by Cat Mann
****
Since the talk I had with Ari about my experiences and thoughts, I had been feeling remarkably better. I had a clearer head, and felt safer knowing he knew about No. 7. I was able to restore some sort of normal routine in my life. I was pushing forward and able, finally, to concentrate on the matter of the final Kakos brother, rather than just hide in my bed all day and wait for him to come and kill me.
I spent the rest of the week combing through all of the articles I had culled from newspapers and online stories about the six Kakos brothers. My name, thankfully, was mentioned only in connection with No.’s 1 and 2 and 6, all of whom had died in Dana Point. No one other than August, Margaux and the Alexanders had even known I was in London when No.’s 3, 4 and 5 died, so I never got a call from the authorities about them. Furthermore, Margaux had somehow managed to cover up most of what had happened with No. 5 and the burning of her flat. The Kakos family had many, many enemies, and I was far down on the list of suspects. I didn’t really think the police cared who had killed them, so long as they were finally off the streets.
I looked for days for more leads to go on and never did I see mention of No. 7. I was beginning to think I had made him up and was actually going nuts. If it hadn’t been for my conversation with Maya, back in Greece, I would probably have given up on my search already.
I had put together a list of Kakos’ cohorts with some help from Andy and had already studied each individual in detail. Some were in prison, some were dead, and others were living double lives as doctors or lawyers in affluent communities throughout the United States and Europe. One morning Andy sent me a new email that added a few names to my list. I pulled up his note and read his message. The new names came from a friend of his in Chicago; the people mentioned were also from the Chicago area. This information peaked my interest considerably. I pulled up the attachment Andy’s friend had sent and read a list of people twenty names long. The very last name on the list made my heart stop and my blood run cold. It read: “20. Dr. Steven Spruce – deceased 9/3/2011.” This man had been my mother’s boyfriend and had been driving the car the night my mother died.
I pulled up my Google search engine with a shaky hand and typed in Spruce’s name. I found several articles about the University of Chicago Medical Center, Spruce’s work with pediatrics and even an article or two about the projects he and my mother had worked on together. I scrolled down the screen and my eyes froze on an editorial about Spruce’s charity work with various organizations. The article was dated five or so years before my mother and I had moved to Chicago. I clicked on the link and was taken to a site that showed the whole piece. At the very top was a picture of a younger Spruce shaking hands with the one and only Damien Kakos, No. 6. They were attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the hospital. Spruce had been part of the Kakos group all along. He had killed my mother. I closed my Macbook softly, grabbed a tissue and cried silently to myself. Frustration, sorrow and regret were all pouring out of me at once.
I heard a small knock on the door.
I quickly dried my eyes and in a croaky voice called out, “Yeah?”
The door cracked opened and I saw Collin on the other side standing in the hall.
“Am I bothering you?”
“Hi, Collin. No, you aren’t bothering me. I was just …” I wiped my eyes again and tossed the tissue in the garbage. “What’s going on? Come on in.”
“Are you sure?”
“I could use a distraction. Please.”
Collin hesitated and rubbed at the back of his head before he finally decided to take a step into the study.
“So … what are you up to?”
“Um, I was just reading up on some things.”
He took a seat and started to toy with the Stonehenge snow globe August had given me a year ago in England. Collin was a native of northern California, born in Etna, the same as Misha. August told me that he worked for some huge internet based company and was also taking classes at UCLA part time. I didn’t see much of Collin, but when he had work to do at home, we once in a while bumped into each other at the coffee pot.
“What’s in the box?” he asked, pointing his chin in the direction of the bookshelf. I scrunched up my nose and turned around in the direction he was pointing.
“I don’t know. Let’s check it out.”
I slid the box across the floor and it stopped next to Collin’s feet. I took a seat on the floor next to the box and pulled off the packing tape that held it closed. Collin got on the floor and sat across from me on the other side of the box. I flipped open the flaps and pulled out a note; it was written in French and signed by François, the caretaker.
The note explained that the contents of the box had been left to me and that he had forgotten about it until the new owner found them in the attic. He apologized for the delay in the shipping.
I peered down into the brown cardboard parcel and began to unwrap a seemingly endless supply of bubble wrap. I pulled out a pair of scissors and set them down on the floor beside me, reached back into the box and pulled out another, and then another and another until twenty-three pairs were lined up on the floor next to me. The scissors were of all different sizes. Some had intricate hand crafted handles and others were simple and plain. Some were shiny silver and others were rusty brown. I laughed to myself and shook my head.
“What is all this?” Collin asked.
“When I was a child my mom and I loved to go to flea markets and find hidden antique stores. She collected scissors.” I rolled my eyes. “She used to be fascinated with them or something. I don’t really know. Anyway, she collected them, and we had all of these scissors framed in a beautiful glass case that hung on the wall in our living room in Montréal. I came home from school one day right before we moved to Chicago and found the glass front of the case had shattered all over the living room floor. The scissors were nowhere to be seen and I assumed they had been picked up, boxed, and put away before I got home that day.”
I took my favorite pair of scissors up out of the pile and turned them around in my hand. They were small and golden. The handles were in the shape of a heron’s wings and the blades served as a beak.
“My mom used to say that scissors are one of the most underestimated tools we use. That their purpose is profound and yet we take them for granted. She would point out all the uses we have for them – from the mundane, like teaching children to cut out simple shapes and removing scratchy tags from new clothing, to the more demanding, such as cutting hair and fingernails, and finally to the seriously difficult, like saving lives in open heart surgery.”
I shook my head incredulously at the box’s contents, put the pair I had in my hand back in the pile, and stood up, dismissing the scissors.
“Wait,” Collin grabbed my hand and then quickly released it.
“There’s more … uh, stuff in the box.”
I sat back down and I pulled out a thick envelope and tore it open. It held my mother’s brown, leather-bound journal. I scanned the through the diary quickly and saw immediately that some of the entries had been made in blue ink, while others were in black or red. Here and there, she had circled a letter in a different color.
Collin was watching over my shoulder as I looked through the diary. We both stared at the writings for a few minutes and finally he spoke:
“It’s a code.”
“A what?”
“It’s an Alberti polyalphabetic cipher. A code.”
I turned and stared at Colin and waited for him to elaborate.
“The Alberti Cipher is basically a deliberately jumbled alphabet used to scramble a message. But you can see that your mother wrote the message very carefully. Certain parts are done in certain colors on purpose and then she circled different letters in different colors. It’s all in code you have to figure out what it is she was trying to tell you.”
“No way,” I stared at the scribbled handwriting in front of me. “Ok, how do I figure out this message?”
> Collin pursed his lips and took the journal out of my hands.
“Well,” he said, “you’ll need a Vigenere square. Then I guess that you’ll need to separate the entries in order of the color of the ink the letters are written in. Then you need to go through each one and find the circled words and separate them by color. And then you can try to decode the letters. When the letters are straightened out, then you can unscramble the words.”
I ground my teeth in frustration.
“What’s a Vigenere…?”
“Vigenere square,” Colin said the words again, a little louder and more deliberately, much as someone using a foreign language speaks more loudly, thinking his meaning will be clear as a result. “It’s a table – a square with 26 alphabets in it. Each alphabet shifts one letter to the left from the one above it.”
“How do I find one of those?”
“Wikipedia, of course.”
“Of course,” I said dryly.
“May I?” Colin pointed to my Macbook.
“Be my guest.”
Within seconds, Colin pulled up an example of a Vigenere square and printed it.
“Holy cow, this will take ages,” I said, hitting my palm on my forehead.
“Yeah, but are you really going to even bother? I mean do you think that what she was trying to save for you so long ago could really be important?”
I swallowed hard, and nodded my head. This was my key to No. 7. I knew it. My mom had known all along. My dad had probably told her about him before he died and she had spent seventeen years writing me cryptic messages trying to tell me about it.
“Yep, I think I’ll give it a try,” I said nonchalantly. “I mean what else do I have to do with my time?”
“OK,” Collin smiled, “I’ll help you get started.”
“You want to help me?” I was a little surprised; the last I heard, I gave Collin the creeps.
“Absolutely, I love this kind of stuff. When I was kid, my best friend and I sent messages like this to each other all the time, for fun.”
“Umm hmm,” I responded skeptically, twirling another pair of scissors around in my hand. We got started.
We first organized the journal entries by ink color. The earliest of them had been entered in Montréal when I was a small child, and they continued fairly regularly up until the time we moved to Chicago.
I’ll admit the whole project did kind of make me frustrated. Why couldn’t she just have told me what it was I needed to know? Why make me go through these mental gymnastics? And what if I had never received the diary, then what?
“Arg, how frustrating,” I said as I tossed the journal at the door. It was still flying through the air when the door opened and stopped only when it hit Ari’s shin.
“Nice to see you, too,” he said picking the journal up off the floor. “What's all of this?”
I explained that I had finally gotten around to opening the box from Montréal and that what Collin and I found in it was a giant pile of scissors and a journal. Ari thumbed quickly through the diary.
“So it’s just a journal and an odd inheritance of a scissor collection?”
“No, it’s more than that,” Collin chimed in excitedly and explained that there was a message hidden in the letters. Collin had his back to me so I held up seven of my fingers and Ari’s eyes grew wide.
Ari tossed his suit jacket on the chair, sat on the floor next to me and listened intently to Collin’s explanation of the Alberti Cipher and Vigenere square. Ari and I worked late into the night as Collin taught us how to decode the message. At some point August joined us and “helped” mostly by sitting at the desk complaining about various students in his class. He was entertaining, though, and helped the work go faster. Rory came in too but was of no help at all; he kept asking Collin to “explain the square thing again”; Ari eventually got mad and kicked him out of the study. We made headway slowly, but the more I worked out the system, the better I understood the process.
When we went to bed that night, I put my head on Ari’s chest and ran my fingers through the tiny little hairs he had there. I told Ari about Dr. Spruce and his connection with the Kakos and his relationship with my mother.
“I used to think my mother loved him, that she was eager for me to move on so they could have a life of their own together. But the last time I talked to her she seemed happy he was dead.”
“What does that mean? I thought they died in the same accident.”
“They did.”
“Well how on Earth would you have talked to her then, Ava?”
“She said things to me in my dreams. When I was in the hospital … strange things. The memories are fuzzy and weird but she asked if Spruce died and smiled when I confirmed that he had.”
“Oh, Baby.” Ari held me and stroked my hair, nuzzling my face to his warm chest. “Someday this will all be over, I promise.”