Fiske and Amy and Dan. Nellie wasn’t used to such silence. It seemed to echo against her ears. When she walked across the polished wood floor, her footsteps had sounded as loud as a giant’s. She’d kicked off her boots and was now padding around in her socks.
Anxiety gnawed at her. She’d run into a big, fat dead end. It was like Sammy had disappeared into thin air.
She reached into her pocket and brought out the New Jersey Turnpike ticket. Whoever had used it had traveled the entire distance — the turnpike ended at the Delaware Memorial Bridge.
She recognized Pony’s knock — three rhythmic taps. Then the taps turned into pounding. She ran to let him in, her phone still in her hand. Pony stepped inside, took one look at her open laptop, and crossed to it in two steps.
“What are you doing?” Nellie asked as he quickly began typing.
“Catching a mouse,” he said.
“I thought you said that laptop was safe.”
“It was.” Pony kept typing, his clumsy hands agile on the keys. “I got you, mousie,” he murmured. “Follow the cheese. . . .”
“Are you writing to someone?”
“Code. I’m hunting them while they’re hunting me.”
“But you’ll lead them here!”
“You swine!” Pony slapped his hand down on the table, then resumed typing. “Not you, goddess. Listen, it’s not . . . here . . . I’m worried about. They know where you are. It’s . . . Dan and Amy . . .”
“They’re tracking them?”
“They’re trying. Did you receive an attachment from them?”
“Just a photograph . . .”
Pony muttered through his teeth. “I’m rerouting . . . through Johannesburg . . . to Beijing. . . . And then . . . come on, mousie, follow me. . . . ”
Nellie crossed her fingers, then closed her eyes.
“GOTCHA!” Pony closed the laptop with a smash.
“Did it work?” Nellie asked.
“They are probably right now looking in Mozambique.”
“Could you track their computer?”
Pony shook his head. “Almost got them, but I can’t pinpoint it. It’s not in the US. Somewhere in Europe.”
“That doesn’t exactly narrow it down.”
He scratched his ear. “Best I could do in thirty seconds. But I can’t be one hundred percent sure they didn’t get a general location on D and A before I managed to divert them.”
“I’d better tell Dan and Amy to get out of there.”
“Not with that phone, you’re not.” Pony held out his hand. “Did you connect the phone to the laptop at any time?”
“The photo came in as a text so I downloaded the photo. . . .”
He dropped the phone on the floor and smashed it with his shoe. “Annoyed!”
“Pony, you’re scaring me.”
He faced her, his hands deep in his pockets. “You should be scared. We should all be scared. This situation is completely wreckitudinous. We have been chomped by the supreme empress.”
“Pony, I’m begging you now. Please speak English. It is our common language.” Nellie tucked her hands in her armpits. She hated it when her hands started to shake. By the look on Pony’s face, she knew it was bad.
Whatever Pony would tell her, she knew one thing: It was time to overrule Amy. They needed help.
He sighed as he sifted the phone through his fingers and dropped it in his pocket. “I figured out who hacked into your system. Who is probably still trying to track you.”
“Who?” Nellie asked, bewildered. Whoever it was, there was a look of fear on Pony’s face.
He leaned in and lowered his voice, as though the house itself was no longer safe. Maybe it wasn’t.
“Waldo,” he whispered.
Chapter 17
An undisclosed location
April May got her first cell phone at four. Of course it was an old one of her mother’s and she couldn’t make a call on it, but it was her favorite toy. She took it apart, which made her parents laugh. But when, at ten, she opened up her father’s motherboard, they didn’t take it so well.
April had always had a thing for secrets. When other children had imaginary best friends, she constructed her own multiple identities. She could be anyone she liked on the Internet. That was freedom, something in short supply in her house. Her mother wanted to know everything she was thinking and her father wanted to know everything she was doing.
There was no privacy in her household. The one time she tried to keep a diary, her father read it, then returned it with his own corrections in red pen. Her mother copied it and sent it to her own therapist so she could discuss April’s problems “in the context of my own personhood.”
April soon learned to fabricate a false front, a place where her parents could access her, while her real self roamed free somewhere else: in her imagination, her dreams . . . and the Internet. That was when she first realized that there, people could be anything they wanted. They could visit sites, write e-mails, join communities that had nothing to do with their real selves.
She never cared for school-yard games. She’d rather sneak back into the classroom and hack into her teacher’s cell phone, then read all the e-mails. Secrets were power.
Her parents soon learned to change their passwords often. It didn’t help much. She still hacked into her father’s e-mail when she was twelve. She did
n’t like what she found there, but she used it. The next thing she knew, she was in boarding school. That’s when her hacking really began.
At school, as her skills increased, she discovered that there was a whole shadow world out there, filled with people just like her. People who saw that digital firewalls were just a challenge to be overcome. April worked less and less on social studies and field hockey and music and math, all those high school preoccupations that suddenly seemed lame compared to this thrilling, secret world. Why bother studying for a math test when you could tell your teacher that you know about his secret weekend trips to that casino in Atlantic City — the trips his wife doesn’t know about? Why bother befriending a roommate who you know is sending texts about how weird you are? Easier to live in a shadow world.
But even April had scruples. Exposing hypocrisy was her game. She didn’t hack to destroy, only to reveal. Sure, she could hack into the CIA, but did she want to? Not yet, anyway.
In the past year or two, she had found another thrill: making money. Lots of it. For certain select clients, money was no object. She was choosy about her clients. She’d only hack into the accounts of people or organizations she didn’t approve of. Actors, politicians, silly celebrities, billionaires who got that way by lying, cheating, and stealing.
She named her company WALDO. She employed a few good hackers, but only a few. No one had ever seen her. There were no photographs of April May on the Internet, and she intended to keep it that way.
She now had a comfortable couple of million dollars or so residing in a very secure account in the Cayman Islands.
Her latest client, J. Rutherford Pierce, was possibly her biggest yet. She didn’t like him much, but he tested her abilities, and that was a good thing. Thanks to him, she’d broken into several search engines and manipulated results. He had his eye on a political career, and April May had discovered early on in this business that almost everyone had something to hide.
He was going places, too. Through him, she could break into media and possibly politics, and then the sky was the limit.
