The Final Step

by Ridley Pearson

  It being late, James stuffed his bed to look like a boy was sleeping and left through the window.

  The steamer, not far from the gymnasium, occupied the entire ground level of the science building. It included the lab, a robotics area, wood shop, and metal shop as well as every kind of workbench, tool, and device, from a 3D industrial printer to an arc welder. The photo and video lab was closest to the makerspace’s main door. James set up on a wood shop bench, working in the red light of one of Lexie’s gel-covered flashlights. The flashlight’s batteries were running low, causing him increasing anxiety.

  At last, he sensed Lexie and me standing a few yards behind him.

  “Cheese-Its! Cripes!” he exclaimed. “What the hello are you doing here?”

  “Moria saw you heading down here,” Lexie said. “She texted me.”

  “The whole school would have seen you if they’d happened to be looking out their windows,” I said. “If you want to sneak into the steamer, James, you might avoid crossing the JV field out in the open.”

  “I was in a hurry,” he said, as if that was any kind of excuse.

  “To shine a shoe?” Lexie said, knowing perfectly well it wasn’t his shoe.

  “Colander,” James said. He explained the meeting with the superintendent, though not the reason for it, and how he’d come to think of Lowry’s shoe differently. “The elves, the naked elves, built the shoes for the shoemaker while the guy slept. They put them together. So what if Lowry was telling me to take them apart? It apart,” he said, indicating the lonely shoe on the workbench.

  We joined him at the workbench.

  “The heel’s the most obvious,” Lexie said. “Did you check for a pin hole? Someplace a paper clip could be inserted?”

  “Who are you?” I said.

  “I saw it in a movie,” Lexie said. “This spy used a paper clip to unlock the heel of his shoe and there were these codes inside.”

  When we failed to find any such trigger, James tried twisting the heel, pulling on it. Finally, he used a chisel and hammer to remove the heel. Nothing but chunks of wood, rubber, and leather.

  Next, with Lexie and me holding the shoe steady, he separated the sole of the shoe from the leather uppers. No hidden space.

  Lexie came up with the idea of running ultraviolet light over the shoe, because she’d seen another movie where the light revealed hidden codes. Nothing.

  “Before we destroy the thing entirely, and maybe the secret message with it—if there is one—what about we think this through?” I suggested.

  They looked at me as if I’d passed gas.

  “Put ourselves in Mr. Lowry’s position,” I continued. “He’s hiding something for others to find. Maybe it’s a note. Probably a note.”

  “So he has it sewn into his shoe,” James said, impatience weighing on him. The flashlight flickered, dimming. “Duh! That’s why I’m taking it apart.”

  “It’s not a note,” Lexie said. “A note could get wet and hard to read.”

  “So, it’s in plastic,” James suggested.

  “Maybe.”

  “Or?” I said.

  “Waterproofed,” Lexie said, nodding, “that’s important. And easy to get to. But not a note.”

  “It’s in the tongue,” I said, guessing. “It’s one of those small memory chips, like for a camera, and it’s in the tongue.”

  James turned over the shoe to explore its leather tongue. Having chewed off his fingernails, he struggled to pick at the edges. Lexie’s nails were shorter than mine, so I stepped up, gently nudging James aside. He didn’t like that.

  I ran my nail along the seam between the dark leather of the top of the shoe tongue and the lighter, softer underside. It split behind the sound of Velcro tearing loose. I worked to keep the smile off my face for having bested my brother. My nail stabbed inside the crack and worked like a zipper, opening a small gap on the right of the tongue.

  Tucked between the two layers was a memory chip. I slipped it out. “Voilà!”

  James huffed. Lexie squealed like a mouse. I passed the chip to James, hoping this might ease the competition between us.

  “Over here,” he said, leading us to one of the steamer’s many desktop computers. He needed a caddy to hold the smaller memory device and he went off in search of one, rifling drawers at the other computer stations.

  “Do you think they killed him for whatever’s on here?” Lexie asked.

  “I don’t think we’ll know until we see it,” James said. I knew him well enough to recognize the suspicion in his eyes. The object of his suspicion, Lexie, missed it completely. I saw mistrust and judgment. My brother was testing her.

  “Maybe it’s just something he wanted to leave behind for us,” I said. “Maybe it has nothing to do with anything, but it was important to him. You know?”

  “Like a will or something,” Lexie said.

  Again, James studied her like she was a painting. What was with him?

  “I suppose,” James said.

  “Files, stuff like that,” she said.

  “You know, in case that’s what’s happening, why don’t you give me and Mo a minute?”

  I wasn’t comfortable with James telling her to take a hike. “James!”

  “Just for a minute,” he said, his scolding eyes telling me to shut up.

  “Sure,” I said. “Just for a minute. Why not?”

  Lexie handled it so gracefully. “Of course! I totally get that! I’ll just . . . be outside.” She looked wounded. Sounded brave.

  James placed the chip into the caddy and the caddy into the computer and opened the directory.

  PASSWORD:

  HINT: Wilford Verse Year?

  “It’s all yours,” I said. “James Wilford founded the Wilford Packet Company. Years later that company became our family’s shipping company.”

  “Duh!” James said. “But what year was that, brainchild?”

  “No clue. Besides, that’s not it,” I said. “‘Verse.’ He’s talking about the family Bible. Bible verse. The Wilford family Bible. Remember?” We’d discovered it inside a secret room off Father’s office.

  “I do,” he said. “But the date?”

  “Sixteen something,” I said. I knew who knew the answer: a boy James couldn’t know was here. “Hang on.” I texted Sherlock the question, hoping he’d be awake at this hour. (He claimed to need very little sleep, but I didn’t believe it.) Only seconds later, my phone’s screen lit.

  1696

  “Try 1696,” I said. James gave me a look. He knew whom I’d texted, just not what time zone Sherlock was in.

  The password worked. James opened the main folder.

  The chip’s directory contained at least fifty folders. A quick sample of the contents of the various folders revealed more folders, each containing hundreds of files.

  I pointed.

  MORIARTY

  James double-clicked.

  I spotted the file first. “Look!” I pointed to a video file. “Check out the date!”

  “Father,” James whispered.

  “The night . . .” I couldn’t finish. It was the date of his “accident,” a date neither James nor I would ever forget.

  James directed the cursor arrow to the file. “Should I?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “I don’t think you should see this, Mo,” James said solemnly. “Why don’t I look at it first? If it’s something . . . you know . . . bad . . . then why should both of us have to live with that?”

  I wasn’t going to argue. I’d have nightmares for weeks—maybe all my life—if it showed what I thought it might show.

  James clicked on the video file. I looked away from the computer but caught eyes with my brother. I saw our life together. Our partnership. I saw, in my mind’s eye, the photo of Mother being put into a car. Our homes at Beacon Hill and on Cape Cod. A brief spark connected us. It included the unspoken-of: the Scowerers, Father’s accident, Ralph’s car crash. Father’s secret room filled with treas
ure. A complicated family history about which we still knew little.

  I wanted to look. I wanted this to help reconnect James and me. But I couldn’t do it.

  James gasped. “It’s . . . bad. Real bad.” I heard him swallow. “Our security cameras. The foyer.”

  “Oh, no,” I gasped. I didn’t have to look. I knew what there was to see.

  My brother’s voice cracked as he choked out: “Father was murdered.”

  CHAPTER 46

  WITH MY EYES TRAINED ONTO MY SHOES, James messed with the video. He wrote down a bunch of numbers. “The recording starts and stops when there’s movement,” James explained. “There was a meeting that night. You can look now: I’ve written down the times so I can stop it from showing the bad stuff.”

  James and I watched segments of the video several times through. We didn’t speak. He’d divided the video into scenes: the arrival of Hildebrandt, Crudgeon, and Lowry; Lois bringing a tray to the downstairs library. Lois leaving the library. Lois returning with a pot of coffee. Lois walking Hildebrandt to the front door. The two of them talking. Lois returning toward the kitchen. Father leaving the library with Crudgeon and Lowry and showing them out.

  James started the segment running again when Lois walked Hildebrandt to the front door. It showed Lois and Hildebrandt talking in the vestibule. Lois passed the camera in the direction of the kitchen. The time—on the bottom right of the screen—advanced twelve minutes. Father escorted Crudgeon and Lowry to the front door. Father headed back toward his study.

  James wrote something onto a piece of paper. I was too absorbed with the video to pay much attention.

  The clock advanced fifty-seven minutes. Father—not Lois, not Ralph—answered the front door. A red-letter crawl ran across the bottom of the video.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “An alert,” James said. “I think it’s warning of a hack. It’s our home security system.” He wrote as he continued, “It’s not an IP address,” James said. “IP addresses don’t use colons.”

  “Speak English,” I said.

  “Thing is,” James said, speaking mostly to himself, “since when does Father open the door?”

  I longed to involve Sherlock. He would know what was going on. I tried to think like him. “One step at a time,” I said. “Father goes to the door. He obviously greets someone. The missing video is of whoever that was.”

  “Duh.”

  “You don’t have to be mean,” I said.

  James was too busy writing down the security warning. The video continued to run. Suddenly, there was Father lying on the foyer floor next to the stepladder. I looked away so quickly after, I’m not sure I actually saw what I thought I saw. But I would never forget the first time I saw Father’s murder.

  Not ever.

  Apologizing, James stopped the video. I was crying. James hugged me. The way his chest was shaking I think he might have been crying too. “Don’t worry, Mo,” he said dryly. “I’m going to get whoever did this.”

  “We are,” I said, choking on my tears.

  James folded and slipped his scribbling into his front pocket.

  “What do we do now?” I asked. “What do we do with this? It’s obviously important evidence.”

  “It was left for me,” James proclaimed. “Mr. Lowry left it for me.”

  “But I found it!” I said.

  “I would have. You know that,” James complained.

  I felt I had to remind him. “We both lost him, you know?”

  “I’ll put the video on its own thumb drive,” he said. “I’ll show it to Colander.”

  “You promise?” I pressed.

  “I promise.”

  “What about the rest of the stuff?” I asked. “All the documents. Whatever else is on the card?”

  “I’ll go through it,” James said. “At least enough to know if it’s important or not. If it is—”

  “We both should,” I said, correcting him. “Lexie, too.”

  “No!”

  “What’s wrong with you? We can divide up the folders. We’ll each take a few.” Before James could interrupt, I kept talking. “The sooner we know what Mr. Lowry left for us, the better.”

  James ejected the card from the computer. “Sorry. I can’t allow that.” I fought him for it, but he held it away and pushed me back. He stuffed it into his pocket with the note. “Mr. Lowry told me about some of the family business. It’s private for now.”

  “Like sending you to military school?” I said.

  “Shut up!”

  “Promise you won’t delete anything.”

  “Promise. You’ve got to believe me.”

  “Why do I have to believe you?” I asked.

  He considered my question.

  Before he could answer, the door opened. Lexie slipped inside and shut the door.

  “Someone’s coming!” she said, running toward us.

  CHAPTER 47

  JAMES AND I WERE USED TO AVOIDING GETTING caught. Having Ralph and Lois around the Boston house had been like having three parents keeping an eye on us. We had to be crafty and sneaky to have any fun. James had an instinct for such surprises. He seemed to know a fraction of a second before I did that we were about to be caught.

  Lexie lacked our instincts, but was just plain smart. With the main entrance to the makerspace being near the photo lab, we were out of sight for now, but the open floor plan left us few places to hide.

  Lexie pulled out the power plug to the computer faster than it even occurred to me that the light from the monitor would give us away. In the same split second, both James and I fell to our hands and knees, our reaction to a possible bust.

  I crawled over to the only box of any size, an empty cardboard shipping box for a printer. I quickly and quietly turned it on its side so I could crawl in, its opening facing the wall.

  As I did, I saw Lexie locate a piece of fabric—probably from a weaving project—lie down amid several rolls of other materials, and pull it over herself.

  “Who’s there?” A low voice. Either a proctor or a member of the expanded campus security team.

  What I saw next, just as I was about to stuff myself into the box, astounded me.

  James had crawled beneath a lab table. He must have had some kind of plan—James was full of plans—but it had failed. Panicked by the man’s voice, he scrambled across the floor, pulled the fabric off Lexie, dragged her by the ankles into the open area, and hid beneath the fabric himself. An astonished Lexie got her feet under her and into a crouch.

  “You!” the voice thundered as a flashlight beam hit Lexie on her back.

  I hid in the box, hearing, not seeing the rest.

  “Stand up where I can see you. Turn around! Name?”

  “Alexandria Carlisle.”

  “Dorm?”

  “Bricks, Middle Two.”

  “Your dorm mistress?”

  The question, along with the unfamiliar voice, suggested a security guy.

  “Ms. McKower.”

  “It’s past curfew. I’m going to call her. You understand?”

  “Yeah, I know the drill,” Lexie said. So did I. So did James. A curfew violation after midnight meant your dorm master had to stay with you until you were back into bed. It meant a lecture. Demerits. Eventually, a talk with the headmaster and another lecture. Sometimes, a call to your parents. Students could also be suspended or moved into a different dorm.

  “Where are the others?”

  “What others?” she said. My heart did little flips. Lexie was lying to protect us. Even James the Jerk. “Look. I’m behind on a project. Who knew summer school was going to be so hard? You’re going to call Ms. McKower and get me into trouble and that’ll mean I have even less time to get this stupid project done. Have you ever tried to three-D print a sphere inside a cube?” The guard didn’t answer. He was probably still working out what it meant to 3D print something. “I’m supposed to not only know how to write the code for that, but print it and hand it in
by third period day after tomorrow.”

  “You’re saying you’re working.” He made it a statement. “Doing homework?”

  “You think I come here to have a good time?”

  “What’s with that?” he asked.

  I couldn’t see what was going on, but I sensed it.

  “That shoe? No clue. Someone else’s project, I guess. It’s a makerspace. We make things in here. Maybe someone’s making a spy shoe for Double O Seven. You know . . . click your heels it shoots somebody.”

  The guard chuckled. “You mean like Q.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Q’s the guy who made all the cool stuff for James Bond.”

  “Yeah, like that. We can make anything in here. But we can’t make a curfew violation go away.” Lexie sounded like a lawyer working a judge in Law & Order. Alone in a cardboard box, I smiled.

  “No,” the man said, sounding unhappy. “You can’t make that.”

  CHAPTER 48

  I LOOKED AT JAMES ONLY ONCE THE FOLLOWING day, a seething, nasty face across the breakfast dining hall letting him know what a jerk he was for what he’d done to Lexie. The rumor mill already had Lexie in the steamer to kiss George Platen, a story fueled by the fact that George Platen tended to follow Lexie around like a sad dog and that he’d left school for home that same morning. The second, and truthful, rumor was that George’s grandmother had fallen down some stairs and his parents wanted him home for a few days. But Lexie was being endlessly teased by others making kissy sounds at her as she passed.

  When James pulled a no-show at lunch, I briefly hoped he’d done the right thing and gone to the headmaster to explain his having set up Lexie. I could have done the same thing, but Lexie had already made me promise I’d do no such thing. “This is between James and me,” she’d said. “You getting in trouble isn’t going to change anything.”

  “But if I get in trouble, then James gets in trouble. And that’s pretty sweet.”

  Lexie had considered what I’d said, but only for a second or two before telling me she wouldn’t talk to me for two weeks if I tried such a thing. In summer school, two weeks amounted to an ice age, so I kept my word and my nose out of it.