Treasure in the Woods

by E. A. House

  “Maddison,” Chris said to himself, stretching the ribbon out full length on his bedspread and staring at the knots she’d tied in it. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  There were eleven knots in the ribbon, some small, some big, and in no particular order. Actually, Chris amended, some of the knots were longer than others. It had been a while since he’d done friendship bracelets but it looked like she’d done single and double half-hitch knots. They went – • – • – – • – – • • and they looked almost like SOS in Morse code except Chris knew what SOS in Morse code was and it was • • • – – – • • •, so what on earth was Maddison doing? Or had she just been tying knots in her hair ribbon out of nerves and Chris was misinterpreting the result?

  He dragged an old book on knots out from under his dresser and looked up both single and double half-hitch knots, but there was nothing particularly meaningful about either, and Chris was at a loss. Nothing came to him while he threw all his wet things into the washing machine, or while he had a late dinner with his parents and tried not to talk about the hiking trip, or even when he sat down at his computer afterward and, still at a loss, tried investigating the footprints they’d found instead.

  Chris had taken a picture of both of the mysterious footprints before they’d left the mission church, but unlike the crime scene investigators on the shows Carrie’s mom pretended not to like he didn’t learn anything. Aside from pulling out his own sneakers and confirming that the tread was similar but not exactly the same—which proved almost nothing because he had two pairs of sneakers that were different brands and the treads were both similar but not exactly the same—Chris didn’t come to any interesting conclusions. If he had a police force’s resources he might have gotten much further, but he didn’t, and it turned out to be fruitless to Google “shoe treads.” The top result—the top five results—showed pictures of novelty flip-flops that left words behind wherever you walked.

  It did occur to him that the last time he’d been reading about codes in relation to string or ribbons it had been when he read up on the possible Incan practice of keeping records in the form of knots, but refreshing his memory on that subject just reminded him that nobody had yet figured out how to read those knots, which meant it was a little unlikely that Maddison would leave him a message in that format. But she was trying to tell him something! He was just looking up the alphabet in Morse code, on the off chance that she had spelled out an actual message on the ribbon—although it would have to be a message that was, at most, only four letters long—when Carrie turned up and scared him half to death again.

  “It’s CQD,” she said from the window, and Chris yelped and fell off the side of the bed.

  “Carrie! What are you doing? It isn’t even dark yet!” It wasn’t, it was only five thirty.

  “Lurking,” Carrie said unapologetically. She pushed the window open and wedged herself through. “I got done unpacking and wanted to check on you,” she added. “That thing with Maddison and her dad was weird. And it must be even weirder than I thought,” she added, “because that’s CQD tied into Maddison’s hair ribbon.” Chris looked at the Morse code alphabet he’d looked up online, and then at the ribbon. It did spell out C, Q, and D.

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” Chris said, handing over the ribbon when Carrie held out her hand for it. “What does CQD stand for?”

  “Nothing,” Carrie said. “But it was one of the very first distress signals after they invented the radio,” she added before Chris got a chance to protest. “People say it means stuff like ‘Come Quick, Danger’ or ‘Come Quick, Drowning’ or ‘Seek You, Danger’ but it really just means ‘all stations, distress’ so it’s not that different from SOS. What?” she added when Chris stared at her. “I did a report on the Titanic once and it was mentioned in one of the books I read!”

  That did not actually clarify anything, so Carrie sighed and elaborated. “It was one of the distress signals sent out by the wireless operator on the Titanic,” she explained. “That’s all.”

  “Okay,” Chris said. “That makes sense—no, actually it doesn’t, how do you get ‘seek you, danger’ out of the letters C, Q, and D?”

  “It’s phonetic!” Carrie said.

  “And why did Maddison tie it into her hair ribbon and then sneak the ribbon into my pocket?” Chris asked.

  “Right. Why didn’t she use SOS?” Carrie added, picking at one of the “long-dash” knots. “This is a much harder code to tie into a ribbon on the fly.”

  “Why did Dr. McRae snatch Maddison away like he thought we were about to get attacked and he didn’t want his precious daughter anywhere near the blast radius?” Chris groaned, defeated.

  “Oh good, I wasn’t the only one who thought that,” Carrie said, settling in Chris’s desk chair. “You know, I have a theory, but you aren’t going to like it.”

  “Tell me anyway?”

  “SOS is almost universally a sort of . . . I don’t know . . . ‘Help, I’m in distress’ sort of code,” Carrie said, twirling the ribbon absently around her fingers. “Whereas CQD is older and doesn’t have the same meanings to most people. One of the meanings people give the letters is ‘seek you, danger’ and that almost sounds more like a warning than a cry for help. So if you wanted to tell someone that they were in danger . . . ”

  “You think Maddison was warning us,” Chris said. It wasn’t a comforting thought.

  “I think we’d better find the San Telmo, and fast,” Carrie said, tugging at a knot of the ribbon. “Otherwise, terrible things are going to happen.”

  WHEN MADDISON HAD BEEN FIVE AND SIX AND seven and honestly all the way up to age twelve, she’d had a very vivid fantasy life involving a stuffed dinosaur named George. He had lived in Montana, when he wasn’t visiting the McRaes for extended periods of time, and he was— young Maddison had told her father repeatedly and very seriously—a college professor, just like Daddy. George had had seven eggs back home, named Bob, Grill, Pumpkin, Splendid, Barbie, Dasher, and Seven, and he worked long hours at paper grading and tea partying to provide for them. Dasher had always been unable to fly, but a small and embarrassingly opinionated Maddison had insisted that if George saved up enough money he could have an operation to fix his wings. Maddison’s father had taken George to work on three separate occasions so George could fill in for another teacher and earn a little extra salary, because Kevin McRae was a very patient parent and Maddison had been a small child with funny ideas about teaching.

  The only terrible accident Maddison could think of involving a George would have to be related to Dasher, and this required a serious explanation. So she waited until her father’s nervousness had gone down by half, which took him almost the entire drive home from the state park, and then gave him a little extra time to get relaxed before she pounced. It didn’t help that he seemed to think they were being followed—her dad kept checking the rearview mirror and every time he did Maddison had to check, too—and Maddison had just spent two days in the woods afraid that she was being followed. But by the time they pulled onto their street her dad had relaxed and Maddison had calmed down some, so she took a deep breath and attacked the issue head on.

  “Dasher’s health took a turn for the worse, huh?” Maddison asked her dad as they were pulling into their driveway, and he sagged in his seat, caught somewhere between a laugh and a sob. As her dad was not the person who had just been the subject of the most awkward and suspicious “you may never see each other again” parting this side of Romeo and Juliet Maddison thought it rather unfair that he was the one getting hysterical, and she told him so, sternly.

  “But you played your part to perfection, Mads,” Maddison’s father said. “I know you suspect me of being a spy, and I know you won’t believe me when I tell you that I was never a spy, but I do hope you believe me when I tell you that you would be an excellent spy. You roll with things so well, and you can fake your way through just about anything.”

  “I have no poker face,” Maddison
pointed out, because it was true and because she had lost track of the conversation somewhere around the point her father had complimented her acting instead of defending his choices. Or explaining his choices, which were getting as complex and creative and paranoid as some of Chris’s nuttier plots.

  “Yes, but you’re smart enough to make up for it,” Maddison’s father said. “I saw you put your hands over your mouth to cover—what were you hiding?”

  “My hysterical urge to giggle,” Maddison said grimly. “I wasn’t expecting to be told that my favorite stuffed dinosaur was tragically dying and that we needed to go help take care of his kids—seriously, Dad, what the heck is going on?”

  “I had to warn you without warning you,” her dad said. “And I was afraid it wouldn’t work. It’s been years since you’ve talked about George, and people forget that sort of thing sometimes. You did magnificently, though, Mads.”

  “I still sleep with George on my pillow,” Maddison said, as though that was the major problem with her life right now, even though it really wasn’t. “Dad, why are my dinosaurs having a family emergency?”

  “Because we’re having a family emergency,” her dad sighed, fiddling with his seatbelt. He finally opened the car door to get out. “I was lying about Montana, though, we’re going to visit Gregory Lyndon for a week and he’s in Nebraska.”

  “Why?” Maddison asked, following him out of the car.

  “Because . . . I can’t run from my past anymore,” her dad said. “Not without it hurting you. So, this time I’m going to face it once and for all.”

  Which was . . . cryptic. As usual. Irritated, Maddison followed her dad up the short walk to their front door, where he paused and turned back.

  “I was planning to visit Gregory Lyndon this week anyway,” he said, hand on the doorknob, which he was studying intently. “But I wasn’t planning to make you and Mom come with me. But then I had a conversation with Griffin this morning.” He said “Griffin” with a slight hesitation. “Willis Griffin and I went to school together,” Maddison’s dad continued, as though he wasn’t breaking open a deep, dark secret on the front porch in the middle of the afternoon. “And we—there was an incident we were both involved in and I still don’t know how much he knew about it. He could have had nothing to do with it, he could have had everything to do with it, I just don’t know. And until I do you aren’t going anywhere with him. Unless I’m there,” Maddison’s dad amended. “I don’t think he likes me very much anymore. He’s always giving me dirty looks.”

  “Oh,” Maddison said. And then, horrified, she added, “But then are Chris and Carrie in some kind of danger?”

  “I don’t think they’re in any kind of danger,” her dad told her. “I can’t imagine Griffin harming them, he adored their aunt and he spends half his time telling people about their achievements like a proud uncle. But he had some sort of falling out with me after Ryan—” He stopped. “We had a falling out and it nearly ruined my life,” he said instead. “I just can’t trust him enough to leave you alone with him. But I’m not going to tell him that to his face, so I came up with the family emergency on the spot. Your mother is probably furious, though. When I called her and asked about a plane ticket for you, she insisted on coming along, but you know how she hates packing.”

  Maddison’s mother was actually grumbling at the refrigerator when Maddison and her father snuck inside, a growing pile of food that wouldn’t last the week in the fridge on the counter next to her and her suitcase on the dining-room table. When she heard the door open she stood up, Tupperware container of mashed potatoes in one hand, and said, “Kevin, did you explain everything to Maddison?”

  “On the front porch in broad daylight?” Maddison’s dad said. “Um, no.” Her mom sighed.

  “You have until we leave Gregory’s,” she said, putting the potatoes in the “offer to the neighbors” pile. “Otherwise I’m telling Maddison everything, and since I don’t know how the love story part of your secret past went—”

  “It was not a—okay! I’ll explain it! Just not right now when we really need to go pack because our flight leaves at seven!” Maddison’s dad was sneaking down the hallway towards her parents’ bedroom as he spoke, and her mom made irritated shooing motions at him until he went in to pack.

  “He does want to tell you,” Maddison’s mom told her, tugging the vegetable drawer open and wincing. “He really does, but everything that’s happened in the past couple of weeks has scared him, and I think he’s a little ashamed of what happened. So if your father can’t get himself together and tell you why he almost didn’t graduate from college on time by the end of this week, come find me and I’ll do it, or if you want to ask Gregory, he has an unbiased outsider’s report and was actually there. Now go pack, we have a plane to catch and I have to get someone to take our milk—he had to pull this on me right after I went grocery shopping . . . ”

  And then the McRae household turned into a war zone, because that was what always happened when they were trying to pack for a trip. It would help a lot if Maddison’s father wasn’t the sort of person who got things nicely folded and then left them out instead of putting them in his suitcase. They spent most of the evening chasing down lost pieces of Maddison’s father’s luggage and trying to figure out where his glasses were, with Maddison’s father sitting on the couch guarding the suitcases while his wife and daughter tracked down everything that he couldn’t find.

  Which was how Maddison found herself in her parents’ study, shifting papers on her dad’s desk and wondering where she would hide if she were a pair of lost but necessary reading glasses.

  “Paperweight, paperweight, paperweight, paperweight,” Maddison muttered under her breath, “why does he have so many paperweights?” Plus, her dad tended to put paperweights down on papers and then put more papers down and put more paperweights on top of them until he had a many-layered booby trap just waiting for someone to move the wrong paper and bring everything down on their toes. It was like playing a complicated version of the game Jenga. Maddison considered the desk and then picked up two notebooks and a glass full of pens. Nothing happened. She let out the breath she’d been holding and moved a large blue glass paperweight. An overstuffed file folder tumbled off the desk, papers fanning out across the floor.

  “Aargh,” Maddison said, and plopped down on the floor to sweep them back up. The folder was old and battered, and the label had the letters THC written in the corner in faded pencil. Most of the papers were handwritten sheets of regular notebook paper that could be shuffled back into a pile, but when Maddison picked the pile up so she could square the edges, a shower of photos and small slips of cardboard fell out.

  “Oh for Pete’s sake,” Maddison said, and went chasing after pictures and movie-ticket stubs. For square pieces of paper they sure scattered everywhere. Most of the pictures, when she gathered them up, turned out to be random candid snapshots of people Maddison didn’t recognize, and there were a bunch of pictures of trees and bushes and buildings mixed in, with no clear rhyme or reason. No names on the back either, Maddison discovered when she peeked, although most of the pictures had numbers in one corner, as if they were part of a series or—Maddison froze in the act of shuffling through pictures. Most of the pictures were of people she didn’t recognize, but she’d just found one that was.

  A slight, heavily freckled redhead was yanking a weed out of somebody’s garden in the picture, her hair falling over her shoulder in a braid and tangling with the bronze necklace she was wearing. She wasn’t facing the camera, probably because she hadn’t seen the camera or the person taking the picture, but it was hard to mistake Carrie even from the side.

  Maddison shoved the picture into the middle of the stack and put the stack back into the folder, shaken. She trusted her dad, always had, but there were things you didn’t do secretly, and taking pictures of your daughter’s best friend without either of them knowing it was pretty high on that list of things that you didn’t do. And she wanted
to know the secret that kept her dad up at night and haunted him, whatever it was that made him so afraid that something terrible was going to happen to Maddison so that he’d taught her safety precautions more suited to the daughter of a president than the daughter of a college professor. But now . . .

  Well, now Maddison was starting to wonder if knowing what her dad was afraid of would be worse than the ongoing agony of not knowing. And wondering just how deep and how far back the secret went. She’d given Chris her hair ribbon knotted into the Morse code for CQD because she was scared and he’d looked so lost, and because Maddison didn’t want him to think that she wanted to leave Chris and Carrie to their own devices for the rest of the search for the San Telmo. She hadn’t used SOS because—well, SOS was the obvious choice, and Maddison was just paranoid enough to worry that if the ribbon fell into the wrong hands someone would be able to figure it out. She was trusting Chris to figure out that the ribbon said CQD and then know what CQD meant because he had once sent her a cypher in a series of text messages, so if anyone could figure it out it would be him.

  But now Maddison was starting to wonder if her warning was more pointed than she’d thought. Could she be in danger? How much danger were Chris and Carrie in? How much worse was it going to get—and how much danger would Maddison put them all in if she tried to figure it out?

  “You started this, you finish it,” Maddison told herself, resolving to come to her own conclusions before she dragged Chris and Carrie into discussion, and then she put the folder back on the desk under its paperweight and finally found her dad’s glasses, resting on the bookshelf next to the desk. “Just so long as it doesn’t finish me,” Maddison added, and flicked the lights off.