by Sean McGinty
“Faith,” said Katie triumphantly. “It was here all along.”
Crazy how something can just stare you in the face and you don’t even know what it is. But now I did. The RMS Mary. No need to rip away the backing or anything like that, because when I lifted the picture from its nail on the wall and flipped it over, it was right there, a small envelope taped to the back of the canvas, a single name written along the flap: Aaron.
It was a thin envelope, no wad of cash stuffed inside—but maybe a cashier’s check? As I tore open the flap, I mustered all the faith I had. Faith in treasure. Faith in success. Faith in—
But no. Nope. Nada. There wasn’t any treasure. There was just a note, a short one, five words written out in my grandpa’s neat block print:
THE WILL IS THE KEY.
And that’s all it said.
“The will is the key? The hell is that supposed to mean?”
Katie examined the paper. “Maybe he’s talking about will as in willpower? As in, you’ve gotta believe? Or maybe”—she paused—“maybe he’s talking about the will itself? Like his final will and testament?”
“But the will told us to look here, and now you’re telling me that this is saying to look at the will again? That doesn’t make any sense!”
Katie ignored me as she read through the will, tracing her fingers along the words.
“What about this?” she said at last.
“What?”
“This part. Right here.” She put her finger on it and read: “‘The remaining one half ½ of my boddy to be crematedd to ashes, these then to be loaddedd into shotgun shells andd honorably ddischargedd from my Remington .410 in the four carddinal ddirections from some appropriate hill or vantage point, preferably at ddusk. My tombstone to readd: ‘It Couldd Have Been Wondderful Andd Sometimes It Was.’ If the will is the key, maybe you need to think about fulfilling it. It is part of the contract, after all. Get it?”
I didn’t.
“Well, a will is a contract, right? Between the living and the dead. And before your grandpa fulfills his end, maybe you’ve got to fulfill your end. Maybe that’s why you haven’t found any treasure yet.”
“You think he’s holding out on me? Like, from beyond the grave?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“That’s crazy! Now you’re getting into some mumbo jumbo hocus-pocus crap. How could me shooting his ashes off lead me to the treasure?”
“I’m not sure. It’s all I’ve got right now.”
It wasn’t much, or anything at all, really, but after she left that afternoon I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Fulfill his last wishes. I couldn’t just inscribe a tombstone—that would take time—but I could shoot him out of a gun. No way was it going to lead me to the treasure, but OTOH, it was his last wish, and what else did I have going on? Not a whole hell of a lot. But where was the gun?
Back down to the basement I went, doing my best to keep my eyes off the dark stain on the floor.
And there it was. Leaning up against the wall behind the door. The same .410 I’d held as a child. Dad must’ve set it there after he found Grandpa. I cracked it open, and a single, empty cartridge popped out.
Here it was. The fatal bullet. Cartridge. Whatever. I looked at the empty cylinder where the payload went, all those tiny pellets he’d fired through his brain.
There was a metal cabinet in the corner, and in it I found the other thing I needed—a box that said LoadAll. Back when I was 10, he’d showed me how it worked, how to load the shells with powder and shot—and I wished I’d paid a little better attention because after I took it upstairs and got it clamped to the table, I couldn’t figure it out. YAY! for the LoadAll—an ancient, rickety contraption, nothing like the smooth precision of a Sharpshot® Precision II shell reloader with comfort handle and convenient carrying case.
But eventually I got it to work.
Most of the work was already done for me, actually. Inside the box were some empty shells, already primed, plus some wadding, powder, and shot. I replaced the shot with my grandpa’s ashes. That was the tricky part: as I was working I spilled some of the ashes onto the table. I tried sweeping them into my hand, but they got all mixed up with the dust on the table.
Working as carefully as I could, I loaded my grandpa’s ashes into four shotgun shells—and then five, because there was enough of him left over. I held the five shells in my hand. Hefted them up and down. Felt the strange weight of them. You never expect to hold your grandpa in your hands. You just don’t. And yet here he was. Half of him, anyway.
So once again, like back when I was 10, I took my grandfather’s .410 and a pocketful of shells and started out into the brush. I headed toward Coyote Heights, in the same general direction I’d headed all those years ago. Only, it was different now. The junk pile was gone, the brush was gone, and it had become a failed golf course development. The snow had melted—the weather was really weird that spring—but it hadn’t done much for the grass, all yellow and matted like the back of some mangy dog. Abandoned. I stood on the paved path, looking up toward the hills, with the sun low at my back.
I hadn’t quite realized the extent of it. I mean I knew the golf course was big, but this thing seemed to go on forever, spreading out along the contours of the land like some ancient god had come and dumped out an enormous bucket of yellow paint. Once, this had all belonged to my grandpa. Before that, it was the railroad’s, and before that it was probably the Paiute Indians’—except they used to say no one owned the land.
Well, I’ll tell you what: this land had been owned. A couple model homes sat vacant—For Sale signs and fluorescent stakes divvying up the bulldozed, quarter-acre lots. To the south, the rectangular buildings of the unfinished resort towered above the flat like a sad castle.
YAY! for Coyote Heights. Its 200-room luxury hotel, 18-hole PGA-level golf course, and fine dining options would surely have been a sight to behold, like for reals, had they ever finished them.
OK.
Preferably at dusk, he’d said.
We were getting pretty close to it.
Some appropriate hill or vantage point.
I climbed the tallest hill I could find, out by the 14th hole. The sun was lower now, not quite dusk but pretty close. I opened the gun and loaded a shell.
Four cardinal directions.
I raised the gun to my shoulder and aimed the barrel in a more-or-less southerly direction, toward Arizona. I squeezed the trigger, or tried to, but it wouldn’t squeeze. What? Right. The safety. I pressed the little button and aimed one more time….
But before I fired him off, it seemed like I should say something. I wasn’t normally one for prayer, but in that moment prayer is what seemed appropriate, though it took me a while to think of what to say.
Dear God,
Hey, it’s Aaron O’Faolain. I’m out here today fulfilling my grandpa’s will. My catechism teacher once told me that people who commit suicide don’t go to heaven. I don’t believe in heaven, so I didn’t really care, although it did seem kind of cruel to me. Like, I knew this guy in junior high who killed himself, Greg Carlton—remember him? He was a good guy, but he was gay and had really bad acne and people gave him endless shit for it. You wouldn’t believe how cruel kids can be. Or maybe you would.
And then you’ve got all these OTHER people saying you don’t make it to heaven unless you’ve accepted Jesus into your heart. Well, IMHO people just like to make up stupid rules to put other people down. We’re all just looking for a little guidance down here….
What I’m saying is, if there IS a heaven, I just want you to know that I humbly submit that you let my grandpa in. And Greg, too. He was a good guy, my grandfather was—and so was Greg. You’ve got to understand: life here on Earth is pretty crazy. Everyone’s running around pretending like they know what’s going on, but the truth is, we’re all just scared. No one wants to die…except I guess sometimes they do. We’re just looking for, like, a little meaning, you know? It’s confusing
sometimes, being a human.
Anyway. Thanks for your time.
Amen.
I raised the gun again, aiming south, and pulled the trigger.
BLAM!
The recoil punched my shoulder, a cloud of dust erupting from the barrel and hanging in the air for a moment before the wind took it. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust—that’s just some shit they say at funerals—you forget that it’s true. I opened the shotgun to remove the empty shell—or tried to, but for some reason my hands were shaking. I took a couple deep breaths. Calm down. It’s just, you know, YOUR OWN GRANDPA.
I loaded the gun, turned east, toward Utah, and raised the gun again. Far in the distance, pale blue mountains rose to the sky.
BOOM!
More dust in the wind. Somewhere, way off in the distance, a dog began to bark.
I loaded another shell, aiming north this time, toward Idaho.
BOOM!
The cold wind blew in from the west, scattering my grandpa’s ashes, and I waited for it to die down, then fired off a shot toward California, aiming high to avoid any blowback.
BOOM!
The explosion echoed into the distance, the sound fading until it joined the wind. Dust floated, vanished. There was one shell left: the odd, fifth shell. Where was it supposed to go? I wasn’t sure. I aimed at the sky, where God the Father and Mary and Jesus and all the rest of them sit upon their thrones of glory or whatever, but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to fire again, so I just slung the .410 over my shoulder and headed back to my grandpa’s.
Back at the house it was getting dark, so I turned on the lights and sat back down again—and YAY! for Philips® full-spec Illumiwatti™ Soft White Light Bulbs—which is not what my grandfather had in his floor lamp, but nonetheless he had some kind of bulb in there, and light is light, and as I was holding up the will to examine it again, I noticed something.
Holes. There were these little holes—these, like, little pinholes—scattered throughout the paper, as if it had been blasted with a tiny shotgun. Dozens of holes scattered around the paper, with the light pouring through, like stars. And then I saw that the pattern wasn’t random. The dots were positioned in line with the text, each one above a word.
Some kind of code! It had to be!
The first thing I did was call Katie.
“I think I found something!”
“What, the treasure?”
“No. Some kind of code.”
“A code?” she said. “What is it?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t worked it out yet. There are all these, like, little pinholes. In the paper. Like some kind of code.”
“Cool. Want some help? I like solving codes.”
“Come on over. I’ll wait for you.”
By the time Katie arrived I’d underlined all the words with holes above them:
And then I wrote them out on a separate piece of paper:
Goodd congratulations crackedd the first codde but this stage isn’t finishedd yet I’ve buriedd levels of nestedd answers as insurance against usurpers ddon’t press pause yet Aaron granddson got it? Ddig ddeeper!
Katie was pretty stoked. “Holy wow. That’s amazing.”
I read the message again, proud of myself for cracking the code. But then the reality began to set in—now what? The code—it wasn’t actually all that helpful. The only instructions were to “ddig ddeeper.” Which is the same thing he told me in the original will. Ddig ddeeper. What did it mean?
“Dig deeper…” said Katie. “It means we’ve got to keep searching.”
“Well, but it’s the same clue as before. How is that helpful? This thing just keeps going in circles.”
She looked at me. “Faith, remember?”
“Yeah. Sure. But now what?”
“I’m not sure.”
We spent the next hour reading over the message, considering the possibilities. Maybe the treasure was buried somewhere—but where? I needed a location. Some kind of x-marks-the-spot-type thing. It was starting to get late, and I was sure she was going to leave soon, but then she noticed something else.
“Check it out! Some of the words have more than one hole above them. Like the word ‘insurance’—there’s a hole above both the i and the s. ‘Usurpers,’ too. It’s got a hole over the u and the r. That’s it! I bet we’re supposed to look at the individual letters. Levels of nested answers! Dig deeper! The clue itself is another clue!”
She wrote out the letters with holes over them, and it looked like this:
DDTEEFDDTHGIEEVILODDNAISSURDDRAENDDGIDDD
“That’s a lot of letters, I said. “So many Ds…”
“Yeah,” said Katie. “But look—it says in the PPS you’re supposed to ‘ignore the double DDs,’ so let’s take those out.” She crossed out each pair of Ds and rewrote the code:
TEEFTHGIEEVILONAISSURRAENGID
“OK,” she said. “Let’s see….In the middle there, we’ve got the word ‘evil.’ Or actually ‘evilonaiss,’ kind of like mayonnaise, but evil. The most evil condiment of all.”
I gave her a look, like, Really? That’s what you got?
“And what’s ‘aengid’?” she said. “That’s kinda creepy, don’t you think? Aengid, the evil angel. And there at the beginning? ‘Teef’? That’s, like, how a baby would say ‘teeth.’ A creepy demon baby. It’s like one of those books.”
“What books?”
“Or movies.”
“What movies?”
“You know—one of those ones. Where the hero finds a mystical object and meddles where he shouldn’t and ends up opening the gates of hell.”
“And the evil angel comes out.”
“Yes! Or a demon baby, or a plague of wild rats, a rainbow of fruit flavors…I don’t know….” She looked at me with wonder in her blue eyes. “Aaron, it could be anything.”
“Anything. How is that helpful?”
“I don’t know!” she said. “But isn’t it fun? My grandpa never left me a hidden treasure.” She grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil from her bag, “Let’s crack the next code!”
Huh. I hadn’t really thought of it that way. It was kind of cool—and not just because of the treasure. I mean here we were, me and Katie, hanging out together, having fun. Like actual fun. Together. The together kind of fun. Which is maybe the best kind of fun.
We spent the next hour hard at it, arranging and rearranging the letters according to a dozen different schemes. We wrote out every other letter, every third, every fourth. We wrote the corresponding letters that came before and after in the alphabet. Nothing. Strange to be using actual paper—the process was so slow. Something occurred to me.
“The solution—it’s so simple!”
Katie looked up from her work. “You figured it out?!”
“I’ll ask Homie™! There’s got to be a program out there for cracking codes. I’m telling you, ten seconds and we’ll have it!”
“Wait. But doesn’t that kind of take the fun out of it? Don’t you want to figure it out on your own?”
I gave it some thought. “But see, that’s what you’re not getting—this is me figuring it out.”
“Give me a little more time. I want a shot at it before you go using technology.”
YAY! for the pencil in her hand, a good old-fashioned Dixon® No.2/HB—because wasn’t that technology? “A pencil is technology, too.”
Katie begged to differ. “It isn’t the same thing. At least this way we’re using our brains.”
“Hey, FUN® is in my brain.”
“You know what I mean….Maybe we need to try a different approach. Maybe there’s some other clue we’re missing.”
“Like what?”
“Like I don’t know. Tell me about your grandpa. What was he into?”
“Well, codes, obviously.”
“But what kind of codes?”
“I don’t know. Everything.” I directed her attention to his bookshelf: crosswords, Sudoku, word
searches, anagrams…
“Anagrams,” she said. “Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s an anagram!”
“You think?”
“You got any better ideas?”
“Yeah. FUN®.”
“Come on,” said Katie. “Just give it a shot on your own. Without FUN®. Humor me, Aaron.”
Over the next hour or so we worked on anagrams without FUN®—and I gotta say, Katie was pretty good at it. A real natural anagram machine. As for me, I pretty much sucked a butt. I could barely make a word. Mostly I just watched Katie work. It really was a beautiful sight, the way she hunched up under the lamp, hard at her studies, the way her hair kept falling down.
“OK,” she said at last. “I’ve got a couple leads here. How about this? A teenager is grief. Or how about this? Soft reggae is eerie. That’s kinda true, isn’t it?”
“I don’t really like reggae.”
“But is it eerie? When played softly?”
“I doubt he put in all this trouble just to tell me about reggae.”
“Fine. So what do you have?” She grabbed my paper and read. “Aaron rules? Come on! Virgin ogre? Riven filth? Sloven thug? What are these, death metal bands?”
“Maybe he got me tickets to a show.”
“Aaron.” She was using her teacher voice. “You have to take this seriously.”
“First you said to humor you, and now you want me to take it seriously. Which is it? Look, we could have this done in five minutes using FUN®.”
Katie didn’t answer. She was examining my paper.
“That gives me an idea. Maybe we need to set aside the most likely words. Like your name, for instance. That makes it easier. Is it possible to make the word ‘treasure,’ too? Or ‘money’? No—there’s no m.” She looked up from the page. “Go ahead and use your FUN® if you think it’s so great. I’ve got my brain. Nothing beats good old-fashioned human ingenuity!”