by Kathi Daley
“Exactly. And that response is how I will know that you are you and not fake you.”
When Charlie, Catherine, and I arrived at home, Zak and Alex were still in the computer room, typing away at a rate that seemed nearly impossible to me. I poked my head in, told them that I was home, and then asked them if I could get them a sandwich. Zak didn’t seem to hear me, but Alex paused and looked at me. She typed in a few more commands and then stood up.
“I could use a break,” she said. “I’ll help you with the sandwiches.” She looked over at Zak. “We’ll bring him one, and I’ll take over his role while he eats. Diego is in town for the weekend, and he’s on his way over. He can take over my part while I fill in for Zak.”
Diego was Alex’s sort-of boyfriend. He was a graduate of Zimmerman Academy and a college student who came home to Ashton Falls fairly often.
“It doesn’t look like things are going well,” I said, based on the pinched look on Zak’s face.
“We’re managing to stay ahead of things for now. Pi and I are playing defense by trying to slow the virus and keep the gates I told you about from opening, while Zak is putting new barriers in place.”
“These gates aren’t actual gates, are they?” I asked.
Alex smiled at me. “No. The term gates just seemed to be a simple way to give you a visual of what we’re dealing with. If we hadn’t found out about the virus as early as we did, there wouldn’t have been a thing we could have done to stop it, but I think at this point, we have a very good chance of doing just that.”
Diego arrived as I was slicing the ham for the sandwiches. Alex kissed him hello and began to explain what it was they needed to do. As the two exchanged ideas, it occurred to me that Diego was the genius who’d helped Alex and me defeat Claudia Lotherman when she’d kidnapped Zak a couple years ago. In the past, Claudia, who also happened to be a master of disguise, had demonstrated that she would go to great lengths just to mess with me. Could it be her?
I glanced at Alex. “Finish the sandwiches. I need to run and ask Zak about something.”
Alex agreed and headed toward the counter where I’d set out the food while I headed down the hallway to the computer room.
“Was that Diego I heard?” Zak asked.
“It was. Alex is filling him in. I’m sure they’ll both be here in a few minutes. How’s it going?”
“I’m managing to keep my head above water so far. I’m hoping that with Diego’s help, we can get ahead of this thing.”
“I had a thought,” I said as Zak continued to type in the codes that he’d determined would put up the barriers he needed to erect. “It occurred to me that Claudia Lotherman might be the person behind everything that’s going on.”
Zak actually paused and looked at me. “Claudia?”
“I have no idea why she would want to kidnap Marlow and hack your system, but it does seem to be exactly the sort of thing she’d do. Plus, there is the whole look-alike factor.”
“The woman on the tape was only about your height. Claudia is tall. Even Claudia couldn’t disguise herself to look shorter than she actually is.”
“True,” I responded. “But what if she made someone else look like me? Maybe she found someone with similar features and took it from there either by the masterful use of cosmetics or even cosmetic surgery.”
Zak paused. He rolled his lips and then rubbed his eyes. “As crazy as that sounds, you might be onto something. In fact, if Fake Zoe was surgically modified to look like you, it would take someone as crazy as Claudia to go to all the trouble.” Zak looked down at his keyboard. “I really don’t have time to work this out in my mind right now, but I do think you might be onto something. We can talk about it later.”
“Okay,” I said, slipping out of the room just as Alex and Diego slipped in with a sandwich for Zak.
Scooter had texted earlier to say he wouldn’t be home until tomorrow, so after Catherine and I ate, I gave her a bath, put her to bed, and then took the dogs out while Zak, Alex, and Diego continued to work. I felt vulnerable given everything that had happened this week, so I made sure all the cats and dogs were inside and accounted for, and then I locked all the doors and set the alarm. If Diego decided to leave later, Alex could let him out, but I suspected he’d end up in one of the guest rooms. If I had to guess, no one was getting any sleep until Zak completed his task, which he’d indicated earlier could very well take hours and hours.
Once the house was locked up, I grabbed a blanket and then headed back into the computer room. I couldn’t help, but I could sit there in solidarity while those I loved did what they needed to do to thwart the plans of whoever had gone to so much trouble to create such a high degree of chaos.
Chapter 8
Somewhere around three a.m., Zak announced that they’d done what they needed to do and that the information stored on Zimmerman Software’s server was safe. Alex settled Diego in one of the guest rooms and then went to bed. Zak looked exhausted, but he was also agitated. I knew he needed to unwind, so I simply sat with him while he settled on the sofa in our suite with a glass of brandy. We didn’t speak as we watched the flames dance in the fireplace in companionable silence I knew we both found comfort in. At some point, I must have fallen asleep because I woke in my bed with the sun shining brightly. I could hear someone in the kitchen, so I got up to find Zak and Catherine eating breakfast.
“I would have gotten up with her,” I said. “You should have woken me.”
“I know I should be exhausted, but I’m actually still pretty wound up,” Zak said. “When I heard the little munchkin call out, I decided to go ahead and get her so you could sleep.”
“Daddy made pancakes,” Catherine said with a grin.
“Yes, he did,” I grinned back. I’d arranged for my parents to babysit Catherine since today was the barn decorating party. I wondered if I should cancel. “I’m not sure if you remember, but we’re supposed to meet the gang out at the barn today. Should we cancel?”
“No,” Zak said. “We made a commitment, and we should follow through. Is Catherine going to your parents’?”
“She’s supposed to.” I poured myself a cup of coffee.
“Let’s go ahead and take her over there. I’m sure they’re looking forward to seeing her. We can help at the barn and then come home and crash if all of this catches up with us.”
“Do you think it’s safe to leave her?” I asked.
“I think she’ll be as safe with your parents as anyone.” Zak got up and poured Catherine a glass of milk.
“Should I tell them about Fake Zoe?” I asked. “My mom will freak out, but it doesn’t seem safe for them not to know.”
“We should tell them,” Zak decided. “We’ll explain what we can when we drop her off.”
By the time we arrived at the decorating party, the place was packed. Zak and Levi had lined up a strong and hardworking group to help assemble everything, which without a professional set designer at the helm as we had in past years, had turned out to be a fairly huge undertaking. We’d agreed early on not to get too elaborate. All anyone really expected were monsters and zombies who would jump out from around dark corners to scare the living daylights out of all but the heartiest of folks. It was true that in the early days when Joel Ringer was in charge of the event, it was worthy of national attention, but in the absence of the man who’d turned out to be a lunatic and mass killer, we’d been forced to settle for ordinary.
Scooter was still at Tucker’s, and Alex had gone off with Diego for the day, so we’d locked up the house and set the alarm, leaving the dogs at home. Charlie didn’t look thrilled at being left behind, but I figured a busy construction site was no place for a little dog.
Jeremy and Jessica agreed to babysit Levi and Ellie’s two little ones, so they were here too, which felt right to me since the four of us had been together for the haunted barn almost from the beginning. In a way, the four of us being together for the pre-Haunted Hamlet events was a time-honored tra
dition I hoped none of us would have to forego no matter how many children might be waiting in our futures.
Zak had sandwiches and salads brought in from the deli as lunchtime approached. The friends and neighbors who’d shown up had worked hard to get the barn ready for opening night, and Zak wanted to be certain everyone was fed. As a member of the event committee, I helped out with dozens of events every year, but the Haunted Hamlet had been a personal favorite since I was a teen coming to the volunteer parties with my father.
“Do you think the electrical panel is going to support all these lights and electronics?” Ellie asked as she helped me hang lights around the exterior of the barn.
“Zak is bringing in a generator to take care of the props and interior lights, so all the house panel will need to support is whatever we add to the exterior of the barn,” I answered.
“It was nice of Mr. Franklin to let us use the barn, seeing that this is a working farm and not deserted like the farms we’ve used in the past.”
“He was very generous to offer. The crowds and noise alone are going to be invasive for a few days, but he insists that he wants to do his part for the community, and the truth of the matter is the use of actual haunted barns and houses for the event hasn’t worked out all that well in the past.”
“I guess that’s as true a statement as any,” Ellie agreed, climbing down off the ladder she was using, moved it over, and climbed back up to take care of the next section of lights.
“Did you see any rubber spiders in those boxes?” a volunteer asked as I knelt down to dig through a box for additional lights.
“No spiders, but I did see bats.”
“Try those big boxes along the back wall,” Ellie instructed the volunteer as she leaned over to one side to hang one last light before moving the ladder once again.
We’d been working for several hours when Alex showed up with Diego. I was surprised to see them since when I’d last spoken to them, they’d indicated that they planned to hang out with friends and maybe play video games. I noticed that not only was Alex carrying an envelope in her hand, but she looked terrified as well.
I climbed down the ladder I’d just climbed up on and crossed to where she was standing. “What is it? What’s happened?”
She handed me the envelope. I opened it to find a photo of Scooter, who was standing against a solid-colored wall made of wood panels. He was holding a large piece of cardboard with the words: What am I? Beneath the words was a drawing of a rectangle and within the boundaries of the rectangle were smaller shapes very similar to the ones I’d found on both the note in my office at the Zoo and the note in Zak’s office at Zimmerman Academy.
“I tried to call both you and Zak when I found it, but neither of you picked up,” Alex said. “I wasn’t sure what to do.”
I realized I must have turned my ringer off at some point and forgotten to turn it back on. I was much better about leaving my ringer on since I’d become a mother, but there were still times when it was inappropriate to allow the phone to ring, so there were times I turned it off.
“Have you spoken to Scooter?” I asked Alex.
“Not since yesterday morning. I tried and tried to call him when I got this, but his phone is turned off.” A tear slid down her cheek. “What’s happened to him? Do you think he’s hurt?” She took an unsteady breath. “We have to find him.”
I knew Scooter’s plan yesterday had been to go to soccer practice after school and then go over to Tucker’s to hang out and spend the night. “Go and find Zak,” I instructed Alex and Diego. “I think he’s in the back working on the electrical panel. I’m calling Tucker’s aunt.”
As it turned out, Scooter never met up with Tucker the previous day. Tucker informed me that Scooter had planned to come by after soccer, but that he’d texted him yesterday afternoon to let him know it wasn’t going to work out. According to Tucker, he hadn’t seen Scooter since Friday morning. I then called Scooter’s soccer coach, who told me that Scooter hadn’t shown up for practice. My stomach churned with worry when a call to his principal netted the information that, while he’d attended his morning classes, he’d never come back to the campus for the afternoon session after leaving the campus for lunch.
Tears streamed down my cheeks as I handed Zak the note Alex had discovered. His lips tightened as he stared at the photo, which featured a frightened-looking, but seemingly unharmed, sixteen-year-old.
“What are we going to do?” Alex cried, leaning into my body as I wrapped an arm around her.
“I’m sure the person who has Scooter is the same person who had Marlow. He was unharmed, and it looks as if Scooter is unharmed as well,” Zak said. “I guess all we can do is figure out what it is this psychopath wants.”
“The photo is asking us to identify the image on the cardboard,” I said. “The words: What am I? are scrawled against the top of the photo. I can’t know for certain unless we actually compare the image on the cardboard and the notes I found, but I suspect they are the same.”
“Where are the notes?” Zak asked.
“At the house.”
“Okay. Let’s head home. I’ll let Levi know what we’re doing.”
Alex and Diego agreed to meet us back at the house. Once Zak explained to Levi why we were leaving, he and Ellie agreed to meet us at the house as well. When we arrived at the estate, I showed Zak the two notes I’d found; one in my office at the Zoo, and the other in his office at Zimmerman Academy.
Zak carefully looked at the notes I’d found. On each of the two notes, the rectangle containing the symbols had three smooth edges and one jagged edge. Zak carefully cut the rectangles out and then fit the two pieces together. He compared it to the larger rectangle on the cardboard sign Scooter was holding in the photo. He looked up at me. “It appears we only have two of the four pieces we need to solve this.”
“The person who did this wouldn’t ask us to solve the puzzle if he or she didn’t think we had all the pieces,” I pointed out. “I found the two notes we have in my office at the Zoo and your office at the academy. Maybe there’s a note here — in your office. We know this person was in your office, so perhaps they left a note when they infected your computer with the virus, and you just haven’t noticed it.”
Zak began looking through the stacks of mail that were on his desk that he hadn’t had time to go through since returning from his trip. I was about to help when my phone rang. It was Salinger. I explained what was going on. He was on his way to speak to the high school principal, who was home since it was a Saturday. He asked for a list of Scooter’s closest friends. He planned to speak to them as well in the hope that Scooter had mentioned where he planned to go once he left the school on Friday.
By the time I got off the phone, Alex and Diego had arrived. We discussed how they could best help. At this point, figuring out where Scooter had gone and who’d he’d met up with after leaving the school seemed the most relevant thing we could do, so Alex agreed to start making calls to everyone she knew who attended the public high school.
Levi and Ellie pulled up out front just as Zak emerged from his office with an envelope similar to the other two I’d found. Now we had three of the four pieces, although three without rectangle number four wasn’t going to do us any good.
“The safety deposit box,” I said. “When we went to the bank, you took an envelope out of our safety deposit box. It was the only thing left in the box. You put it in your jacket pocket.”
Zak headed toward the coat closet. “I forgot all about that.” He opened the closet and took out the envelope. He opened it to find the fourth small rectangle that made up the one large rectangle.
“Okay, we have all the pieces,” Alex said. “Now, we just need to figure out what it means.”
Zak started by taping the four pieces together in a manner in which the jagged edges fit together. He then scanned the image into the computer and accessed the software which would search the world database for a match. In the meantime, I sat at
the conference table with Alex, Diego, Levi, and Ellie. We all stared intently at the images, but nothing jumped out right away.
“Maybe it’s a substitution cipher,” Diego said.
“Substitution cipher?” Ellie asked.
“The shapes represent numbers or letters,” he replied. “For example, the squares could be E’s, and the stars could be A’s. That sort of thing.”
“If that’s true, how will you ever figure it out?” Ellie asked.
“Basically, you just start by guessing based on probability, given naturally occurring frequencies,” Alex said.
I could see that Ellie and Levi were both confused, but Zak and Alex had explained this to me before.
“E is the most commonly used letter in the alphabet,” Alex said. “If the most commonly used shape is a box, you start off substituting an E for every box. It doesn’t always work out that way, but it gives you a place to start.”
“You can also look for small words, especially one letter words like A and I,” Diego said, “or two letter words like as and if. Once you start to find a few letters that seem to work, you can make further guesses and slowly build the key.”
“Of course, there is software that will do this much quicker,” Alex assured our friends.
“And if it isn’t a substitution cipher?” Levi asked.
Alex looked down at the image on the table. “It really can be a lot of things. There might be a key which will unlock the pattern, and the secret will be to find the key.”
“What sort of key?” Ellie asked.
“It can be anything really,” Alex answered. “A book, a document, a number sequence. Anything.”
“If all of that is true, how are we supposed to figure it out?” I asked, feeling totally helpless.
“Keep in mind the person who left these notes and developed this code wants you to find the answer,” Alex said. “In the end, I think we will find that the answer to the puzzle is personal.”
Personal, I thought, studying the symbols on the page in front of me. They did seem familiar. I glanced at Ellie, who was staring at the symbols as well. Our eyes met.
