Keyword Cypher

by E. A. House

  Chris smiled, waved Professor Griffin into the elevator, then grabbed a stack of boxes from where they were piled outside the door of the office and marched inside.

  Then he stopped dead on the threshold in shock. The office had been ransacked.

  Admittedly to a casual observer it wouldn’t look like anything more than a normal lived-in mess. But the books on all three of the office bookshelves were jumbled and standing at a slant, instead of perfectly perpendicular the way Aunt Elsie always kept them so the binding didn’t warp. The floor rug was at an angle from the desk, which had sticky notes scattered across its surface and all of Aunt Elsie’s pens jammed into a single penholder. The trashcan was beside the desk, instead of under it, and—Chris poked his head under the desk—pieces of crumpled paper and tissues were scattered where it had presumably fallen over. And the filing cabinets, when Chris checked them, had all been rifled.

  Okay, Chris said to himself. I’m getting creeped out and concerned. This was edging into bad-television-thriller territory, and while he might be overly imaginative Chris didn’t particularly want to be bumped off for poking his nose into a criminal conspiracy. So the last thing he should do was indicate in any way that he had realized someone had been in the office before him looking for something—which standing in the dead center of his aunt’s ransacked office and looking horrified was not going to accomplish.

  Chris gave himself a mental shake, then went back to the hallway to grab another box and closed the door to the office with what he really hoped was a natural and innocent air. Then he pulled out his phone and took pictures of every corner of the office, even under the desk, since he figured that Carrie would blame his impression of Aunt Elsie’s office on his nonexistent paranoia. If it really is paranoia, Chris thought.

  In the meantime, there were Aunt Elsie’s things to pack up and then her office to search for a floorboard with a burn mark. And it was actually interesting, in a depressing kind of way, to pack up her desk and her doo-dads and whatsits and papers and such. Soothing, too. Here was Aunt Elsie’s blown-glass paperweight with a sailing ship etched on it, and her other blown-glass paperweight with a sailing ship etched on it, the one with the light-up LED base, and the clay paperweight with a ship made out of macaroni that Chris had made her, and the rock paperweight with a ship painted on it that Carrie had made her—actually, Chris thought, looking into an entire box of paperweights with sailing ships on them—maybe the Kingsolver family had a paperweight problem.

  He lugged the box to the growing pile next to the door and turned to the papers in the desk drawers, taking care to leave aside anything that might possibly have been the Archive’s so someone could look over them later. Chris had not actually believed Professor Griffin when the man had told him that little boys who walked out of the Archive with archival property in their pockets were fed to the archive dragon, but it never hurt to be cautious. He’d already done the bookshelf—shaking every book first, in case there was a note in the pages, and checking the titles for obviously fake books—and it had been mercifully organized. And Aunt Elsie was careful and organized in general, so the collection of documents that might belong to the Archive and not Aunt Elsie, mostly internal affairs stuff, was small. Aunt Elsie never left anything even remotely fragile out of its special labeled, acid-free box, and she put little sticky notes on the folders for everything. In the end, Chris was left only with yellow legal pads covered in neat notes, professional correspondence, and three-ring binders of archive procedures. Not very interesting, but still full of Aunt Elsie’s life’s work, so Chris parked himself on the floor behind the desk and started filling boxes, noticing nothing unusual until he got to the bottom drawer in her desk, which stuck abominably and hardly looked like Aunt Elsie had used it in years. He had to jiggle the drawer and whack the side of the desk just to get it to open, and then sneezed at the dust that puffed into the air when the drawer squeaked open. It was half full of old folders.

  Humming to himself, Chris blew some dust off a disaster-preparedness plan from 2010 and plopped it in the box, then followed it with a larger-than-normal file folder almost the exact same color as the industrial-green-painted desk. There were three even older three-ring binders stacked under it, each one taped closed with a shiny strip of duct tape and each one with the word “the” scrawled across the front in terrible cursive.

  “The what?” Chris said to himself, prying at the duct tape with a fingernail. The tape looked newer than the binders, or at least more recently applied. “The secret to the mystery of my untimely death? The identity of the person who killed me?”

  “Hello?” someone called, and Chris jumped a foot in the air.

  “Aw, jeez, sorry,” whoever it was said, and Chris scrambled up from the floor. He put the binders into the box under the file folder and the disaster-preparedness plan as he did, and desperately tried to keep a perfectly neutral face when he opened the door and recognized his mysterious visitor—by process of elimination, because Chris knew all the archivists at Edgewater by sight and didn’t recognize this one—as Dr. Kevin McRae. Dr. McRae was—well, frankly he looked unfairly nice and normal. He was wearing a button-down and a tie with a pattern of palm trees, on which he was polishing his glasses. He had sad blue eyes and black curls that made him look like the young psychiatrist in the horror film who turns out to be murdering his patients because of deeply repressed childhood trauma. Chris should probably have laid off the horror films, but he’d been having trouble sleeping. Which the late-night horror movies weren’t helping, actually.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you,” McRae said, hands now in his pockets. “I heard someone in here and I wanted to lend a hand. You’re Chris, right?”

  Chris blinked several times, trying to decide if this was normal interest or creepy interest.

  “I mean,” McRae said a little too brightly, “I’ve seen your picture with your aunt in the director’s office and I know this must be hard for you, losing Elsie so suddenly, and if there’s anything I can do to make the transition easier on your family I feel I owe it to my predecessor to—”

  “Chris!” Carrie’s voice piped up from behind McRae. “Mom’s out front with the car! Do you need help with—er, hello?” she added, stopping short and staring at McRae.

  “Dr. McRae,” the man in question said, shaking her hand.

  “Carrie Kingsolver,” Carrie said dubiously. Turning to Chris she said, “All packed up?”

  “Er,” said Chris, who had in fact packed up the office but had not in fact found the burn mark on the floor while doing so, “everything I could find I’ve packed . . . ”

  Carrie seemed to get his meaning, because she nodded at him and grabbed a box. “Why don’t we get this stuff in the car and then do a last sweep?” she suggested.

  “Oh, good idea,” Chris sighed.

  “Need any help?”

  “Ah, Doctor . . . ”

  “You could go through the pile of maybe archive stuff and weed out the definitely archive stuff?” Chris suggested. “But otherwise, we’ve got this.”

  “Oh, let me help carry things,” McRae said. “And it’s sometimes helpful to have an outside observer when packing—they can notice things you wouldn’t.”

  “Sure,” Carrie said sweetly, exchanging a grimace with Chris when the man’s back was turned.

  “What’s his deal?” she whispered to Chris as they carried the first load of boxes out to the car. Chris shrugged. “And you didn’t find it?” Carrie continued. He shook his head.

  “Okay,” Carrie said. “You distract him and I’ll look.”

  But that proved easier said than done. McRae would not leave. He wouldn’t be induced to sit quietly in a corner and check the possibly-archival-papers stack, he insisted on doing a thorough sweep of the room for missing paperweights while Chris and Carrie watched him with poorly concealed terror, hoping he didn’t find anything, and Carrie wasn’t even able to get him tangled up in conversation with her mom. Aunt Helen was a n
otorious talker, possessing a nosiness that led her to terrorize new neighbors and a genuine sweetness that somehow saved her from charges of assault—but McRae managed somehow to brush off her third degree and go right back to poking his nose into everything Chris and Carrie didn’t want him noticing. He kept offering to carry boxes out to the car and peering inside them as he did. It was sheer luck Chris managed to grab the last box he’d been packing for himself. He wasn’t sure why, but he did not want McRae to see what was in the drawer that stuck.

  Then Professor Griffin turned up with a plate of cookies he’d liberated from the college meeting and he wanted to help out, and if Chris and Carrie had just wanted to pack up their aunt’s office it would have been as painless and comforting a day as they could have wished. Barring of course McRae, who didn’t seem able to read social cues, or was too interested in Aunt Elsie’s office to care. As it was, Chris and Carrie spent the whole time hoping for a chance to shoo all the adults out of the room, and the closest they came after Professor Griffin turned up with cookies was when Aunt Helen, noticing that Carrie seemed tenser than normal, came to the conclusion that Chris and Carrie were just about at the end of their tolerance for packing up their deceased aunt’s things, and decided it was time to go home.

  “Carrie, honey, are you coming?” she asked as she chased everyone else out the door, Professor Griffin and McRae wandering off in different directions and Chris fidgeting.

  “Just give me a minute?” Carrie called from inside the office, and when Chris and his aunt peered around the door, she was sitting on the desk with her back to the door, wiping angrily at her eyes with a Kleenex. Aunt Helen sighed.

  “Take as long as you need, sweetie,” she said and then looked to Chris questioningly. Chris gave her a half shrug and wandered on down the hall, because he hadn’t found anything in the office and if he went in now with no packing to do it was just going to hurt. Carrie came out a few minutes later with her eyes and nose red, and gave Chris such a distressed look that he knew she hadn’t found the floorboard either, which really just put a cap on the whole mess. Chris went home feeling drained, didn’t really pay much attention to his aunt asking him and Carrie what they wanted to do with Aunt Elsie’s stuff, and was just miserable enough to hide in his bedroom and do a very small amount of crying before dinner. He suspected Carrie of going home to cry as well, and was therefore startled when she came in his window at nine in the evening with the force and determination of a small hurricane.

  CHRIS HAD A BEDROOM ON THE GROUND FLOOR with a concrete garden bench right under his window, as he had the bedroom that looked into his mother’s garden. So it wasn’t at all hard to climb in his window, although if a parent caught someone there would be scolding about messing up the air conditioning and then pointed questions about what was wrong with using the front door like a civilized person. And anyway, Carrie wasn’t the sort of person to climb in windows in the first place, so Chris was really very confused.

  “Um,” he said as Carrie stomped across his bed while he was in it. “Hello, cousin?”

  “Sorry,” Carrie said, “I didn’t think you’d be in bed yet.”

  “I was checking Facebook on my phone,” Chris admitted, “so I wasn’t exactly asleep, but—why did you climb in my window?”

  “I know, and I’m sorry about that,” Carrie said, which didn’t answer the question. “But I don’t want my mom and dad to know that you know what I’m going to do tomorrow so I need to warn you about it—”

  “Carrie!” Chris had seen her like this only once before, when she’d told a teacher the exact truth in just such a way that the boy who’d been picking on the whole second grade class got suspended. “What did you do?”

  Carrie opened her mouth, apparently to angrily demand to know why Chris thought she’d done anything, then seemed to realize the exact circumstances and deflated a bit.

  “I lost my necklace,” she said.

  “That . . . sucks?” Chris tried, because he wasn’t sure where this was going.

  “At the Archive today,” Carrie explained. “And it was the one Aunt Elsie left me—”

  “You lost that!?”

  “Not by accident!” Carrie hissed. “It was the only one I was wearing and we needed to get back in that office!”

  Chris blinked. “You left your locket in the office today?” he asked. Carrie nodded.

  “In a desk drawer,” she said. “I’m going to call Professor Griffin tomorrow and see if he’ll let us come back and look for it. I’m hoping it’ll give us an excuse to move the desk and the file cabinets, and I might be able to convince McRae that I really don’t want help finding it on account of it being so personal and me being so embarrassed.”

  “I don’t know if that will stop him,” Chris said. “He’s kinda creepy. You don’t think he knows something about what happened to Aunt Elsie, do you?”

  “Oh, probably!” Carrie said. “He sure seems interested in us, and Aunt Elsie, and her office—”

  “Which is going to be his office soon,” Chris pointed out.

  “I know,” Carrie said glumly, and they sat side by side in the dark, wondering if they’d bitten off more than they could chew.

  “Well, today is a Thursday,” Chris said finally. “And the Archive is closed for the next three days because the person who used to come in on the weekends is gone, so we have the weekend to plan.”

  “And Monday is a grace period,” Carrie added. “Because McRae has to go up to his old office on Monday and get the last of his things.” When Chris looked confused she rolled her eyes and added, “He told me allll about it while he was helping me carry a box out to the car. I have no clue what he wants but it is totally not Aunt Elsie’s job.”

  “Great,” Chris sighed. “So we still haven’t found the box or even the floorboard, you had to lose your locket, and we have no idea what the deal is with McRae.”

  “An excellent summary,” Carrie said, turning reluctantly to the window. “Not that we—actually—”

  “What?”

  “Oooooooohhhh!” Carrie breathed. A delighted smile broke across her face.

  “Carrie, what?” Chris asked. That smile of delighted plotting never, ever boded well.

  “I might possibly be able to do something about McRae,” Carrie said sweetly, and scrambled out the window, through the backyard, and over the fence, leaving behind her a very puzzled and alarmed cousin.

  Carrie did not pop out of the woodwork the next morning, despite the vaguely panicked impression Chris woke up with as a result of a series of dreams about cars exploding and Carrie dressed as a mobster telling him that “McRae’s been taken care of.” It took him some time to remember that she was working at the school until noon and did not own anything with pinstripes. Chris spent the morning eating cornflakes and watching a television special on Bigfoot, turned the television off violently when a car restoration show came on, and then gave up and did all his chores except the mail, which he was in the middle of sorting when Carrie finally did call him.

  “Chris,” she said, “how do you feel about terrible action movies?”

  “Weren’t we going to . . . ?” Chris trailed off significantly as his mom wandered past, looking surprised that he’d already done a load of laundry. He wasn’t sure if they had been planning to do something, but he was sure that an action movie wasn’t going to help them deal with Dr. McRae.

  Unless it was an action movie about mobsters and Carrie really was planning to sink the man into the harbor wearing concrete overshoes and needed to watch a movie for research, but Chris didn’t think his subconscious was that accurate.

  “This will help,” Carrie said. “I’m ninety-five-point-nine percent sure.”

  “Um,” Chris said, wondering at the point nine. “Sure. Are you coming by or should I meet you there?”

  “No!” Carrie said. “Chris, we’re coming to get you in, like, half an hour. Do not still have your pajamas on!”

  Then she hung up, leaving C
hris to slowly realize that she’d said “we” instead of “I” and that he was, in fact, still in his pajamas.

  There were two people in the car when Carrie swung by to pick him up. One of them of course was Carrie, looking cheerful and wearing yellow and demonstrating that Mrs. Hadler still had not eaten her. Chris was always slightly afraid that she would, and had probably read The Librarian from the Black Lagoon at an impressionable age, because Mrs. Hadler wasn’t even a librarian.

  The other person in the car was a girl the same age as Chris and Carrie, with her long dark hair caught up in a ponytail and a pair of strangely familiar sunglasses snagged in her collar. Her eyes were a bright and vivid blue and she was very nearly the prettiest person Chris had ever seen. She was also weirdly familiar, as though he’d seen her in passing a long time ago and never caught her name, and Chris found himself staring, trying to remember where he had seen her, trying to force her name onto the tip of his tongue. She’d been, not sad, but grave . . . wait. She was the girl from the funeral! His pulse suddenly racing from the shock of seeing a mystery up close and personal, Chris realized that he was frozen halfway into the backseat, staring. He gave himself a stern shake and scrambled into the back.

  “Hey,” he said, giving Carrie a desperately questioning look and scrabbling around for the seatbelt.

  “Heya,” Carrie chirped, bright and sing-song. “Maddison, this is my cousin Chris.”

  “Hi,” the newly introduced Maddison said, offering Chris her hand. “Nice to meet you.”