Keyword Cypher

by E. A. House

  “I wasn’t trying to sneak up on you!” Carrie said irritably while Chris had a minor spaz attack from the unexpected sensation of a hot hand on his shoulder. “And I’ve been outside in the humidity, what did you expect?” She sat down with a huff on the exercise ball that Chris’s mom had bought herself and then decided never to use. Chris liked to bounce it out the attic window when he was bored.

  “I was researching,” Chris said.

  “I’ll admit I’m impressed. And worried—did you move from that spot at all today?”

  Chris admitted that he maybe had, if one counted bathroom breaks and putting a lunch together. “But I was going to find a floor plan of the Archive before I realized you’d just insist we walk in the front door, and then I had to look up this Kevin McRae guy.”

  “Kevin McRae?” Carrie asked.

  “The archivist they’ve already hired to replace Aunt Elsie,” Chris said. “Don’t tell me I’m just being paranoid. This is getting really weird.”

  Carrie was quiet for a moment, wobbling back and forth a bit on the exercise ball. “I wasn’t going to,” she said.

  “Good,” Chris said. “Because I’m seriously starting to think we need to go to the police about this—”

  “Actually,” Carrie interrupted, bouncing suddenly off the exercise ball and to her feet as though she’d made an unpleasant but necessary decision, “I was going to ask you to come look at something for me? We’ve got an hour before anybody expects us for dinner.”

  THEY ACTUALLY HAD MORE LIKE FORTY-FIVE MINUTES, not nearly enough time to do what Carrie wanted to do, which was retrace Aunt Elsie’s last fatal drive. Aunt Elsie had lived in what she considered necessary peace and quiet and what Chris’s dad considered a hellish pit, which when you averaged it out meant that she’d lived two miles outside of town in a large, crumbling Georgian manor house. It had once been painted a white that had since turned dingy gray, and it dripped with Spanish moss and had a distinctly haunted aura. The house wasn’t remote but it was isolated, and the winding road where Aunt Elsie had died was barely two lanes wide. At the last curve before the house there was an off-kilter crossroads at the crest of a hill, and a car had run the stop sign coming out of a dip in the road and rammed Elsie’s car into a ditch. There were still scorch marks in the grass, and although her car had been moved, caution tape was still wrapped around some of the trees at the site of the accident.

  Carrie pulled her mom’s car into the driveway of the now-empty house, parked, and then marched across the crossroads to just before the crest of the hill. It was a significant dip in the road that you really couldn’t see out of, and it’d caused accidents before when someone went into the dip, missed the stop sign, and breezed into another car on the way out.

  “It rained the day she died,” Carrie said when Chris caught up to her. She was standing in the grass at the edge of the intersecting road, which was dirt and gravel. The main road Aunt Elsie had been on was blacktop. “I checked the weather report for the month—know how we’ve been in a dry-ish spell?”

  “Yeah,” Chris said, thinking of the soggy mail he hadn’t sorted fully and not sure where his cousin was going with this.

  “It was dry the day before, and hasn’t done more than sprinkle since,” Carrie said. “Now I came out here after work, today. And look at this.”

  She pointed and, to make it clearer in the gradually darkening light, pulled a flashlight out of her purse and shined it on a pair of tire tracks pressed deeply into the road. They were worn but still clearly visible in the dried sandy mud.

  “You think that’s from the car that killed her?” Chris asked.

  Carrie sighed, and actually looked around as though she thought somebody might be in the trees watching her. “I think it might be from the car that murdered her,” she said quietly and in a rush. When Chris did nothing but stare at her, she twirled the flashlight nervously a few times and continued, “This whole dip in the road gets pretty muddy when it rains—as a matter of fact there’s a spot back there where I think you could get really stuck really easily, but if you look at the tire tracks? These tire tracks? They’re really clear here and nowhere else. I think somebody was sitting here, in their car, waiting.”

  “Okay,” Chris said, because there were no clearer tire tracks than the ones she’d pointed out. “But that could mean a lot of things—”

  “Also, somebody had to have been sitting here for a while,” Carrie added, “because there’s an oily spot in the road right between the tire tracks.”

  “Oh,” Chris said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t really think—” Chris started to say, because this was Carrie, who did the right and normal and sane thing and was just a little bit ashamed of the treasure hunts of their youth. Carrie, who found a reasonable and rational explanation for everything. Carrie, who was now gathering a whole bunch of innocent-looking facts into a pile that screamed “murder” to the heavens.

  Somewhere in the dense forest a twig snapped and something crashed through the underbrush, startling them both and saving Chris from voicing his own suspicions aloud.

  “Come on,” Carrie said, suddenly turning off her flashlight and striding back to the car so quickly Chris had to jog to keep up with her.

  “You think Aunt Elsie was murdered?” Chris asked as he climbed into the car, the need to move and a nagging feeling of urgency giving him the bravery to blurt it out.

  “She never did anything without a reason, Chris,” Carrie said, starting the car and locking the doors. “Never. Sometimes we didn’t understand the reason—I still have no clue why she habitually reversed the first and last address when she was writing out directions for herself, remember when she got Dad lost in a Cyprus swamp? But . . . ”

  “At some point she would have explained why, yeah, I know,” Chris agreed.

  “So why would she leave you an ‘if you’re reading this I’ve been murdered’ letter if she hadn’t at least considered the possibility of being murdered? Aunt Elsie liked you, she wouldn’t play with your raging paranoia like that.”

  “I do not have a problem with paranoia,” Chris said. “And I think that car is following us.”

  There were headlights glued to their back bumper. They’d been too caught up with each other to register when the car pulled in behind them and it was now too dark to see much, but there were headlights behind them. It could have been nothing and probably was nothing, but it made for a deeply uncomfortable drive home, and Chris may have been more defensive of his paranoid streak as a result. It’s more or less real, he told himself. But it wasn’t as bad as Carrie made it out to be. When the car following them peeled off one street from their house it was a huge relief, and the argument about paranoia lost half its heat, although it didn’t stop completely. Chris and Carrie had a couple of set arguments that were mostly just a comfortable way of passing the time.

  They were consequently still arguing the exact point at which everyone really was out to get you when they pulled into Chris’s driveway and parked, so it took them a moment to register that there was one more car in the Kingsolver gravel drive than normal. Then the figure rummaging in the backseat of the Jeep straightened up and Carrie yelped.

  “Professor Griffin!”

  “Smaller Kingsolvers!” Professor Griffin exclaimed, smiling. He was his usual tall, tanned, commanding presence—he could have played a sea captain in an action movie. He was a professor of oceanography and so in fact did spend a lot of time out on the ocean being commanding—although his smile was dimmer than usual and there were worry lines around his face that hadn’t been there when Chris and Carrie had last seen him.

  They had seen him last a month ago, when he’d waved them off at the pier. Willis Griffin had been both a colleague and a friend of Elsie Kingsolver’s since they’d met in Geology 101 at the University of Florida, although he’d gone on to teach oceanography at a college level and she’d gone into the library sciences. Aunt Elsie didn’t talk mu
ch about her college days (except to remind Chris and Carrie that she expected them to attend), but when she did, Professor Griffin featured prominently. They had gone in very different directions after college but then had found each other over and over again in their professional lives. Professor Griffin sometimes joked that Elsie was afraid to let him out of her sight, for fear of him really finding a cursed treasure and being haunted by it for the rest of his life. For the past six years Professor Griffin had worked with Aunt Elsie at the satellite college campus where he taught geography and oceanography; they had long worked together on research projects, and he was a close friend of the family. He had been almost the only person not at the funeral.

  “I only just got back,” Professor Griffin said, giving Carrie a hug and Chris an arm around the shoulders. “And I am so, so sorry about Elsie, and so very sorry I couldn’t be back in time for the funeral.”

  “It’s okay,” Carrie said, poking her nose into the grocery bag Professor Griffin was holding and grinning at what she saw.

  “Not really,” Professor Griffin said. “I should have, oh I don’t know, jumped over the side and swum home for the funeral. Blasted Atlantic Ocean, deep and vast.”

  “Well,” Carrie said, “everybody did miss you at the funeral. But that wouldn’t have worked and anyway you’d have had to pay your respects in a wetsuit.”

  “But we knew you were out in the middle of the Atlantic with no way to get back in time,” Chris said. “So nobody blames you. Or at least I don’t.”

  “I don’t either,” Carrie said, pulling a jar of maraschino cherries out of the bag.

  “That is because you two are angels,” Professor Griffin said, an arm around each of them as they walked up the drive toward to the house, “who I’m planning to ply with ice cream and pictures taken from Moby after dinner so you’ll forgive me my absence—drat and botheration!” The professor was buzzing. Or rather, ringing.

  “Your . . . hat is ringing,” Carrie pointed out.

  “Ah,” Professor Griffin said after patting down his pockets, shaking out his jacket, and finally taking off his hat and removing his phone from where it had been tucked in the inside band. “It’s my phone! I’m afraid I need to answer this person. You two go on ahead,” he said, shooing them into the house. He wandered back down the driveway. “Yes, this is he,” Chris heard him say into the phone.

  “Carrie!” Chris’s mom exclaimed. “You brought groceries?”

  “Professor Griffin did, Aunt Bree,” Carrie explained. “He’s outside answering a phone call right now.”

  “Ah,” Professor Griffin said from the doorway, “so sorry about that, former student on the other end, he was in a bit of a quandary. Hopefully I’ve steered him in the right direction. What’s for dinner, Bree?”

  Dinner was livelier and happier than it had been recently. Chris and Carrie were used to eating dinner together since they lived down the street from each other, and it was almost normal to be having chicken and rice with both sets of parents and Professor Griffin. Talking about the professor’s research into ocean floor fauna and the pictures brought up by Moby, Professor Griffin’s very small and very accident-prone submersible, was almost entirely normal. Almost normal, that is, except for the absence of Aunt Elsie, which was like having a giant hole at the head of the table that everyone could sense. Luckily Professor Griffin had a gift for distraction.

  “I brought ice cream in memory of Elsie,” he said as he helped clear away the dinner plates. In almost any other family this would have been a simple comment on dessert. The Kingsolvers were not a normal family, so there was a wail of mingled horror and delight at the news.

  “Willis, you didn’t,” Uncle Robby said.

  “Oh no,” Chris’s mom added.

  “Oh yes, I did,” Professor Griffin said, his eyes a little teary and a lot amused. “Elsie would’ve insisted on fake cherry cordial chip at the wake. Do you want her to haunt us?”

  “I hate maraschino cherries,” Uncle Robby said, putting his head down on the table without even checking if his plate was still in the way. “And now I have gravy on my nose.”

  Aunt Elsie had had a cultured palette (whatever that meant, Chris had never been sure), a wide range of tastes, and a willingness to try anything once, including scorpion lollipops. But she had also had a horrifying weakness for cheap chocolate-chip ice cream with maraschino cherries poured over the top. She had served it at every holiday get-together, even Easter and Halloween, and it was a dessert that divided the Kingsolver family more thoroughly than even Aunt Helen and Chris’s mom supporting different political parties. Half the family loved it, half the family hated it; Chris could not stand maraschino cherries and Aunt Helen was suddenly lactose intolerant whenever the dessert showed up. Professor Griffin—not a blood relative but still a member of the family—regarded chocolate chip ice cream and maraschino cherries as a nostalgic treat, enjoying some whenever it was available. He had brought two family-sized tubs of the super-cheap chocolate chip ice cream and an enormous jar of maraschino cherries with him.

  “Your aunt came up with this idea,” he told Chris, spooning cherries into a bowl. It was a comfortable habit rather than anything else, because Chris knew the story of the chocolate-chip-cherry-ice-cream-of-doom by heart. “We were freshmen in college and she wanted cherry-chocolate-chip ice cream, but had no car and little money and the convenience store across the street only had chocolate chip.”

  “She couldn’t just be happy with chocolate chip?” Chris asked, like he almost always did.

  “It’s not that bad,” Carrie mumbled around a mouthful of cherries.

  “It’s weird and pointless,” Chris said. “We couldn’t just have cherry cordial chip from the store instead?” But he put cherries in his bowl anyway, because the point was not ice cream but Aunt Elsie.

  “Most of the best things in life are weird and pointless,” the professor said. “Want to see a very cranky shark that tried to chew Moby’s camera off?”

  “Sure,” Chris said. “But Professor Griffin—”

  “Hmm?” The professor was sorting out pictures of a very irritable electric eel and a very sad-looking submersible and paying only partial attention to Chris, which was just perfect for his purposes.

  “I was wondering . . . ” Chris said, hoping that his nerves would look like grief (to some degree they were). “ . . . if it would be okay for me to help pack up Aunt Elsie’s office?”

  “Oh!” Professor Griffin said. “Yes, of course! That is,” he added, “if it’s okay with your parents? It needs to be done soon so we have somewhere to put the new archivist and I’m sure Elsie would have wanted you to do it. Most of her personal papers were to go to you and Carrie, did you know that?”

  “Yes,” Carrie said under her breath, “but not why . . . ”

  “Then do you mind if I come over to Edgewater tomorrow and start packing stuff up?” Chris asked, ignoring Carrie’s aside. He wasn’t even sure it was aimed at him. They had all known, since the meeting with Aunt Elsie’s lawyer, that almost all of Aunt Elsie’s papers had been left to Chris and Carrie. Chris was honestly puzzled by this bequest because most of Aunt Elsie’s papers were boring, especially the ones that detailed what to do if the Archive flooded. The sixty-page disaster-preparedness manual focused to an incredible degree on how to halt mold damage, which Chris just did not find interesting.

  “Not at all,” Professor Griffin said. “I can even arrange for you to meet the new archivist if you’d like?”

  Chris must have made a face because Professor Griffin huffed a little laugh and said gently, “I know it was sudden. To be honest I’m not sure what the board was thinking, but we should at least give him a chance, hey?”

  “Sure,” Chris sighed, as Professor Griffin explained to his parents and aunt and uncle that the Archive’s Board of Directors had already filled Aunt Elsie’s position and got an appreciable number of shocked responses. “Carrie, do you want to come with?”

  �
��I’ve got school stuff tomorrow,” Carrie said. “Sorry, Chris, but Mrs. Hadler is paying me and I need the money.”

  THE EDGEWATER MARITIME ARCHIVE WAS A CONcrete-and-glass building that looked depressingly industrial. It had been built for preserving delicate documents from Florida’s sweltering climate and it looked it. In fact, it looked vaguely institutional. Chris wheedled his mom into dropping him off at the grim front doors at nine in the morning, and Professor Griffin let him in, munching on a carrot muffin and trying to read a letter from the Dean of Students upside down. Professor Griffin wasn’t at his best in the mornings.

  “Ready to pack?” he asked Chris with a strained sort of cheerfulness as they walked down the echoing hallway. “I asked custodial to leave you some boxes, and your aunt was meticulous in her organization of data. Just don’t pack up any sixteenth-century charters by mistake.”

  “Don’t worry, Professor. Aunt Elsie taught me to identify a sixteenth-century charter by sight and by feel—”

  Professor Griffin raised an eyebrow.

  “Which I would never do because sixteenth-century documents should always be handled with white cotton gloves,” Chris continued hastily.

  Professor Griffin grinned. “Spoken like a true archivist in training. Well, here we are—boxes and all.” And he unlocked the door with a flourish, waving Chris inside and tipping an imaginary captain’s hat. His real one was probably on the bust of Melville in his office. “Now I’ve got to go attend an all-college meeting about the inappropriate usage of inter-office mail to send dead birds,” he said, wandering backwards down the hallway in the general direction of the front doors. “I do hope it wasn’t Professor Delgado on a ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ kick again. English professors can be awfully strange,” he added as he almost walked into the wall instead of the elevator.