‘Frankly, I was hoping you’d have some ideas,’ Jenna sighed, plopping down in the computer chair. ‘I’m brainstorming, but I’m at a loss so far.’
‘Let’s hang up so you can send jock boy out on his mission. That’ll free up two brains to think easier. Teva and I will dig through the library records as soon as Irv sends the copy he’s making. In the meantime, maybe get Grey to focus on the guy’s library records in conjunction with the McKenzie letter. They made this thing to lead to something. The answer’s got to be here somewhere.’
Jenna nodded, glancing to where Grey was lying on her stomach, the butterfly book open on the floor between where her elbows were propped, chin resting on her fists. ‘Will do. Thanks, Saleda.’
‘Call if you have something. We’ll check in soon if we don’t hear anything.’
‘Ditto, that. Bye,’ Jenna said.
Porter left straight away after Jenna relayed his orders, seeming thrilled to have an escape from Grey. Dodd took the tactic of following Hattie around the library as she attended to her responsibilities, asking her questions that were ultimately hooks without teeth. Jenna took a seat back at the computer and resumed her search of Paul Neary’s library records. She clicked the mouse to bring up another window on Paul Neary’s library account page, this time a history of holds he’d placed on books, titles he’d requested, and a few other things.
As she scrolled through the list, she could hear Dodd’s voice across the room as he lobbed question after question at Hattie. Had any strangers been to or called the library recently? Did she know if any faculty regularly attended groups designed to bring together intellectuals, like MENSA? Were any outside groups allowed to use the school facilities for get-togethers: maybe Alcoholics Anonymous held a meeting there, or maybe a women’s club hosted a fundraiser?
Jenna kept thinking if only she looked hard enough, far enough … stared long enough at this account’s pages, something would pop out at her. The letter had sent them here. Something was here.
As Jenna’s ideas of how to figure out the next step circled round and round in her mind with no clear path, her agitation seemed to whip itself into a frenzy until it felt like she was about to boil over. She beat her fist hard on the marble countertop, shoved back from the desk, and stood again. There had to be a way to figure it out.
‘Damn, that hurt! Why the hell did I do that?’
Dodd had heard her outburst and was a few feet away now, heading back to check on her. ‘That counter was obviously being deliberately unhelpful. Somebody had to teach it a lesson.’
Jenna turned her hand over, expecting it to be red, but it wasn’t. Still, it throbbed.
They both leaned against the counter. Jenna grimaced, squeezed the pad of her right hand, trying to massage out whatever kinks she’d jammed into it. She shook her head. ‘Seriously, Dodd, I don’t know when the last time was I’ve knocked the fire out of my fist that hard … No, wait. I actually do remember. I was at the ATM a few weeks ago …’
But Jenna stopped talking, walked away from the counter and Dodd. Something had flashed, and she’d missed the color by milliseconds. Come on, brain. Let me see that again …
She’d been thinking about hitting her fist on the ATM machine! Right!
This time, Jenna didn’t miss the frustrated pewter blue-gray that flashed in. Just like it had when she’d been agitated at the ATM. She’d beat the side of it, pissed because she could only get three of the four digits of her PIN number to register on the screen, and she needed to pick up Pull-Ups on the way home. It was a freak connection, but it gave her an idea.
‘Hattie, I need your help!’ she called in a voice loud enough to make any librarian Jenna had ever known die of offense on the spot.
‘Of course, of course. I’ll be right there,’ Hattie called.
Jenna rushed back to the computer and clicked through the account information page, double-checked the dates on when the account was opened. That no changes had been made to it. They hadn’t.
Hattie rushed to the media hub.
‘Can anyone besides the librarian or the card account holder access records of what books have been checked out with the card, when, etc.?’ Jenna asked.
The color flash had jarred the PIN number to the forefront of her mind. It was important that the terrorists had given them the PIN.
Hattie shook her head. ‘They would need both the account number, which is the library card number, and the PIN number.’
Jenna turned to Dodd, her heart picking up. ‘Then, for some reason, they want us to look through the records of books on this guy’s account. And they have his PIN number. We can put Irv to work on making connections to Paul Neary to get some possible leads on who might have access, but right now, it’s more important we know they have it. They tacked on those numbers to the end of the code. If they hadn’t needed them, they wouldn’t have been in there.
‘They wanted whoever solved the code to end up logging into Paul Neary’s records—’
‘Hey, guys!’ Porter’s voice called, and a door slammed behind him.
In the next moment, he came into vision, jogging toward them, a tall, graying man in khakis and a white button-down keeping pace just behind him, his blue-striped tie flapping side to side. Jenna’s heart quickened even more. Running never meant good things.
‘This is Paul Neary,’ Porter said, a hitchhiker thumb over his shoulder indicating the teacher and coach. ‘He does have the library card with the number we used, and he has checked out books here before—’
‘But not in over two years,’ Paul Neary said, seeming to only half-understand the weight of his statement. He glanced around at each agent in turn and shrugged. ‘Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on?’
Jenna and Dodd shared a glance, then Jenna’s eyes travelled to where Grey was still on the floor with her butterfly book, only now on her back, feet crossed at the ankles.
Don’t get too comfortable, Grey.
She lifted her eyes back to meet Paul Neary’s. ‘Mr Neary, some dangerous criminals are using your library account records as part of some sort of sick scavenger hunt to find them before they hurt anyone else. We got into your account but weren’t sure what to take from it. But if you haven’t checked out any books with your library card in two years, I think that just changed.’
Twenty-seven
Jenna, Porter, Dodd, Grey, Paul Neary, and Hattie all huddled around a printout showing all the books he’d checked out from the Suellen B. Holloway Memorial Library since his tenure at the elementary school had begun. The list wasn’t long.
But after the tedious journey through the letter’s riddles, the short list of books on Paul Neary’s library account was refreshing, because it looked like figuring out the next move might be short work after all. It turned out that three books had been checked out since Paul had last picked out a title himself. And all three had been taken out in the past week.
Even stranger, all three had already been checked back in.
Jenna waved away the suggestions flying in her direction, the talk of surveillance footage, interviewing everyone in the building, dissecting the school’s visitor logs. They’d get to all of those, but anyone who could convince a team of fourteen people to walk into a bank in broad daylight and use blades to slaughter every man, woman, and child that happened to be in there could figure out how to get three library books checked out of this place without it being traced to him. In fact, if one of those leads led them straight to the killers’ leader before this code manifested something that did, Jenna would bet all the duct tape she owned it would be a trap. A killer like this didn’t want to be found. A killer like this didn’t want to be caught.
Red anger flashed in. And if he did, he was too much like Isaac Keaton for her to give him the satisfaction without finding a way to turn the trap back on to him first.
‘Other departments are working on those things, which are all very important. But right now, Saleda’s orders are to crack
this code, so that’s what we’re going to do. They gave us everything we needed to bring us to this library and this specific library card—’
‘And then some,’ Porter cut in.
‘—so it stands to reason that along the way, they’ve given us the knowledge of how to move on from here, too—’ Jenna stopped abruptly and looked at Porter. ‘What did you say?’
Porter bowed his head, bent the bill of his cap. ‘I know, I know, I should shut up and concentra—’
‘No, no! Whatever you just said, say it again,’ Jenna said, turning her back and walking two short steps away from the group, closing her eyes.
‘You said that the group’s letter had given us everything we needed to get to this library, and I said, “And then some,”’ Porter said, confusion seeping through his usually arrogant tone.
Jenna ignored him, paying attention only to holding the color in her mind that had flashed as he’d repeated his thought. Light taupe, the same color as those ugly bridesmaids’ dresses her college roommate had bought off the half-priced rack from the prior season. Leftovers.
‘Oh, boy, kids,’ Dodd said in a tone he usually reserved for only children and those he deemed incredibly stupid, ‘you’re in for a special treat today! Usually visitors only get to watch the Peacock of Many Colors strut in her natural habitat. But you fine people, well … you might just be about to catch a glimpse of the Color Wonder splaying her tail!’
Jenna ignored him, turned back around.
‘The Importance of Being Earnest crack we used yielded eighteen numbers – fourteen for the library card, the other four for the PIN. But remember how when we used the crack on the full list of literary reference numbers Grey took out of the McKenzie McClendon letter …’
As her voice trailed, she fished in her pocket and found the scrap where she’d written the numbers and systematically marked them. She unwrinkled it as best she could and laid it on the counter:
51
5-3000
95
147
7-2521
1
0-0009
274
214
3
4-8818
4
11
169
207
‘See? The crack’s last direction took the 2 in 214, but then nothing else. It didn’t work to repeat it; the numbers didn’t work out evenly that way, either. So, we just took the fourteen numbers and figured the rest were for something later,’ Jenna said, gesturing at the seventeen leftover numbers.
Porter slid the scrap across the counter so it was next to the printout of Coach Paul’s limited book history. After only a moment of silence, he jabbed the printout with his finger. ‘This book. It’s library number or sorting number or whatever—’
‘Call number,’ Hattie filled in.
‘It matches the first seven of the seventeen leftover numbers. 143.4881!’
Canary yellow relevance flashed in. ‘What are we waiting for? We need that book!’
‘Well, here it is: Bergson and Education by Olive A. Wheeler,’ Hattie said as she returned from the row of shelves she’d disappeared down. She laid the dusty volume on the counter. ‘The copy looks old, but the actual book’s older. The original version was published all the way back in 1922.’
Jenna couldn’t take her eyes off the old man staring back at her from the cover of the 2012 reprint edition of the book in front of her. They’d taken monikers from classic literature, left clues from various renowned books and plays, their cemented places on required reading lists proof they’d stood the test of time. Oxford blue flashed in. Obscure.
This book, however, represented a rather large diversion from the other references they’d run into on this orchestrated quest. Sure, it was a book, and in a way, it fit the elitist mold. But not for its acclaim or because of celebrated recognition of its contribution to a genre. Rather, at a glance, it could fit into a group of books that might’ve been chosen by the elitists in question only because the everyday library-goer would walk right past it. Or, at best, glance at it, assume based on its cover and existence in the philosophy section that it was boring, and put it back.
No, this book didn’t fit with the other works of art the terrorists had used in their puzzle so far. Brown the shade of a coconut husk flashed in. This choice was included out of necessity.
‘This book somehow holds the next step,’ Jenna muttered mostly to herself. ‘But what?’
‘We still have ten unused digits from the seventeen leftover code numbers,’ Porter said. ‘Maybe those could lead to a chapter number, then page, then—’
‘Line number, word number? I know we’re grasping at straws, but the letter at least gave us a guide to make the jump to the page numbers. You might be right,’ Dodd said, ‘but the reality is we’ve still got ten digits here and nothing to tell us how to use them in conjunction with this lovely volume on … what is it about, anyway?’
Jenna turned toward Grey without thinking as Dodd shifted his gaze toward where their amateur literature expert was now leaning with her back against the desk, holding the hardback copy of Bergson and Education flat on her right palm and using her left hand to turn pages.
Grey didn’t acknowledge she’d been spoken to at first, but the series of blinks that came in soft, quick flicks told Jenna she was aware she had been addressed.
Grey gently licked the tip of her pointer finger and touched it to a page corner, turned it over.
‘Please, it would be better if you didn’t—’
Jenna touched Hattie’s arm beside her, caught her gaze, and shook her head sternly.
Hattie seemed to fight the urge to argue, but finally, she simply looked down and muttered something about germs as Jenna turned back to Grey. ‘Any good?’
As usual, Grey answered any question but the one asked.
‘It was put between the covers in 1922, so she might not have gotten to read it. Sad,’ Grey said, as if contributing to a line of conversation. Whether she was oblivious to the fact it was one she was having in her own head or just didn’t care that they were in the dark was anyone’s guess, though her tone was light and thoughtful. She cocked her head, looked up as if thinking. ‘Well, then again, I suppose she could’ve still been alive. The question would be whether or not she’d have heard of it before it was too late or even been interested.’
‘Grey, you’re talking about the author of this book, right? What book is it you think she wouldn’t have been able to read, and what does it have to do with this one?’ Jenna asked, sure to keep her words slow and polite.
Grey looked up from the book and slowly turned her head to face Jenna in an owl-like motion. ‘Education reform. This book is about an evolution philosophy and education reform that would teach it.’
‘Are you kidding me with this?’ Porter mumbled behind Jenna.
Jenna ignored him, mustering patience and focus to extract from Grey whatever it was she had put together. Her response may not have answered the question Jenna had asked, but the fact that her ex-patient had answered Dodd’s question bolstered her resolve.
‘OK, and what book are you wondering if the author of this education reform book ever got to read? Why would it have mattered to her?’
Grey shrugged. ‘It might not have. Some people can’t stand it, so I suppose she could’ve gone either way.’
Focus. Eye on the prize.
‘So if it might not have mattered to the author, why wonder if she’d read it?’ Jenna asked, choosing the phrase very carefully so that if she actually addressed it, Grey would be all but forced to reveal something about why she had drawn a connection between the two in her mind.
‘Because it’s the next piece of the hunt, obviously, and it was on my mind.’
Well, then. That clears that up.
‘What is the next piece of the hunt, Grey? Please,’ Jenna said, the last word slipping out in a tone of desperation. For all they knew, the bank killers were putting on their masks
again, moving to strike some target she had a chance to stop.
‘Your masked men. One of them is Scout, right? From To Kill a Mockingbird?’ Grey said.
‘Yes,’ Jenna said slowly, begging her own wit to be quick enough to foresee any answers or word choices that might bog Grey down.
‘Well, the leftover numbers were this book’s Dewey Decimal number. Kinda funny book to have in an elementary school, but I guess maybe the high school kids might need it …’ She paused. Shrugged. ‘But elementary school and Scout sitting somewhere back in one of my brain containers that opened up reminded me of a joke. Most people don’t even get it, but it’s a good one if you don’t miss it.’
So much for not getting bogged down on any tangents.
‘A joke?’ Porter said in disbelief.
Not now, Porter!
But this time, Grey didn’t seem bothered. In fact, she nodded fast. ‘Yeah. Chapter two. “I’m just trying to tell you the new way they’re teachin’ the first grade, stubborn. It’s the Dewey Decimal System.”’
‘What?’ Porter said, his voice a mix of confusion and distaste.
‘That’s something Jem says to Scout,’ Grey said. She let out a little laugh. ‘He was trying to sound smart, saying Miss Caroline was annoyed at Scout already knowing how to read and used flashcards to dumb-down her teaching material was just because the teacher was trying out a new technique.’
‘How is that a joke?’ Porter asked, no longer annoyed but interested, albeit confused.
‘Because it was Harper Lee sneaking in a little rubber egg—’
‘Easter egg,’ Jenna translated.
‘—for her readers.’ Grey chuckled again as if she knew Harper Lee herself and thought she was just the bee’s knees. ‘Jem was trying to sound smart, because by blaming Miss Caroline’s methods on John Dewey, a big talker about educational reform at the time, it made it look like he understood everything they’d heard the grown people discussing about the way schools were changing and might change more.’
Flash Point Page 15
