Dead to Me

by Mary McCoy

The first part of the key was the FIGUEROA. Annie used that to throw off the predictable A-to-Z progression of the Polybius square.

  Now A wasn’t 11 anymore; F was.

  But there was another step, too. I knew because there were numbers in Annie’s cipher bigger than fifty-five.

  YWCA was the key; YWCA, otherwise known as 54 52 25 23.

  So, to decode the cipher, I needed to subtract the numbers in the key from the numbers Annie had written down:

  86 64 50 77

  -54 52 25 23

  32 12 25 54

  Jerry looked over my shoulder while I worked, his eyebrows scrunched together.

  “Now I see why she never showed me anything more complicated than the trick with the pencil,” he said.

  “This is a Nihilist cipher,” I explained. “Russian revolutionaries used them to pass messages to one another. They’re one of Annie’s favorites.”

  Jerry rolled his eyes. “Well, whatever it is, don’t let HUAC get wind of it, my little Bolshevik. You and your whole family will be blacklisted before you can say ‘Joe Stalin.’”

  Once I’d used the key, the only thing left to do was to plug the sum back into the Polybius square.

  32 12 25 54

  H I C Y

  Or at least that should have done it. Instead, when I’d finished, I was left with a row of letters that didn’t mean anything. I wondered if I’d made a mistake somewhere along the way or if Annie had invented an extra layer of encryption.

  Even though she’d never lived here, it was impossible not to see Annie’s hand in the cleverly disguised front, to feel her presence here. It had been a long time since we played our games, and yet here she was playing them with me, still a cryptographer spy and crusading angel of the Allied forces. Still glamorous, elusive, and uncrackable. I loved her for it.

  While I was puzzling over the code, Jerry shook his head and laughed in disbelief.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “Only that you’ve been working on that thing for half an hour,” he said.

  “I have remarkable powers of concentration when I want to.”

  “Apparently,” Jerry said. “Also, I’d like you to know that while I may not be able to crack a Nihilist cipher, I have not utterly wasted my time here.”

  “You were just sitting there,” I said.

  “I was thinking,” Jerry said. “And I was wondering whether the people who got here before us allowed themselves to get quite so engrossed in your sister’s secret codes. I suspect they may have lacked your powers of concentration.”

  I sat up straight and set down the book.

  “Someone besides us has already been here?”

  “They were careful to cover their tracks, but yes. This room’s already been searched.”

  “How can you tell?” I scanned the room, admiring Jerry’s eagle eyes. There was hardly a thing here to be out of place, and nothing was.

  “Well, it might have been that piece of cigarette ash in the corner, or that the mirror above the sink is just slightly crooked.”

  I gasped. “Really?”

  “No. Otto saw them sneak up here two nights ago.” Jerry slapped his knee and gave a little bark of laughter. “And they neglected to slip him a fin or two when they did it.”

  “Who was it?”

  Jerry’s face turned serious now. “It was dark. He didn’t get a good look at them, but it might have been Conrad Donahue’s people. Or Rex’s. Or your father’s.”

  Jerry walked over to the window and peeked out at the street below. He had to stand on his tiptoes to do it.

  “Aren’t those all the same people?” I asked.

  Jerry came away from the window and removed the toothpick he’d been gnawing on from the corner of his mouth.

  “It’s beginning to look that way,” he said.

  “Then what do we do next?”

  Jerry sank down onto the cot again. It creaked under his weight.

  “I don’t know,” he whispered.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  He cleared his throat. “I said I don’t know. I’ve checked out all our old meeting spots, a few old apartments, friends she’s mentioned, enemies too. Nothing’s shaken loose, and I don’t know where to look next.”

  He stared at his hands, folded uselessly in his lap, his face as bleak as the room itself. “I’m letting her down,” he said.

  “You’re not letting her down.”

  I sat down next to him on the cot and put my hand on his shoulder.

  “Was there anyone Annie really trusted?” I asked. “You said you talked to her friends. If anyone knows where that girl is, wouldn’t it be one of them?”

  Jerry let out another laugh that wasn’t really a laugh.

  “If they knew anything, they weren’t saying a word about it to me.”

  I thought about that for a minute, then asked, “Do you think any of them would talk to me?”

  “Why? You’re a kid.”

  Jerry scratched at the stubble on his cheeks, and little bits of dead skin snowed down onto his pant leg.

  “I’m Annie’s sister,” I said, wrinkling my nose in mild disgust. “And a girl. And not a detective.”

  “You might have a point there.” A pink flush spread up Jerry’s neck as he brushed the flakes onto the floor. “There is one friend of Annie’s who might be worth talking to again. Maybe he’ll have more to say to you than he did to me.”

  “He?” I asked.

  I tried to imagine Annie with friends. Friends she could go out with at any hour of the night, friends who didn’t have to drop her off a block away from her parents’ house. Boy friends.

  “His name’s Cyrus. Annie and her friends found him and more or less adopted him. He was like a little brother to them. Or a pet. I never could tell which.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “He wants to be an actor,” Jerry said, his voice dripping with scorn, “though not a bad kid despite that. He works hard, that’s for sure. Last I heard, he was holding down two jobs, and that’s not counting the work he does for me.”

  “What kind of work?” I asked, hungry for details. This was Annie’s inner circle, the people she’d chosen over my parents and me. I wanted to know what she saw in them.

  “He works at a bar not too far from here. It’s the kind of place where a person overhears interesting things from time to time.”

  “Marty’s?”

  “You catch on quick, kid,” Jerry said. “He buses tables at the Musso and Frank Grill, too. It doesn’t pay as much as the bartending job, but you get a lot of producers and directors and writers in a place like that. Not a bad place to be if you’re an actor trying to get discovered. He’s good with a camera, too. I’ve taken him along with me on stakeouts before.”

  Up until now, my sister’s closest known associates included a thuggish pornographer and a dope peddler who posed for scandalous pictures. Compared with them, Cyrus sounded downright wholesome.

  “I’d love to meet him,” I said.

  When Jerry pulled his car into the parking lot behind Musso & Frank, the smell of steak filled the car before we even opened the doors. In the seat next to me, Jerry’s stomach gurgled, and I realized I hadn’t actually seen him eat since I met him. I wondered how he ate if he was spending all his time working a case where there wasn’t a paying client, especially since he’d shelled out more than a week’s worth of grocery money to Otto. If I’d had more than a dime in my purse, I would have gotten him a sandwich, but a dime wouldn’t even get you a cup of coffee in that place. As for myself, I wasn’t hungry. I’d been to Musso & Frank exactly once in my life and that had been enough.

  Probably I was the only person in Los Angeles who felt that way, but it was haunted for me. I don’t know why that place, that night stood out. It’s not like it was the worst dinner I ever had with my family. Maybe it was because of how fast everything went downhill afterward. All I knew was, I looked at the place and a shudder went through me, and it
was my twelfth birthday all over again.

  When that day started, I’d thought it was going to be a good day. There’d been a wrapped package on my chair at the dining room table and a fresh-cut daisy in a vase next to my glass of milk. My mother kissed my cheek as I sat down at the table, and then said, “Open it.”

  It was a pair of black patent-leather shoes with low but unmistakable heels and a little strap that buttoned over the ankle.

  “Just the thing for a young lady,” she said.

  I wore the shoes that night along with a dress that was more grown-up than the ones I usually wore. The skirt was longer and not so full, the sleeves not so puffed. Instead of white socks with lace at the cuffs, my mother let me borrow one of her treasured pairs of nylon stockings. During the war, you couldn’t find them anywhere, and most women went without or drew fake seams in eyebrow pencil on the backs of their legs. Not my mother, though. She took such good care of the few pairs she had that people in our neighborhood gossiped that she must have been buying them on the black market.

  Once I was dressed, my mother set my hair in curlers and pinned the waves into ornate-looking rolls that framed my face, and she finished the whole thing off with a spritz of her Shalimar perfume.

  There was a knock at the door promptly at five thirty: Cassie dressed in her Sunday best—a salmon-colored sailor dress and white cotton gloves that made my mother suck in an appalled breath when she saw them. Still, she smiled broadly and said, “You girls look lovely.”

  My father drove us all to the restaurant, Cassie and me jostling along together in the backseat. Annie wasn’t there. She had plans that afternoon with her friends, so she said, and had begged our parents to let her come to the restaurant late. At first I was upset, but with my elegant hair and new shoes, I found I didn’t mind so much. For once, I was the pretty, doted-upon Gates sister.

  Musso & Frank had paneled walls and soft leather booths and crisp-jacketed waiters. It wasn’t glamorous, exactly, but it made me feel like I might be, sitting next to Cassie with cloth napkins unfolded on our laps and champagne flutes of seltzer water and maraschino cherries bubbling in our hands.

  People my parents knew came over to our table to say hello. They were all writers, set designers, directors, and other unrecognizable but important people. Their smiles weren’t the indulgent “cute kid” smiles I was used to. These smiles said “pretty girl” and “lovely daughter.” Everyone was still charming and happy and on their first drink, and I felt the way a twelve-year-old girl is supposed to feel on her birthday.

  But then it turned into any other day. Annie was late, and we didn’t order any food because my parents were waiting for her. They drank too many cocktails on empty stomachs and got crabby with each other. Cassie and I got tired of looking glamorous and began trying to tie cherry stems with our tongues, which made my mother smack the back of my hand and hiss, “Stop that this instant.” Then the waiter came to the table for the fifth time and asked if we were ready to order, and my father snapped at him, saying that when we were ready to order, he’d be the first to know about it.

  All the magic was off the evening by then. Cassie’s gloves were stained pink with cherries, and two wet circles darkened the armpits of her dress. I wasn’t much better—I could smell my sweat stinking through the Shalimar. I’d picked out half the bobby pins in my hairdo and stacked them on the table next to my fork. My scalp had begun to ache from them, my feet felt pinched in the shoes, and I’d had too many glasses of seltzer water.

  “May I be excused?” I asked, already sliding out of the booth.

  They hadn’t yet answered when I felt the back of my stockings catch on a splinter of wood, and a telltale rip sounded so loud that my father stopped yelling at the waiter and turned to see what it was.

  My mother looked up from her martini, and the blood drained from her face as she registered exactly how unkempt and disappointing I looked, and she said, “Sit down this instant.”

  My father cleared his throat and said, “Vivian, leave the girl be. It’s her birthday.”

  The waiter, who was still standing there, brightened and clapped his hands together. “Ah! Then let me bring a little something for the birthday girl. Compliments of the kitchen, of course.”

  “I told you,” my father said, throwing his napkin onto the table and sloshing his Manhattan, “that we were not ready to order yet.”

  At the same time, my mother lifted her martini glass and said, “Another round of these, please.”

  “Are you sure, madam?” the waiter asked, shooting a pointed look at my father.

  “She asked for a drink, now bring her a drink.”

  “May I please be excused?” I asked.

  “Me too?” asked Cassie.

  “I don’t care what you do,” my father said with a sigh.

  It was another hour before my parents finally got tired of waiting and ordered Welsh rarebit for Cassie and me. It was a baby’s meal—toast and cheese—and Cassie and I picked at it like babies while my father paid the check and stared at his watch without speaking until we cleaned our plates.

  Annie never even showed up. She didn’t come home until the next morning, raccoon-eyed and defiant. When I woke up to the sounds of our mother screaming at her in the hallway, I found a silver bracelet lying next to my head on the pillowcase. It wasn’t what I wanted, and even then, I’d known there was a decent chance she’d shoplifted it from Woolworth’s, but at least my sister hadn’t forgotten about me.

  As we got out of the car, the memory sat there like an undigested dinner roll wadded in my stomach.

  “Are you okay, kid?” he asked.

  “Fine,” I said. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and followed Jerry to the parking attendant’s stand.

  “Is Cyrus working tonight?” he asked.

  The parking attendant was a stern-looking man with slicked-back black hair and a scar on his upper lip. In Hollywood, you had to be nice to everyone just in case they were someone important, but the attendant seemed to know right away that we weren’t the kind of people you had to be nice to.

  “I’m afraid I couldn’t say,” he said, slouching against the stand.

  Jerry reached into his wallet and handed the man a couple of singles.

  “You can say.”

  That made the parking attendant stand up straight. “I’d have to check,” he said, pocketing the money.

  “Tell him it’s important. It’s about Annie.”

  “That his girl?”

  “How about you just see if he’s in and don’t worry about that.”

  The parking attendant glared as he went inside the restaurant, but a few minutes later, he reemerged and escorted us toward the kitchen, scooting us out of view of the paying customers.

  “Five minutes,” he said, holding the swinging door open for us. “No more.”

  The air in the kitchen was boggy and filled with the sounds of loud men in a hurry. All around, people yelled out orders, dodged one another, and darted back and forth bearing heavy trays of meat through the swinging kitchen doors.

  Half hidden behind a rack of bowls and chafing dishes stood a boy who looked like he’d collapse under the weight of one of those trays. And yet, he held one piled high with plates and bones balanced on one shoulder. Even before he pulled us out of the kitchen traffic and into the only quiet corner of the kitchen, I knew it was Cyrus.

  As I turned the name over in my head, it occurred to me that I’d decoded Annie’s cipher perfectly:

  H I C Y

  It just didn’t have anything to do with the missing girl. It wasn’t a decoy to throw her enemies off track. It was a game, just like the ones she used to play with me to pass the time during blackouts. I could almost imagine Annie sitting on the floor of her Main Street apartment with this boy, teaching him how to make a Polybius square.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he said, by way of a greeting.

  Jerry acted like he hadn’t heard him. Instead he kicked me in the b
ack of the heel until I stumbled half a step forward, and Cyrus really looked at me for the first time. Something about his gaze made me self-conscious about the film of grease and steam that was already settling on my face. I looked away and fiddled with the clasp of my necklace.

  “You’re the sister,” he said, setting down his tray.

  “Alice,” Jerry said.

  “I know what her name is.”

  He was too tall, too thin. His neck was too long. His ears stuck out a little bit. His nose was crooked like it had been broken once, and his chin was pointed. Taken in individual parts, his face was all wrong, but taken together, there was something about it that made you want to keep looking. He didn’t look like an athlete or a brain or a member of the thespian society. If he went to my school, I couldn’t imagine a single table in the cafeteria where he would have looked at home.

  Which meant that he probably would have ended up sitting with me.

  “Jerry, why’d you bring her here?” he asked.

  “I thought you’d want to meet her.”

  Cyrus gave me a look, then sighed and shook his head. It was a look I recognized, having received some version of it from my mother at least once a week for the past four years. There was pity in it, a pinch of disappointment. You’re not her, it said. You’re not Annie.

  “You think I don’t know what you’re doing? I already told you everything I know, Jerry.”

  “It’s been two days, Cyrus. You sure you haven’t heard anything since then? Anything at all?”

  Cyrus looked over his shoulder, where a mustachioed man in chef’s whites stood at a chopping block, fingering the blade of his knife and glaring at us.

  “I’ve been working,” he said, clutching the kitchen towel that was tucked into his apron ties. “Right now I’m just trying to stay out of sight, which is what you’d be doing if you were smart. This is bad business, Jerry. People are going to get hurt, and if Annie knew you’d roped Alice into this, she’d kill you.”

  “What about Irma’s people?” Jerry asked. “Has anyone called them yet to let them know?”