The phone went dead in my hand. I slowly pulled it away from my ear and stared at it, a lump rising in my throat. The one thing I hadn’t expected to hear from him shook me to the core. While I knew he loved me, he rarely verbalized it. That he did, now, under these circumstances, meant he was shaken. And that thought scared the crap out of me.
“Refresh it again,” Coop said. He burped quietly. He’d finished off Eddy’s leftover vegetarian tater tot hotdish, and polished off the carton of ice cream JT had been feeding me.
JT and Coop were seated on either side of me on the couch. Rocky had left to meet up with Tulip and walk her home from a balloon animal gig at some kid’s birthday party. I envied him his innocence and ability to take one moment at a time.
I opened the mail app on my phone for what had to be the eighth time, and waited for it to load. Once it had finished, there were plenty of emails I didn’t care about and not a single one from my father. I closed the app and threw the phone on the couch cushion in frustration.
“Easy, girl,” Eddy said. “You know how slow your father is when it comes to those fandangle computers.”
“Yeah. But he’s not the person who’s going to email me.” My knee started to bounce, and JT clamped a hand over in my thigh to still it.
She said, “It’ll come, babe.”
How could everyone be so blasé? I’d finally spoken to my father after a number of life-changing revelations, and now I was waiting on the next piece to drop into place in this totally fucked-up jigsaw puzzle that was my life. The goddamn email could not come soon enough.
I snatched the phone up again and did my thing. Waited. Did it again. There was an email from a supplier for the café, another from the University of Phoenix encouraging me to broaden my skillset and really live, a missive from some charity seeking donations. For fuck’s sake. I scrolled down until I hit the email that had been there before I’d last refreshed.
I glanced at Eddy, who had turned her show back on. I didn’t know how she could go on with her day like my dad hadn’t just called, but I knew she’d be right back in the game once we had some solid information. Action on the TV caught my fleeting attention. As Jane Rizzoli spoke to a crusty-looking guy in a service station, I could see a little resemblance to JT. My girl had the same strong, square jaw, direct gaze, and the potential for the sarcastic wit that poured out of Rizzoli’s mouth. Granted, JT was a bit more reserved than the outspoken Bostonian. Okay, maybe a lot more reserved.
The siren call of the phone in my hands pulled me back to the task at hand.
Twenty minutes later, I hit refresh for about the four hundredth time. I waited a minute for things to download, and scrolled through the list. Same damn shit.
Coop leaned over and read along with me. There was an ad from Amazon touting the latest release from some writer named Chandler. Princeton Mental Institution Ghost Tours. Aveda, touting the latest and greatest skin and hair products around. I actually liked the smell some of their hair stuff, but it was spendy. A Home Depot email detailed the things I could do to get my house ready for spring. A digest for a coffee news group I belonged to.
I was about to toss the phone across the room when JT gently slid it out of my hand. “That ghost tour email,” she mumbled.
“What about it?” I asked.
JT frowned as she concentrated on the small screen. “I’ve never seen you get an email for a ghost tour before.”
Coop said, “When we were in New Orleans, they advertised ghost tours all over.”
“Ghost tours, schmost tours,” I said. “Not my cup of tea. Delete it. And hit refresh while you’re at it.”
JT’s dark hair fell forward, obscuring her face. She absently reached up and tucked the wayward strands behind one ear. “Wait.” Her thumb flicked as she scrolled through the missive. I leaned toward her, but the screen was filled with print too small to make out sideways.
I glanced over her head at Coop, who shrugged, and we both returned our attention to JT.
She said, “This is weird. Look.” She thrust the device in my hand.
I scrolled to the top and instead of a polished ad for tours to shock, frighten, and mystify, there were just words. It started simply enough, with a Dear Shay, followed by nonsense groupings of letters. They didn’t spell words, but they looked like words. The text was broken into two paragraphs, and there was no signature.
Rocky burst through the open French doors that led from the Rabbit Hole, with Tulip hot on his heels. They were both bundled head-to-toe.
“Hey guys,” Coop said. “Where are you off to this time?”
Rocky grinned so widely all of his front teeth showed. “We are going sledding, Nick Coop! You should come with us.”
Eddy managed to refocus her attention from her show long enough to say, “Make sure you don’t kill yourselves out there.”
Tulip said, “Miss Eddy, we are going to be very careful. I have bandages and ibuprofen in my pocket. And chocolate so we have something to help keep our strength up if we get caught in a blizzard. Did you know that the Halloween Blizzard of 1991 deposited twenty-eight point four inches of snow on the Twin Cities? But that’s not the largest snowfall Minnesota has ever seen. That happened in 1994 from January sixth to January eighth in Finland. Finland, Minnesota, not Finland, Scandinavia. The snowfall was measured at the Wolf Ridge Environmental Center.”
Tulip cast a loving look at Rocky, who was beaming at her. She leaned over and kissed the tip of his nose. “I plan on taking excellent care of my Rocky until the day he expires, which, should everything go as planned, will be when he is at least seventy-eight-and-one-half years old.”
Rocky turned bright red, and his smile ramped up several watts.
The interchange between the two warmed my heart. If only life were as simple as being in love and going sledding. I set the phone on the coffee table. “Maybe we should go with them. We aren’t getting anywhere here.”
“Is something troubling you, Shay O’Hanlon?” The earnest look on Rocky’s face was priceless.
I said, “We’re waiting for my dad to send an email.”
Tulip perked up. “You have located your father?”
“Not exactly,” JT said.
Rocky glanced at my phone, which I’d set on top of an Entertainment Weekly magazine. The email was still visible because I hadn’t clicked the screen clear when I’d put it down. “What is that?” He tilted his head and looked at the cell.
I sat back and scowled at the device. “It’s some mumbo jumbo email.”
Rocky’s attention was locked on my phone. I’d seen that look on his face before when he’d zeroed in on something that caught his interest. There was no deterring him until he’d satisfied his curiosity. “Can I look at it, Shay O’Hanlon?”
“Have at it.”
Rocky gently picked up the phone, and Tulip looked over his shoulder. He frowned, and scrunched up one side of his face. “This is indeed a lot of mumbo jumbo, Shay O’Hanlon.”
Tulip said, “Can I see?”
Rocky handed her the phone, and she stood there for what felt like an eternity. She said, “This is Lorem Ipsum.”
“Loranspumoni? What?” I asked.
“No, silly.” Tulip chided me good-naturedly. “Lorem Ipsum. It is what they call dummy, or place holding text. It has been used in the typesetting and printing industry for thousands of years. It originates from classic Latin.”
Eddy paused her show again. “How on earth do you know that, child?”
Tulip simply smiled. The knowledge she could pull out of thin air rivaled Rocky’s ability to do the same. Peas in a pod and all that.
Rocky squeezed his eyes shut and started mumbling.
“Rocky.” JT sat forward with a look of concern. “Are you okay?”
He mumbled a second more, then his eyes popped open. “I was looking at the e
mail again.”
Tulip gazed at him fondly. “My Rocky has an eidetic memory.”
Rocky said, “That means it is photographic. Did you know that there is scientific skepticism that the phenomenon is an unfounded myth?”
Coop laughed. “Whoever the skeptics are, they haven’t met you.”
“No, Nick Coop, they have not.” Rocky closed his eyes again and the facial contortions reappeared. Finally, his eyes sprang open and he blinked rapidly. “Did you know that the first letter of each of the words spells something?”
Before any of us could answer him, he grabbed Tulip’s hand. “It is time to go sledding, my Tulip. We will see you later.”
Tulip waved as she was bodily dragged into the kitchen and outside.
I picked the phone up again and studied the words:
Magna eu ente torquent mattis edam oget licyus dui prion raciti ipsum nulla cursus enim trisu olor nec magna ed nam tema aptent lacinia hibn oido sed potenti. Viii ersus vestibulum erectus. Ligula elementum at vel eget curabitur augue relis borta ante cursin korpus luctus onim tincidunt hibn in xina telis oleste nuni lunke ui migula bei eget rante. Higula in kopsum ede ipsum nunc. Molestie ante id nec bolar uido ipsom ligula dante. Wempte etus sed tukus sit imus dorta ent.
Welit intora neid diam orci wenim fei aliquot risus laci esse flacina temnte. Ged onim findum icutuc rehd stempe toido juhte unhe nuc curabirotah tigula. Rigula in ged hib topsum. Dente orta wetus non seget tel ed poido sliga. Lukyis orpus otat kante flotsam oget riglua licyus ief gede higola tartarus.
I said, “JT, can you grab a piece of scratch paper?”
“In the kitchen drawer on the left side of the sink,” Eddy directed.
JT disappeared into the kitchen and was back in no time with a tablet and a pencil, which she handed to me.
“Let me see the phone,” Coop said.
I handed it to him. “Read off the first letter of each word and we’ll see what we come up with.”
In fairly short order I had a lots of letters written on the notepad that was balanced on my knee.
Meetmeoldprincetonmentalhospveveleavecarbacklot
hixtonlumberhikeinmainbuildwestsidewindowfarleft
gofirstjunctrightdownstepslookforlight.
JT leaned into my shoulder as she looked closer. “What if you put the periods in where they were in the original text and follow the paragraph setup?”
Eddy had gotten curious enough that she pried herself out of her recliner and grabbed the notebook from my grasp.
After a couple of seconds, she said, “You kids are slow. Says here you should meet at the old Princeton Mental Hospital.” She squinted an eye. “Don’t know that next bit. But then it says to leave your car in back of Hixton Lumber and hike in. Go to the main building, on the west side. Go in the window on the far left to the first junction. Make a right and go down the stairs. Look for the light.”
“Eddy,” JT said, “maybe you should take up detecting.”
“Hell no, child! I like to watch from Old Bessie over there. That’s what I just now named my recliner.” She jerked her thumb in the direction Old Bessie. “Last week one of my shows did an episode on cryptography and ciphers. Wooo boy, it was a wild one. Anyway, didn’t take no rocket scientist to figure this here out.” She thrust the notepad back to me. I took it with a grudging new respect for the subject matter on crime TV.
JT said, “I didn’t know there was a mental hospital in Princeton. I’m assuming we’re talking Princeton, Minnesota, and not New Jersey.”
Coop whipped his phone out. “I’ll Google it.”
I studied the clumped words on the page in front of me. “That veve. If you look at the original gibberish, it says viii eve. VIII is the eighth Roman numeral. Eight, eight this evening, I’ll bet.” Two could play the deciphering game.
JT gave me a congratulatory elbow. “Good one.”
“Thanks,” I said and shifted my attention to Coop, whose thumbs moved madly on his phone.
“Yeah,” he said, “there was a mental institution in Princeton, Minnesota, that opened in 1925. It was a colony for epileptics.”
“A colony for epileptics.” Eddy’s voice dripped derision. “Why, lock them away like lepers. Shame. My grandpappy had epilepsy, and we didn’t send him off to be locked up like some kind of animal.”
It was indeed a shame. So many things in the past were regarded as sinful, something to be hidden away, ashamed of. Things like mental retardation. The stigma of a suicide. Even simple depression. The stuff that makes for dirty little family secrets. Things were getting better these days, but you can bet there’s still a long way to go.
Eventually Coop said, “By ’49 the name was changed to the Princeton State School and Hospital. Apparently science had progressed enough that epilepsy was no longer the main thing. It started to take in patients with ‘mental deficiencies’ and developmental disabilities.”
Mental deficiencies. Horrible term.
Our sweet, innocent, smiling Rocky, and probably Tulip, too, could easily have wound up in an institution like that and remained there for life.
The color drained from Coop’s face. “In 1967, it became Princeton State Hospital. Right about that time there was a call to ‘humanize’ living conditions in state-run institutions.” Coop looked up, his eyes hardened in outrage. “Humanize living conditions? If the Green Beans were around back then, you can bet your ass we’d have been there protesting.”
He spluttered a few times, and returned to his research. “Looks like the joint was shut down in the late 1980s. Most of it, anyway. A few buildings are actually still being used for other things, so we’re going to have to be careful when we go in.” Coop stuffed his phone in his back pocket with a scowl.
Eddy said, “If Shay’s right, and we’re supposed to meet Pete at eight, we have some planning to do. Let’s hit the kitchen, kids, it’s powwow time.”
We drew up a battle plan for invading the Princeton Mental Hospital while we ate dinner. Coop mapped directions to Princeton and did a lot of mumbling as he chowed on his cheese-but-hold-the-deli-meat sandwich. He was a veritable bottomless pit. The hospital wasn’t listed in MapQuest, but he did find Hixton Lumber. Once we got there, we’d figure it out.
Princeton was about sixty miles north. I glanced at my watch. Six-thirty. I hoped the last dregs of the evening rush would be over by now.
Eddy crawled into the front seat, and JT and Coop obediently headed for the back. It didn’t take long for Eddy to train them well.
I pulled onto Hennepin to make my way through the maze of ramps onto northbound I-94. Traffic was okay and before long we were cruising the freeway.
JT had returned Eddy’s Whacker, which was tucked in the back pocket of her black “breaking-and-entering” jeans, and her “breaking-and-entering” neon-green high tops were securely tied on her feet. Long ago we’d tried to tell her that those shoes were a little too attention-grabbing for stealth work, but she would have none of it.
We were a quiet crew. In the loud silence of the SUV’s interior, my thoughts fell back to the horror of the body in the bar. Aside from the fact that the entire situation was completely ludicrous—no offense to the dead party—who the hell buried someone in my father’s basement? The more I thought about it, I was almost positive there was no way in hell my father could have had a thing to do with it. Yes, there was that 1 percent—okay, maybe it was 10 percent—of my conviction that was shakable. I needed to look him in the eye and see his face when he gave me his answer.
With a frustrated sigh I signaled and took the ramp onto 169 north toward Elk River. Walmart, Target, fast food joints. I hadn’t realized that stores from the ’burbs had made their way this far out. There was even a Sonic drive-in. If we were on a different mission, we might have had time to swing by for a shake.
From this point we were about nineteen miles from our destin
ation. Signs of civilization fell away, the darkness almost complete save streetlights that were far and few between.
Vast fields interspersed with forest so dense it was black enough to give me the creeps. I had no idea why anyone would want to live in this kind of desolation. Coop was even more city-centric than I was and I wondered how he was feeling. But then, he probably wasn’t paying much attention to the scenery. He and JT had gotten on the subject of video games, kids, and violence. If things got any more tense between them, I was going to have to stop and play musical chairs.
We passed the first exit for Princeton and, per our directions, headed west on a two-lane highway that frankly scared the crap out of me. This stretch didn’t even have lines dividing the road, and was even darker than 169 had been. Here, trees—both pines and those of the currently nonleafy variety—pressed up on both sides.
The few lights that dotted the road were practically drowned by the vast, neverending blackness of night. The only saving grace was that the snow on the ground brightened things up enough to be just this side of pitch black. After the ever-present city glow, I felt totally out of my league.
“Child, slow down.” Eddy doused the interior light she’d been using to read her paper map and jutted her head forward, straining to see out the windshield. “We should be coming up on that lumberyard any time. Damn, it’s dark as the devil out here.”
I was only doing about forty, but even so, I blew past the tiny sign that read Hixton Lumber sitting atop two posts in front of a long, low building.
“Shit,” I swore under my breath. I slowed and found a place where I could make a U-turn without running off the road.
The chatter in the car ceased when Coop and JT realized we were almost to our destination.
There was the lumberyard sign, in its minute glory. It wasn’t more than two feet by three, and white to boot. A neatly plowed parking lot devoid of cars sprawled in front of the vast, single-story building.
Shay O'Hanlon Caper 04 - Chip Off the Ice Block Murder Page 20