The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three)

by Baum, Spencer

  “No amount of computing power in the world can crack this code,” said Carolyn. “That’s what is so clever about it. It is constantly changing.”

  “What? How can that be?”

  “I don’t know, but it is. Several times a day, the string changes. They are short changes, just a couple letters and numbers, but it’s enough to throw off my attempts to crack it. Look at this.” Carolyn grabbed another sheet of paper from the desk. This one had only a few letters and numbers on it, handwritten in pencil.

  Qb8 Na5

  “Somewhere on Renata’s phone, there is software that is rewriting the encryption string every few hours,” said Carolyn.

  “That’s wild,” said Jill.

  “It’s unprecedented!” said Carolyn. “It’s amazing! Whoever wrote this software for her has done something I’ve never seen before!”

  A banging on the bedroom door interrupted them.

  “What’s happening in there?” Walter yelled. “Carolyn, I need you! I told them I’d have sample code by tomorrow!”

  “Ugh! Your father is driving me crazy!”

  “Ignore him,” Jill said. “I’ll talk to him later.”

  Walter’s banging got faster and more violent. He was like a spoiled brat having a temper tantrum out there.

  “I am working!” Carolyn shouted. “Go away!”

  Walter banged on the door even more. “This is not acceptable! What’s happened to you?”

  Carolyn put her hands over her ears and leaned in close to the computer screen. Outside the door, the banging turned to deep, loud thumps, one after another.

  “Is he kicking my door?” Jill said. “Dad! Whatever you’re doing, stop it!”

  A final thump and the door burst open, with splinters flying out of the doorframe. Walter apparently wasn’t expecting the door to give. He fell into the bedroom, crashing into Jill’s end table and sending papers everywhere.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Jill said.

  Walter pushed himself up on his hands and knees. “Jill, get out of here! You’ve tried talking to her. Now it’s my turn!”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” said Jill. “You need to settle yourself down.”

  Walter was up on his feet now. His face was bright red. His whole body was moving up and down with each hurried breath.

  “Jill this is not your business,” he wheezed. He tried pushing Jill out of the way but she slapped his hand back.

  “You watch yourself young lady,” he said.

  “Or what, Dad? Are you gonna hit me?”

  “Don’t test me. I was raised in a house where children were taught to respect their elders.”

  “You don’t deserve my respect! You wanna know why Mom’s not following your orders anymore?”

  “What did you say to me?”

  “I know the truth, Dad. Mom does too. The other night, when you got drunk off your ass, you told me that Melissa Mayhew programmed mom to be a slave to her own wedding vows.”

  “I…what? No, that’s--”

  “They were your own words, Dad. Right before you passed out cold. And while you were asleep, I watched the wedding DVD. I arranged for a hypnotist to work with mom. That’s why she’s not obeying your every word anymore.”

  Walter took a step back. He was looking at Jill like she had a gun in her hands and was about to shoot.

  “You insolent little brat,” he whispered.

  “I have emails,” Jill snapped. “Between you, Merv, and Galen—I could turn all three of you in for treason right now if I wanted.”

  “You petulant, spoiled, arrogant--”

  “Call me all the names you want, Dad. It doesn’t change the simple fact that Mom isn’t your slave anymore.”

  “I will call Melissa,” he whispered, speaking more to himself now than to Jill. “I will get your mother fixed.”

  “Melissa Mayhew is dead!”

  Walter’s eyes opened wide. He took another step back.

  “You and I are going to go downstairs,” Jill said. “Mom has work she wants to do. Her own work. What say you and me go pour ourselves a couple more martinis and figure out where things go from here?”

  Walter was thinking about lashing out one more time. Jill could see it in his eyes.

  But he controlled himself, and turned to go downstairs. A few minutes later, he and Jill were seated in the parlor again, a martini in Walter’s hand.

  Jill never told her him about the Network. Or about the Marsh Hawk Protocol.

  But as Walter gulped down one martini after another, Jill told him plenty.

  She recounted an entire chain of emails for him. “You, Merv, and Galen,” she said. “Thick as thieves while you bought slaves from Melissa. Galen bought employees, Merv bought people to hunt, and you bought a wife.”

  She told him all the code words and secret numbers they used, proving that she had seen it all.

  “Whenever you talked to Melissa, Galen was number 2, Merv was number 3, you were number 11,” she said.

  Walter looked at her with disbelief.

  “It would be easy for me and Mom to disappear,” Jill said. “We could leave the country, and from a safe distance, I could send the clan all sorts of interesting info about you, Merv, and Galen.”

  “You wouldn’t dare,” Walter whispered.

  “Try me, Dad.”

  He took a big gulp of his drink.

  “Fortunately for you,” Jill said, “I really want to solve the final Rose Ransom clue and win Coronation for Nicky. So as long as you behave, I’m content to stay here and live like a big happy family.”

  “What do you want?” Walter said.

  “I want you to leave Mom alone. I want you to recognize she’s no longer your slave.”

  “But Jill…I’ve spent months in Seattle sealing up an arrangement with a new client. It isn’t even one of the immortals. It’s work your mother might enjoy doing.”

  “Then you can present it to her respectfully as something she might like to do and she can decide when and if she’s going to work on it.”

  “We have a schedule we must meet. The first deliverable is tomorrow.”

  “Then change the schedule! Right now, Mom is doing what she wants to do. You will let her do it, because if I hear you two fighting like that again, I’m putting her on the first plane out of here and you’ll never see her again!”

  “What is it that your mother is working on?”

  “That’s the next thing I want,” Jill said. “You will not ask me or Mom what we’re up to, ever. You won’t ask because you don’t want to know. Do you understand?”

  Walter closed his eyes and poured the remains of his glass down his throat.

  “Yes,” he muttered. “Anything else?”

  “Sometime, when she seems ready, I want you to talk to Mom about what you did,” Jill said.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “She’s not right, Dad! She’s been your slave since the day you got married. Can you imagine how that might mess her up?”

  “But what am I supposed to say?”

  “Saying you’re sorry would be a good start.”

  Chapter 39

  “Now she’s found the second rose! I can’t believe this!”

  Kim was in her daddy’s office, pacing the floor while he sat calmly behind the desk.

  “Why are you so calm?” Kim snapped. “Why does it seem like you don’t care one way or the other?”

  “I’m reading this clue,” Galen said. “I think the game ends now. This clue is the most obtuse of all of them.”

  “You’ve been saying that since the beginning,” said Kim. “You’ve been so sure that no one is solving the Ransom this year, but now Jill has solved two out of three clues!”

  “She doesn’t have any time left to solve this last one.”

  “Does she need time? She has an immortal helping her! But we don’t know who it is or why she’s getting help because you’re too chicken to say anything.”

 
“Our hands are tied, Kim. We’ve discussed this.”

  “We haven’t discussed anything. You’ve given me excuses, and I’ve listened! Maybe I shouldn’t listen anymore!”

  Galen turned his gaze back to the paper on his desk.

  “An expression of mortal frailty,” he said, reading the newest clue. “Death and new life made manifest. You know, this really sounds like it was written to be unsolvable. I can’t even make sense of the lines.”

  “You’re so passive about all this,” Kim said. “We should be doing something!”

  “In the throes of agony eternal,” Galen read, “within and without the square. What a strange little poem.”

  “I want to send our evidence to Renata.”

  “Our evidence?” Galen said. “What are you talking about?”

  “We have a picture of Shannon Evans sitting at the front desk of the Praia de Sol hotel in Rio de Janeiro. We have financial records proving that Annika Fleming is in touch with her. We know that Nicky Bloom couldn’t have gotten into Thorndike unless Shannon disappeared first! We have all the proof we need to end this!”

  “And end ourselves in the process,” said Galen. “I don’t think you understand how serious our situation is. I bought slaves from Melissa for twenty years. I have more than fifty of them working for me right now.”

  “We can do it anonymously.”

  “There is no anonymous, Kim. Not anymore. Everyone knows our agenda. If you send your evidence to Renata, the first thing she’ll do is go and quiz Annika Fleming. And thanks to Jill Wentworth, Annika knows the truth about us.”

  “Then let’s leave Annika out of it! Let’s send Renata the picture of Shannon in an unmarked envelope. Let her go find Shannon Evans, get inside her brain, and learn about the conspiracy to put Nicky Bloom in Thorndike.”

  “We can talk about a strategy like that after the year-end party,” Galen said. “For now, it is much safer to be patient.”

  “I’m tired of playing it safe. You always make me play it safe! The immortals never play it safe!”

  “And you’re not immortal yet. Your best chance to become an immortal doesn’t involve any anonymous letters to Renata. If you can just calm yourself down for a few more weeks, we can see if anyone solves the final clue. I don’t think they will. I think the most likely outcome is that we reach the year-end party with the final clue unsolved and Nicky gets killed in front of the entire class. When that happens, all your problems with Nicky, Jill, and anyone else go away.”

  Kim left her daddy’s office that night in a foul mood. He was so soft. So timid. Sure, he could weave together a few sentences that justified his desire to play it safe, but in the end, it was just his own cowardice.

  And all of this was his fault. If he hadn’t been illegally buying slaves, none of this would have happened. It made Kim furious to think about. She was paying for her daddy’s mistakes. It wasn’t fair.

  I’ve done nothing wrong, she told herself. We’re sitting on valuable gossip in order to protect Daddy, not to protect me.

  As the week went on, and Kim overheard everyone at school working on the third clue, she became convinced that her Daddy’s strategy was wrong. He had been wrong on just about everything up until now. Why should she listen to him on this?

  Early on a Saturday morning, while her parents were still asleep, Kim took matters into her own hands. She sat down at her computer and typed out an anonymous letter to Renata Sullivan.

  Dear Ms. Sullivan,

  Enclosed you will find proof positive that Shannon Evans, who was pronounced dead last summer following a boating accident, is still alive. This photo was taken at the Praia de Sol hotel.

  She didn’t sign the letter. After she printed it, she handled the paper and the photograph with cotton gloves. She left the gloves on when she went to the post office in downtown DC, where the letter would be stamped with a zip code far removed from her own.

  You’ve been looking out for yourself first since this all began, Daddy. It’s time that somebody looked out for me.

  She dropped the envelope, addressed to the Regents Office, attention Renata Sullivan, into the mail slot and watched it disappear.

  Chapter 40

  Jill knew the invitation was coming. Still, she panicked when she saw it in her mailbox.

  This invitation serves notice that Jillian Wentworth will be deemed front door access to the mansion of Renata Sullivan on the night of December 15 for a celebration of the semester’s end. Doors open at 9:00. Guests will not be allowed inside without an invitation. Formal dress required.

  And there it was. A formal reminder for Jill and everyone else that the ending loomed. If the third clue wasn’t solved by the fifteenth of December, Nicky and Ryan were dead.

  The year-end party wasn’t the only social event in the near future. The day after Renata’s invite arrived in the mail, Jill got an invitation to Annika’s eighteenth birthday party. That invite was a lot more fun to read.

  Handwritten in calligraphy on expensive card stock, on first look, Annika’s party invitation gave the impression of an extremely formal and uptight affair. But upon closer inspection, Jill detected a wonderfully bold bit of sarcasm in the language of the invite. Written as a four-line poem, the invitation was a not-so-subtle spoof of the Rose Ransom clues that had occupied the class all semester.

  Your presence is requested

  At the residence of Miss Annika Fleming,

  Who on the occasion of the eighteenth anniversary of her birth,

  Wishes for her friends to gather and get shit-faced.

  On the back of the invite was a picture of the National Mall with a giant rose looming over the city in place of the Washington Monument. The rose had two wide leaves at the bottom, a thick green shaft, and the flower on top was shaped like a rectangle with rounded corners. Clearly, it was meant to evoke a giant penis.

  Nice one, Annika.

  While the rest of the class would view this invite as a bold, even reckless bit of fun directed at the immortals, Jill saw a different message. Annika was getting ready to bolt. The arrival of her eighteenth birthday also meant the transfer of her trust fund.

  Looking at the invite, Jill couldn’t help but feel envious. Just a few more days and Annika was free.

  And just a few more hours until you can crawl under the checkered quilt and tune it all out for a while, Jill thought.

  With her father back in Seattle and her mother camped out day and night in Jill’s bedroom, Jill had taken to sleeping in her parents’ bed. An obscenely large mattress made of some high-tech foam with a black and white checkered quilt that was the softest fabric Jill had ever felt, crawling into that bed had become Jill’s favorite part of each day. It was the one place where she didn’t have to think about Ransom clues, computer hacks, the Network, or the rest of her miserable life.

  It also was a place where, if she was lucky, she got to see Zack.

  He came to her in dreams sometimes. It was usually in the early hours of the morning when she dreamed about him, when her body was nearly awake and some part of her remembered the joy of sleeping next to him. The dreams could be that simple. Zack is in the bed, lying next to me. Sometimes that was all there was to the dream and it was more than enough. On nights that she dreamed about Zack, she woke up energized and ready to work. It was as if his presence, even his imaginary presence, was a reminder that there were things in life worth living for. There were reasons to get out of bed.

  At school, everyone was working on the third Ransom clue, with results no different than they got on their attempts to solve the first two. This third clue, with its line about “death and new life made manifest,” had everyone talking about places where both birth and death happened. Thorndike students scoured every hospital in town without any luck. As the afternoons grew shorter and colder, the students grew less enthused about solving the third clue, probably thinking that it would be Jill who figured it out anyway.

  But Jill wasn’t working on the clu
e. She knew no more about death and new life made manifest than anyone else. Besides, Tarin had come through on the first two clues. He’d come through again. The more pressing work for her was Renata’s phone, and the encryption code that was hiding most of the phone’s real functions.

  “I’ve noticed that only a limited subset of the alphabet appears in the code,” Carolyn said one afternoon.

  Carolyn handed Jill a piece of paper. It was covered in a random assortment of numbers and letters.

  “I’ve already seen this, Mom.”

  “But have you seen it? Have you looked carefully for the patterns that might live in the characters?”

  “Why don’t you just tell me what you’ve figured out?”

  Carolyn snatched the paper back from Jill.

  “Q, N, K, R, and B are the only letters that appear in upper case,” Carolyn said, clearly excited at this discovery. “Letters A through H appear in lower case. Where are the rest of the letters? Why write a secret code that doesn’t take advantage of the whole alphabet?”

  “I don’t know, Mom.”

  “And only numbers one through eight show up. Where’s nine?”

  “Perhaps seven ate him,” Jill said.

  Carolyn looked at her like she had just said something offensive.

  “It’s a joke. Seven, eight…don’t worry about it.”

  “And why don’t two digits ever appear together?” Carolyn went on. “And why don’t two uppercase letters ever appear together? The pattern is so clear. Upper case letter, lower case letter, number. What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know, Mom.”

  Carolyn threw her head back and grunted. “Why is this so hard?” she snapped. “What are we missing?”

  “Maybe we’re not missing anything,” said Jill. “Maybe it can’t be solved.”

  “Anything can be solved. Somewhere, at some point, somebody thought up the routines that created this encryption code. We need to think like that somebody. If I wanted to hide an entire partition of my phone, what would I do?”