The Book Code: A Gripping Psychological Thriller with a Brilliant Twist (The Girl in the Book Box Set 2)

by Dan Noble

  Don’t want to ring me back, Pinocchio? Well, I’m coming to get you. The way I see it, you owe me. Time to pay up.

  Again I’m on the bridge in the middle of the night. My thoughts connect directly to Mother’s days in the hospital. The same lights, the same coned off sections of road. The same cock and balls graffiti on the turn-off for Co-op City. Everything changes and nothing changes.

  There is no traffic, the ride is not long enough to prepare me for what I’ll say to Pinocchio, a man who has dodged my increasingly desperate phone calls for three days. His home is behind another home. The house in front is depressing. An old ranch with sky blue vinyl siding faded to near colorlessness.

  The driveway winds behind to Pinocchio’s elevated studio, which looks like it might have had a garage beneath it at some time, but now has become a store room utilized by a hoarder—a book hoarder, of course. His lack of care to the written words themselves would have pissed Mother off and gives me a bad feeling about his priorities.

  Piles of hard and paperbacks, softened and half-open boxes, newspapers, folded blankets, bolts of fabric, and cases of more books fill every inch of the garage, and give off a nauseating damp smell that makes me retch. Thankfully nothing comes up. He was passionate about Mother once. That’s the only card in my hand.

  I ascend the wooden stairs, waiting for a creak that might prepare him for my approach, but it’s deathly silent. On the rail, my palm catches on a splintered shard. I wince and holler out. When I yank it, there’s blood. More than I would have expected. Inside my purse, my hand closes on an old, hardened tissue I must have used on Rose’s nose.

  Mothers aren’t put off by this kind of thing. I press it to my palm, then squeeze it in my fist. At least there’s proof we both lived. I think of the paper scrap from Truth and Art, under my childhood mattress, Rose’s mattress. I feel the pull of the Queleque Chose lists. I haven’t thought about them in so long. Why am I thinking of them now, after the box of relics? I can’t stop thinking of the connections they have helped me to make. Does everyone search these associations out? What’s so special about my ability to do so? If I’m to believe Kennedy, quite a lot. Another card in my hand.

  Three more stairs and I’m there. The door has an old-fashioned brass knocker. It feels heavy, lovely, actually, in my hand. Lucky threes, I think and use it to knock as many times.

  As if in the habit of receiving visitors at 2:30 a.m., Pinocchio opens the door immediately. It’s a shock to see him. Same tall, lanky frame, same tee shirt if I’m not mistaken, same giant Adam’s apple and smooth face. But his hair has thinned. Cut short, I can see his scalp below the nearly blonde fuzz.

  “Hell-” the word quits itself on his tongue when he realizes who I am. His first move is to shut the door. I wedge my foot in the jamb. His jaw tightens. He looks me in the eye. “Go away.”

  “Why?”

  “Go away.”

  “At least hear me out.”

  “You? I should hear you out? All the trouble you caused me, with your accusations, your ability to make people believe you, even when you’re completely bonkers.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the kind of talk a professional would use.”

  “Well, I’m not a professional anymore. Been stripped of my title, thanks to you.”

  “Surely that isn’t true.” I don’t know what he’s referring to. Yes, it was quite ugly that day, but I said what I remembered happening. That is what the attorney told me to do.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  He says nothing. I see movement at his jaw. It’s anger.

  “Please step out of the way Millie Burns.”

  My father’s name smarts. Doesn’t he know about Kennedy? Kennedy’s so powerful, so important in their world.

  “I need your help.”

  “Your mother is dead.”

  “I know that.” But I don’t. She was missing, is missing. It’s an unsolved case.

  “Step out of the way, Ms. Burns, before I call the police.”

  “We both know that would look ridiculous. A woman frightening you?”

  “If I must remove you from the doorway, I will.” His voice has grown loud, his hand posturing as if in performance.

  “You once asked for my help. I wasn’t ready. But now I am.”

  His gaze is unshakeable, but his left eye twitches. He watches me notice. I can see his shoulders slump. Is he just posturing? How far can I push?

  “Millie, I can see you are not doing well. You should go get some help.”

  I show him my hand.

  “The trembles?” he says. “Please take care of yourself. That is not a good sign.”

  “Kennedy. I’m Mrs. Kennedy now. My daughter is a Kennedy too.”

  His eyes bulge.

  “You have a child—with that patient, Kennedy.”

  My hand lands heavier than I intend on his shoulder.

  “What did you say? How do you know about Kennedy’s cancer.”

  “I don’t. Please leave.”

  “But you said ‘patient’ and you’re right. My husband Kennedy is a cancer patient, and he’s dying, and—”

  “Mrs. Kennedy.” He yells over me. But he’s heard.

  He crouches down to try to move my foot from the door. “I am truly sorry for you, Emily.” He looks up to the sky. Millie, I’m Millie, I want to say, but don’t want to put him off anymore. Besides, we’re so alike in our talents, I can see why someone would be confused.

  He shoves and this time my foot slips out enough for him to gently, but successfully push me back enough to close me outside. The platform outside is small and I stumble down one step. I’m voiceless, in shock, my hands cradling my empty womb, but I catch a post of the handrail and stop myself from tumbling further. I look up.

  “You’re a coward! You blame me for your failures. But we can fix that now. Together. You have an invaluable perspective, and the expertise to inform it. You have ambitions, and I have made attaining those difficult. It was a hard time for me. I wanted my mother. Nothing else mattered. But I’m not a child anymore. I will make a deal with you, Dr. P. And then we can both get what we want.”

  Not a sound.

  “Fine! I don’t need you! I’ll do it myself! I am a Reader!” Even as I yell it, I know I need to tame my emotions or I’m not going to get anywhere. Besides, I can’t do this all without him obviously, or I wouldn’t be here in the middle of the night. And he knows it too. Still I can’t help myself. “You’re a fucking coward!” I kick the post.

  On my way down, I see someone brush aside the curtains on the windows of the main home. Good. Let them look. I stick out my tongue and spit. I can act like a child too. Maybe something that sends a stronger message. I go down below to his book storage mess and start upending boxes, kicking at piles. And when I’m satisfied with my mess, I go home.

  30

  MILLIE

  All those years ago, breathless, I listened to Phil Collins sing with an electronic twang about the air tonight. That haunting drum beat. I blacked out, and Mother disappeared into her story, I told myself. She was dead, or as good as, and either way, it had nothing to do with me. I was a good girl. Whatever happened I’d have to deal with it alone.

  But I didn’t have to know the truth, I realized. Better not to. That way, I could live with whatever narrative best suited. That night had become immortalized in my mind. I’ve gone over it so many times, there was no way to know what was true and what wasn’t. But whichever way I went through it, there were the holes—important holes.

  I’d drunk four shots of Jack Daniels and that’s how I’d explained passing out in my bed. Mother was still gone, up to the moment I’d blacked out. Dead? Gone. Dead, likely. She’d left the copy of Wuthering Heights right in the center of the floor, so I couldn’t miss it, I remember thinking. Though somehow I knew she wouldn’t return, I waited three days, pacing, reading, running my finger over the chalky boards, before phoning the police. That wouldn’t look good.

 
I pictured them running their yellow tape around trees and across doorways. Their lights littering the sky, their polyester jackets swishing as they strode. But in reality it was not that way. There was no crime scene tape, no searching the house. Only a rookie cop, looked about two years older than me, who asked a few questions and then left. It was the longest day and I tried desperately to hide my shame. Because I wasn’t going to get into the things I knew.

  I remember being unsure how I should appear—horrified, terrified, concerned, cool and collected, helpful? Anything but guilty, not so different from how I had to seem with Kennedy, at Rose’s disappearance the other day—which inevitably comes off as suspicious. I couldn’t sort the images that bombarded me, some quite grizzly.

  I tried to keep it simple, my desperate attempts to explain without explaining, because I wouldn’t, couldn’t even begin to unravel the truth, much less share it, but I was terrified to become a suspect.

  The day after the questioning and initial investigation, I woke alone at a nearby hotel, as I thought it best if I showed I couldn’t bear to be there, or that I was afraid that someone might harm me. I had mentioned this to the young Officer Lou, and I followed through. I kept picturing them bulldozing the wild garden, which seemed to have taken on a life of its own. I shivered, thinking of it, huddled under starched sheets and scratchy blankets. But no such thing had happened. Mother hated hotels like this. I held onto the image I often came back to: dancing for her, gargling ginger ale from the Princess Leia glass. Had that even happened? It was so hard to know now.

  There I was in this place I had only known as a highway landmark that meant I’d be home in ten minutes. It was already noon when I made myself open my eyes. In the room’s incredible blackout-curtain darkness, I rose with dread, and soon realized something else was off kilter. My ankle, throbbing painfully hours earlier the way it always did in the damp, was healed. Beneath the support sock, I could feel the strength in the leg, the blood pumping in a way it hadn’t for a year or so now. The pain was gone. I scanned for a logical explanation where there was none. The story of my life.

  Mother was gone. She took my injury with her. It was a parting gift. I allowed myself the soothing warmth of this notion for a few wonderful hours, imagining telling this version of the truth at her funeral. Her last thoughts and actions for me.

  Mother had discovered a portal to another dimension. When she transported over there, she could take problems from here over to there. And what she did with it was help me. Now she existed in the worlds of her favorite books. My chest puffed with the significance, the meaningfulness. It was beautiful. I withheld all judgment of my ideas and conclusions; I let creativity run free. I pictured Mother’s chalked circles of reasoning on the boards. I was sure I understood them now. The mother-daughter connection was doing its thing, tendrils stretching, branching, twisting around to new heights.

  Later, though, after Dr. Samuels, I decided that I would defer to the logical explanation: my ankle hadn’t been that bad to begin with; most likely, it had been psychosomatic. The doctor had been humoring a poor, misguided girl, putting a Band-Aid on an imaginary boo-boo.

  At home, several months after her disappearance, the officers had dredged the lake where Mother had attempted suicide last time, dug around a bit in the garden, quit when they found the tackle box Dr. P had given me, which I’d buried in the yard, and after examination, considered its contents proof she’d gone mad. Her handwriting and mine were so similar, they’d noted. But the truth was I’d studied hers, perfected it. I didn’t correct them. I just wanted them to go.

  In seven years, they closed the case and pronounced her dead. They went away with conspiracy theory stuff to laugh about in the break room. And I would go on with my life, stop referring to it as the magically healed ankle, and forget all the inexplicable stuff. I asked myself what other choice I had. And for a long time, in that mindset, I did not have any “blackouts.” I lived life relatively normally. I found Kennedy and love and meaning.

  Now I know none of that old logic applies. Not only am I a Reader, but I am a Writer—a creator with God-like powers. And I am free to explore the full extent of that. Which is just as good. Because I need to find a way to save Kennedy’s life. Despite everything, that’s all I want: to go back to the way things were.

  31

  MILLIE

  I sit in New Jersey, in my car, way down the block from my father’s house, across the road where I have a good spot to memorize their cookie-cutter center-hall colonial. I don’t know what I’m looking for. Same thing Pinocchio wouldn’t tell me hours ago? But everything seems questionable now. Do I really know why my parents divorced? What did my father know about Mother’s abilities? And mine? I am a discovery writer, meaning I don’t have a clear path about where the story will go, so I put my characters in the situation and see where it all leads.

  With Pinocchio ignoring me, I find myself gravitating toward my father for answers. The key is here, somewhere over the bridge. I take Rose to sit outside my father’s house. I have every intention of knocking on the door. Could this something I sense here be the missing link? Without Pinocchio, I can only work with what I know; and right now, the most pressing bit seems to be that I have information in my brain that I cannot use with precision enough to save Kennedy.

  I sip mechanically at the herbal tea I’ve brought with me and sit poised…for God knows what. I squirm when a chunky woman notices me as she fetches the mail from her windmill-shaped postbox. Can I be arrested for this? I hope a young mother in a Toyota SUV looks sensible enough.

  I think back to one of the keynote memories of him: at my high school graduation. He’d been fiddling with the program, his strange way of mouthing the words he reads. When his head wasn’t buried in the program, I’d catch him checking his watch and wondering, it seemed, when it would be over so he could get back to Tennessee and forget about this failed life.

  I retrace memories of my father, as if I must prove to myself he’s real. Real, real. What is this real we’re always so concerned with? If it felt real to me, isn’t that enough? I pull out a Quelque Chose and note this. It feels so good to put my pen to that paper. I don’t know why I swore myself off it for so long. There’s the day the two of us drove to the big park, two towns over, which had the special wooden bridge we called The Bridge to Terabithia (I’m sure Mother found the allusion obscenely simplistic), and a rope swing for moat crossings. I swung higher and higher on the swing facing this structure, feeling the breeze at the backs of my legs while my father chatted with another dad he recognized from the neighborhood.

  “Hey!” he yelled, when he noticed how high I’d gotten. I was Leslie, from the story, on the day of her death. What did I care if I swung too high?

  I remember the satisfaction, the power of pulling him away from his conversation.

  “I want you to slow down. Not so high, Millie.” He didn’t raise his voice—something he was careful about (too careful, according to Mother, God forbid he show some emotion).

  “Leslie! I’m Leslie!”

  My father refused to play along. “You are Millie! And you’d better get down.” The other father was watching, too, and I knew I could drag out what felt like the Millie Show for a little longer. But my father frowned and came toward me. I knew he would grab the chain and pull me off. I didn’t like that ending, so in a panic at his reaction, I jumped off, twisting that same ankle I later reinjured on Rhodo Day. Because of the secondary break, the doctor had called it a “complex” fracture. Mother certainly had a lot of fun with that. At least she had imagination.

  I release my seatbelt and get ready for my mission.

  “Mommy’s just running to that house right there, Rose. You stay here.”

  “Why? WHY?” she yells. “What are we doing here anyway?”

  “Just stay. I’ll be right back and then you can go home and have some ice cream.” What a wonderful mother. When she isn’t barricaded in a room, she’s being blackmailed with
full-fat dairy. Rose starts singing an ice cream song, again to the Happy Birthday tune, and I smile and bob my head, then leave the driver’s door open, and run across the street, checking over my shoulder that the mail retriever isn’t peeking through her louvres.

  All clear. I’m going to ring the bell and ask him outright what he knows. What was he doing at the supermarket with Kennedy? I’m clutching an Aspidistra, a popular hardy houseplant, to give to my father as a gift. It’s a fighter with unflagging, graceful sturdiness it fights back when harmed, cultivating its complex network of shiny, dark leaves, commanding attention in the face of adversity. When I saw it at the supermarket, in a mesmerizing tiered display at the head of a check-out lane, I thought, it’s the botanical equivalent of a fuck you.

  Even you could not kill this plant, I am saying. Here.

  I muster enough anger to propel me up the elaborate side-winding staircase of his ghastly miniature mansion. I ring and look to the left and right at the identical homes, with their contrasting window molding and shutter colors, which undoubtedly, the owners wear as badges of superior taste to their neighbors. My mother would be nauseated. It is, in every way possible, the opposite of our home.

  The small holly bushes have been planted exactly a foot apart. Rose of Sharon and Camellia—perfectly maintained but sterile, like a budget hotel room.

  My gaze stops at my father’s miniature Cypress tree—the one in the very center of the row of three carbon copies, and look around. I hear footsteps down the steps inside. I can feel my pulse beat in my palms as I run back down the steps, bend over and pull that Tuscan shrub, that poor little plant, out, with everything I’ve got.

  I look back at Rose, who’s turning the pages of one of the old Disneyland record books I ply her with from thrift stores and garage sales. This one is Pinocchio. I get a frisson. I’m so close. I’m so fucking close to working it all out. I can taste it. I check my father’s windows, but my gaze is drawn back to the fucking perfect tree. I squat like a sumo wrestler, getting a good handle around the shrub, and yank. What am I doing? If this is my instinct what is it telling me to do? Am I going to be on the seven o’clock news? They’re strong, this one’s roots. I imagine my father planting this Cypress. How would he do it? What would he wear? Is he a morning person? Are there gloves on his chunky hands? Does he research gardening do’s and don’ts, or simply wing it?