Raising Arcadia

by Simon Chesterman

  “Fine,” she said reaching for a small bottle on the counter. “I’ll take some sunscreen.” Puzzled, the sales assistant added it to the bag, passed Mother her change, and turned to the next customer.

  It is Mother who has convinced her to play in the concert, deploying her usual mix of flattery and filial obligation. It began with an overly-innocent observation about the concert at dinner, then a page from the school newsletter inviting interested students to put their names forward was strategically placed on her pillow. At last Mother asked her directly whether she would play. By that point she had already made the necessary arrangements at school and told Mother that she would play Mendelssohn. The moistening of her eyes clearly indicated happiness, but for a moment she was unsure whether Mother would laugh or cry. In the end she did both, hugging Arcadia. She has agreed to play because she knows how much pleasure it will give Mother, even though her music is primarily for herself. Mother does not ask much of her.

  As she nears the end of the piece, her reverie is disturbed by a nagging sense that she has missed something, something important. Bow still moving, her mind ticks over the morning’s events. Something about the code. Something different other than the knife.

  For as long as she can remember, Saturday mornings have started with code-breaking, a challenge for her to solve in order to find a reward. At its earliest it might have been a sweet. In later years it had led her to a small present like a book or, as in this case, money and a shopping list for breakfast.

  The codes or puzzles take many forms. The easiest were basic manipulation of a message, like reversing the letters in each word: “Raed Aidacra, yenom rof tsafkaerb si rednu eht enohp.” Or simple substitution ciphers, like Caesar’s code in which each letter in a message is replaced by a letter three steps along in the alphabet (“cat” becomes “fdw”), or numbers representing the place of each letter in the alphabet (“dog” becomes “4-15-7”). There have been a few variations using Morse code, and occasional use of the Freemason’s cipher in which letters are drawn into a tic-tac-toe grid to generate geometric symbols.

  Over the years, the puzzles have become more complex. But they always appear on the same off-white bond paper, almost always laser-printed in a simple font like Palatino. Almost always.

  There is a knock on the door. “Is everything all right dear?” Mother asks.

  “Yes,” she replies, lowering the violin from her shoulder and moving to open the door. “Why?”

  “You were playing the same note for five minutes. At first I thought you were doing an exercise, but I wanted to make sure you were OK.”

  She raises her eyebrows. “I must have drifted off.”

  Mother is about to go, when she calls her back.

  “Yes, Arky?”

  “Mother, we don’t have a typewriter.”

  “No, dear.” Mother looks at her, puzzled.

  “Today’s code was typed on an old-fashioned typewriter, on which moulded letters on a typebar strike a ribbon. We don’t have such a typewriter.”

  A fraction of a second. Mother’s eyes break contact with hers and she reaches out to ruffle her hair. She says: “We borrowed the one in the office of one of your father’s colleagues. His secretary still uses it sometimes to fill in forms. I thought you might find it interesting.”

  “Oh. All right then.” She raises the violin back to her shoulder. “Sorry about the long note.” As she returns to Mendelssohn, Mother’s footsteps pause for a moment outside the room before she goes back downstairs. Mother knows that she prefers to play alone.

  It is a long time since she can remember Mother lying to her. Innocuous lies concerning fairy tales and festivals ended at an early age. Around the age of six she nearly gave Father a heart attack when she laid a trap for the “tooth fairy”. Admittedly, a mousetrap was a clumsy device with which to apprehend a dentally-obsessed pixie, but Father’s fingers soon recovered.

  The last occasion on which Mother lied concerned human reproduction. When she was nine, they had visited Aunt Jean and Uncle Arthur’s cattle farm during breeding season. Having seen a bull and cow mating, she later asked Mother whether human sex was the same as sex for other species. Squirming slightly, perhaps from embarrassment, Mother replied that it was quite different. Making a child depended as much upon love as it did upon bodily functions, she said. Only with both could you create a fully human child; it required more than the mechanics of insemination and gestation. Back then, Mother also broke eye contact and tried to distract her with a touch. Arcadia did not challenge her then, either, though she did some more research of her own on the Internet and concluded that human reproduction certainly looked a lot like the sexual behaviour of other mammals.

  Dinner that evening is a simple meal of fish and chips as her parents have tickets to the theatre. “Are you sure you’ll be all right, Arky?” Mother asks. “Ignatius, I’m not sure we should be leaving her alone.”

  “She’ll be fine, Louisa,” Father says, wiping his hands on a serviette. “She’s more responsible than half the teenagers running around town these days. Aren’t you, Arcadia?”

  She reassures them both. “There hasn’t been a burglary within a mile of our house in more than a year. And violent crime tends to be concentrated in the poorer neighbourhoods to the west. Please don’t worry about me.”

  Mother is thinking twice about leaving her alone. “You can call our mobiles, and here’s the number of the theatre in case they have one of those jamming devices.” She passes her a piece of paper. “What will you do while we’re out? Perhaps you could clean up your room? It’s getting a bit dusty.”

  “I’ll probably read. Perhaps conduct one or two experiments that I’ve been putting off.” She sees Father’s expression. “Don’t worry, nothing explosive. I was thinking more along the lines of invisible ink.” To reassure them and to encourage them to get on their way, she moves across to the stereo and puts on some Puccini. “You should probably start driving if you don’t want to miss the opening.”

  Mother gives her a kiss, Father pats her on the shoulder, and they are gone.

  She sits in a lounge chair, browsing through a reference work on spider bites until a quarter of an hour has passed. This allows enough time for her parents to realise they have forgotten something and turn back, or perhaps to circle around the block in order to check that she has not in fact blown up the house the moment they left her alone.

  When there is no anxious knock on the door or jangling of keys, she stands and moves swiftly across to the writing desk by the telephone that her parents use to pay bills and write Christmas cards. A quick search confirms her suspicion that there is no bond paper in the drawers. There are stamps and envelopes, but simple brown ones for regular mail.

  The envelopes with the codes appear only after she has been sleeping, so they could be anywhere in the two-storey house. But it is unlikely to be in a common area. They appear weekly, and so the stationery cannot be too hard to access. Almost certainly in the house, then, but not where she will stumble across it. Why? The paper is expensive but no more so than the drawing block paper that she requests for her anatomical sketches. She pictures the rooms of the house in her head, prioritising the search. For some reason her parents do not want her to find the stationery. It is presumably hidden somewhere they think she is unlikely to look.

  Standing outside her parents’ room, she realises that she is about to cross a line. The codes have been part of her weekly routine since at least the age of five. She had long assumed that Mother printed them on the family’s computer — laser printing is so generic — but the use of a typewriter broke that mould. Was it a breach of trust comparable to that which she is now contemplating? Uncertain, yet it is clear that something is being hidden from her. And she needs to know.

  She hesitates no more than a moment before opening the door. The room is neat — far neater than her own — with the simple furnishings of a queen-sized bed, a dresser, and a pair of reading chairs. From the wall op
posite, doors open to an en suite and a built-in wardrobe.

  Facing the bed is a painting of an English pastoral scene, which Father said depicted the estate that his family once managed. A small manor house sits amid rolling fields, a long driveway meandering up to the gates.

  As she has seen Father do once before, she gently tugs at the bottom right of the painting and it swings out on well-oiled hinges to reveal a small wall safe with an electronic combination lock. Six digits are required to open the safe. A million possible combinations, and she has not seen Father enter the code. Trying one combination every second would take… two weeks. Or the safe may shut down after entering the wrong code. Yet she suspects that she will not need to resort to such brute methods. Six digits correspond to the abbreviated form of a birthday. She looks closely at the number pad: the zero is almost worn off, used far more than the other keys. The one and the six are also well-used. A quick review of birthdays in the family and she rebukes herself for not guessing immediately. She enters her own birthday into the safe, 6 January 2000: zero-six-zero-one-zero-zero. There is an ascending series of beeps, the internal locking mechanism slides across, and the safe swings open.

  The chamber inside is about six inches high, a foot wide, and a foot deep. Careful not to disturb anything, she looks past the passports, a few bundles of cash, and some of Mother’s jewellery. There are some old journals, or perhaps diaries, tied up with ribbons, but no stationery. She closes the safe and looks around the bedroom. It would have been too obvious to use the safe, and the noise of the locking mechanism is too loud. Mother would want the stationery somewhere to hand but accessible quietly. Something other than a combination lock that would protect it from prying eyes.

  Underwear, perhaps? She opens the dresser drawer in which Mother keeps her brassieres and knickers. Though folded, it is clear that the undergarments have been hastily rearranged. She stacks them on top of the dresser in order to examine the base of the drawer. There is nothing else, but the drawer is too shallow. Feeling around the back, she identifies a small hole large enough for one finger to reach in and pull out the false panel. Behind it is a space as wide and high as the drawer but only a couple of inches deep, large enough to hold the carved wooden box that she now removes.

  Placing it on the bed, she looks at it carefully. A Chinese style box, its deep red lacquer exterior is decorated in gold with a stylised image of a rabbit. It is large enough that it could comfortably conceal a reasonably-sized novel — or a stack of note paper and envelopes. Brass hinges on the back match a simple three-digit combination lock on the front. Only a thousand combinations this time, and from the design of the box it does not appear that an incorrect guess would cause it to become inoperable. Nevertheless, she pauses to consider the possibilities.

  Three digits could be anything. A fragment of a phone number, a page in a book, part of a birthdate. She pauses. Dropping zeroes from her own birthday reduces to three numbers: six, one, zero. The brass lock does not move. She is contemplating testing individual codes when her eyes fall on the rabbit once more. As well as being a Capricorn in the Western zodiac, by the Chinese calendar, she was born in the Year of the Rabbit. Based on the lunar phases, the dates in the Chinese calendar are quite different from the Gregorian calendar used in European countries for the past half a millennium. A quick calculation would put her birthday as being on the thirtieth day of the eleventh month. Not reducible to three digits.

  She turns the box over, looking for another way to open it, when a different possibility presents itself. In Chinese, dates are written in descending order year, month, day. Returning to the combination lock, she enters her abbreviated birthdate in reverse: zero, one, six. Even as the last number slides into place she hears a satisfying click as the notches align over the toothed pin inside. She slides a brass catch to the right and opens the box.

  A stack of off-white envelopes — ten, to be precise — lie inside the box. Being sure to keep them in order, she lifts them out to confirm that all have been sealed. On the front of each is a yellow adhesive post-it note, indicating a date in the near future. The topmost envelope is marked for next Saturday, the second for the week after that, and so on. Up until the end of term.

  She takes the envelope dated for the next weekend and examines it. The date on the post-it note is written in a hand she does not recognise. A man’s, almost certainly, but as the dates are written using numerals only it is hard to get a sense of the natural handwriting style. The flap on the back has been sealed with its gum adhesive, activated by water or saliva. For a moment she imagines getting a DNA sample from the saliva, but this presumes access to a forensic laboratory. A more traditional method of investigation, then.

  She takes the envelope downstairs and boils a shallow pot of water. When steam begins to rise, she holds the envelope over it, allowing the vapour to moisten the gum. In a few minutes, she can feel the gum loosening and turns down the gas. She eases the envelope open and eases out the paper inside.

  Once again, it is something she has not seen before. At first blush, it appears to be a drawing rather than a message. A row of stick figures stretch across the page, apparently in the midst of some kind of dance. No, apparently at different stages of a dance:

  Curious. Clearly another substitution cipher, but this time without a key. On the basis of frequency and position at the end of words it is highly likely that the basic stick figure with arms and legs outstretched like an X is the letter “e”, but the sample is too small to extrapolate much beyond that. For meaningful analysis either several sentences would be needed, or else one would need the key.

  Unless. The third word has seven letters, the first, fourth, and seventh of which are the same. A reasonable assumption is that it is “Arcadia”. Letters from that word are repeated elsewhere in the message. Substituting them in produces a plausible result: “_ice_ _ d_ _e, Arcadia. _ _ _ are _ear_ _ read_.” Trying out the various remaining possible combinations, she arrives at the most likely final result. Curiously, it departs significantly from the usual codes that have directed her to a reward or a goal. On this occasion it merely congratulates her on approaching some goal that is as yet unclear:

  Nicely done, Arcadia. You are nearly ready.

  Odd. She waits for the envelope to dry before slipping the code back into it, resealing it, and replacing it in the Chinese box. She restores Mother’s underwear drawer to its original condition and returns downstairs to continue reading about spider bites.

  3

  MISSING

  “All right, if you can keep your distance please — there’s really nothing to see here.” A police officer is gamely trying to keep a curious public behind a line of yellow tape. “Police line: Do not cross”, it reads. She turns to give Father a wave and lifts the yellow tape to enter the school grounds.

  “Just where do you think you’re going?” The police officer is new to the force, uncertainty being masked by bluster as he moves to intercept her path. His shoes are shiny and new; a barely concealed wince shows that they are causing him discomfort.

  “Good morning, Constable.” She looks him in the eye. “I’m a weekly boarder at the Priory School. My father has just dropped me off.” The officer is hesitating. “As you can see, I’m too young to be a reporter, too small to be much of a threat, and I am wearing the school uniform. I think you can let me in.”

  The officer is taken aback but tries to hide it. He is still formulating a response when Mr. Ormiston appears. “Well, go on then, Miss Greentree, put your things in your room and get to assembly. You have — ” a glance at the new watch on his wrist “ — twelve minutes.”

  She nods at him and lifts her violin case from the ground, swinging her weekend duffel bag onto her shoulder. She is about to head towards the dormitory when she pauses. “Coconut oil,” she says to the police officer.

  “Excuse me, lass?”

  “You could try coconut oil on your shoes. It will help them wear in faster.”

  The off
icer glances at her with suspicion, perhaps assuming that he is being made fun of. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he says at last.

  “Well, Miss Greentree?” Mr. Ormiston begins.

  “Yes, sir. Eleven minutes, sir.”

  “Exactly. Today of all days it would not be a good idea to be late.” The teacher turns to the police officer. “Constable, that should be the last arrival of the morning. Please ensure in particular that the press do not intrude upon the school? We don’t want this to become a media circus.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mr. Ormiston turns to see that she has not begun to walk across to the dormitories. “Can I help you with something, Miss Greentree?”

  “No, sir,” she says. A glance confirms the red smudge on the teacher’s cheek. She hoists the duffel bag once more and heads across to her rooms.

  It was during breakfast with her parents earlier that morning when the telephone rang. Father had just passed her some more cosmetics samples that arrived in the morning post — Magnus’s idea of a joke, she assumes. Mercifully, her parents have stopped suggesting that she open them.

  Father frowned while listening, issuing a few questions before returning to the table. “Apparently there’s a boy missing — one of the full boarders. They wanted us to know that there may be some police on the grounds today. The school hopes to keep the media out of it — but that seems unlikely.”

  “Who is the boy?” Mother asked.

  “They didn’t say.”

  Mother frowned. “And what does ‘missing’ mean?”

  Father blew steam off his tea. “They didn’t explain that either.”

  Arcadia took another bite of her toast, digesting the limited information. “They must be thinking it was a kidnapping. Bringing in the police so quickly means they think someone else was involved. Keeping the name out of the press might be intended to help with negotiations. But if that’s the aim then perhaps they shouldn’t have called the police in the first place.”