Oh, them. “First of all, Brittany is not a girl. She’s an adult. I’m not going to date anyone who’s twenty-three. Grandma would flip.”
Grace seemed to visibly relax some.
“Second of all, why should you care?”
“Just because my mom is being protective doesn’t mean my feelings for you have changed.”
“And what are your feelings, Grace?” Because even before her mom put the kibosh on our relationship, her actions had been all over the map.
“I love you.”
Her expression was so intense, like she’d agonized over whether or not to say those words.
They didn’t scare me. But they didn’t exactly help, either.
Grace grabbed my shirt and kissed me, which also didn’t help. The thought that her mother wouldn’t like this flitted across my mind, but the smell of coconut withered all reason. I slid my fingers into her hair and held her as close as I could in the car.
When we finally broke apart, her cheeks were wet from tears. I wiped them away with my fingers. “Grace, what’s wrong?
“I don’t want to lose you.”
I grinned. “Then don’t forget where you put me.”
“I’m serious, Spencer. I’m afraid you’re going to fall for someone else while my mom is being paranoid.”
“I’m not,” I said. “And I honestly don’t have the time. Between school and basketball and my investigation…” I shrugged innocently.
She punched my arm. “What about that Meg actress?”
“No, Grace. I’m not interested in her.” I really wasn’t.
She sighed and fell back in the seat. “What are we going to do?”
I pulled on my seatbelt. “I’m going to catch some bad guys. And you’re going to start texting me again, like everything is normal. Because it will be. Someday soon.”
She shook her head. “My mom won’t let us.”
“Your mom said I needed to stay away from you until this investigation is over. But she agreed to our meetings with Mr. S, so she knows we’ll see each other once a week. And she never said we had to stop texting. So text me. Okay?”
She sniffled, nodded. “Okay.” But she didn’t budge. “My mom is making me talk to Mr. and Mrs. S.” She wrinkled her nose. “Like they’re my therapists.”
Ah . . . And they think she was trying to control me. That fit. “Grandma made me do it last year. Just with Mr. S.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. After the arrest at Kip’s party, before the charges were dismissed. Grandma made me for five weeks.”
“What did you talk about?” Grace asked.
“Oh, uh . . . I was mad about Kip, mostly. I wanted to know why bad stuff always seemed to happen to me. I was a better person than Kip, but I was always getting in trouble while he could do whatever he wanted.”
“What did Mr. S say?”
“That it wasn’t my place to worry about Kip’s business. That God will deal with him. The only person I need to worry about was me.”
She nodded. “He said the same thing to me! That I waste too much time worrying about everyone else. On things I can’t control. He said because of my dad, I don’t trust people.”
That made so much sense.
“Do you think he’s right?”
Yeah, I wasn’t falling for that one. “Do you?” I asked.
She sighed. “I just want to help people. Is that so wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I said, wanting to tread carefully in this minefield. “I’ll have to think about it.”
“Thank you, Spencer.”
She kissed my cheek, then got out. I watched her walk toward the school. As I drove away, I felt better than I had in weeks. Grace loved me. We were going to get through this thing, somehow.
But while Grace seemed to have totally forgotten the mysterious key, I had not. I eyed the manila envelope. I couldn’t wait until tomorrow when the bank was open.
REPORT NUMBER: 14
REPORT TITLE: I Make a Withdrawal from a Safety Deposit Box
SUBMITTED BY: Agent-in-Training Spencer Garmond
LOCATION: Pilot Point Christian School, Pilot Point, California, USA
DATE AND TIME: Monday, November 26, 6:15 a.m.
It was killing me that I couldn’t go to the bank until after school. I took the envelope and key to school and carried it around in my backpack, paranoid I might lose it. We had late practice, so I figured I could run over to the bank while the girls were using the gym. Grace texted me throughout the day, wanting to know my plan. I filled her in. Then she asked me to have my detail pick her up after cheer practice so she could come with me.
I texted her back: No way.
Grace: pleaz? i wanna go with
Me: Grace, no. Your mom would NOT be happy.
And that was all I heard from her. Until I walked into the bank that afternoon, and I heard her voice.
“Spencer.”
I turned, saw her sitting in her cheer uniform on a fat leather couch in the bank lobby. I glared as she jumped up and skipped toward me, swinging her purse and looking adorable.
I reminded myself I was mad at her. “What are you doing here?”
She flashed me a wide, flirtatious smile. “Helping you.” She reached my side, slid her hand into mine, and squeezed.
I grunted and walked to the counter. “You’re grounded.”
The teller was this super happy Asian guy. “Good afternoon. How can I help you today?”
I pulled the envelope from my backpack and dumped it out on the counter. “I need to look inside a safe deposit box.”
“That’s no problem at all. I just need your name or account number, please.”
I flipped over the paper and pushed it toward him.
“All right, great. Let me look that up for you.” His fingers clicked on his keyboard as he typed in the numbers. My heart started pounding extra fast, and I bounced my knee.
Please let this work.
But seriously. Even if, by some miracle, my name was on this account, surely they wouldn’t let a minor open a safe deposit box without an adult present.
“Can I have your name, please?” the teller asked.
“Spencer Garmond.”
“Middle name?”
“Michael.”
His face lit up. “You’re the local basketball star, aren’t you?”
“Uh, I guess.”
“So nice to meet you, man. I’ll still need some ID.”
“Right.” I pulled out my wallet, removed my license, and dropped it on the counter.
“Okay, so sign here and here.” He made Xs on a sheet of paper and slid it toward me.
I scrawled my name on both lines, and he returned the key and account number.
“Now, if you’ll follow me, Mr. DeLeon will help you.” The teller grabbed the paper I’d signed and headed over to where an old dude with a comb-over was manning a big desk.
“Mr. DeLeon,” our teller said, “this is Spencer Garmond. He’s here to view the contents of a safe deposit box. Here is the form with his signatures and his ID.”
“Thank you, Evan,” Mr. DeLeon said, then he turned his attention to me. “Yes, Mr. Garmond. Your uncle was here this morning. He signed for you to get into the box on your own without an adult present.”
“Great,” I said, more than a little bewildered.
“It’s a shame, what happened with the . . .” He motioned to his face. “You know, the accident. He said the scars were no longer causing him pain, though. I was glad to hear that.”
I had no idea what this guy was talking about, so I tried to keep my expression neutral.
Mr. DeLeon seemed to take the hint that I didn’t want to talk about the accident. “Will you be taking the contents with you or leaving them?” he asked.
“Taking them,” I said.
“Very good. Go ahead and sign here as well.” He drew an X at the bottom of the paper I’d already signed twice and pushed it toward me. I signed again.
“All right. If you’ll come with me.”
Mr. DeLeon led me and Grace into a narrow room filled with lockboxes. It looked kind of like a post office. There was a tiny, waist-high table in the center of the room. He pulled a key off his belt. “Go ahead and insert your key into the lock,” he said, patting box 234.
I shoved in the key, and Mr. DeLeon did the same with his. Together we opened the box. Mr. DeLeon pulled it out and set it on the middle table.
“Take as much time as you need, Mr. Garmond,” he said, then walked out.
I met Grace’s big blue eyes, then slid off the lid. Inside was a leather journal. Nothing else. I picked it up.
Grace crowded up to me. “What is it?”
“Don’t know.” I opened to the first page. It had one line of handwriting, which I read aloud. “This is the thirteenth intercession journal of Aleksander Halvorsen.”
“Who is that?” Grace asked.
“My dad.” Why would Kimbal have my dad’s intercession journal? I handed it to Grace. “Put it in your purse,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because Kimbal might be out there, watching. I don’t want him to see this.”
“But didn’t he leave it for you?”
“I don’t think so. And if he didn’t, I’m afraid if he sees me with it, he’ll take it away.”
“But I thought he wasn’t part of your detail anymore.”
“I don’t think he is. But I don’t want to take the risk.”
“If he’s out there, won’t he suspect you’ve found this?”
“I have my own bank account here. He won’t know the journal is gone until he comes looking for it.”
Grace put the journal in her purse. I grabbed her hand and we walked out to the main part of the bank.
“Have a good day, Mr. Garmond,” Evan called.
“Yeah, you too,” I said.
Grace and I got into my car.
“Can we look at it?” she asked.
I glanced in the rearview mirror at the sedan. I couldn’t tell who was inside. I really wanted to look at the journal, but if Kimbal was on duty, I didn’t want to risk him getting out to chat. Not that he’d done that forever. I hadn’t spoken to him in months. Hadn’t even seen him. He probably wasn’t there. And I was dying to look inside.
“Yeah, let’s see it.”
Grace pulled it out from her purse and opened it. I leaned close to see.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “These look like dates, but the sentences are gibberish.”
“Intercessors write their journals in code,” I said.
“Do you?”
“I try.”
“What are you going to do with this?”
“Give it to Prière, probably,” I said.
“You can’t do that. Not until you try to read it.”
“Oh, I’ll read it first,” I said, taking it out of her hands.
“I’ve got to get back,” Grace said. “I skipped out on practice.”
“Grace.”
She grinned at me. “This was more important.” She kissed me goodbye, and it was all I could do not to pledge my undying loyalty to the Empire of Grace Thomas.
Then she was gone, jogging across the street to what looked like Jasmine’s car.
That girl was going to get me in trouble. The question was, what was I going to do about it?
● ● ●
I booked it back to the school and arrived a half hour before practice. I spent that time in my car, paging though the journal, trying to figure out how to read the thing. It wasn’t all in code. There were notes written in the margin in red. The handwriting was different. Skinnier. Familiar, actually. I was pretty sure the red writing was Kimbal’s. Most of it had question marks at the end, like he’d been trying to decipher these prophecies.
I spotted my name in red. “Jonas” it said, with a line pointing to a word at the start of a coded prophecy. The word “Sanoj” was underlined in the same red pen.
Sanoj was me?
And then I saw it. Jonas, spelled backwards. I tried to flip the words on either side of that name, but they didn’t work the same way. I did, however, find many more uses of “Sanoj.”
The name Jonas was all over this book.
I flipped through the pages. Toward the back, the chart format of an intercession journal stopped, as did the code. Here it was just a journal:
I never thought it would be this hard to go to work each morning, but Jonas has so captured my heart I don’t want to leave him. Loraine enjoys watching him, and since she’s retired now, she certainly has the time. I just can’t help thinking it should be me or Lisa with him. Does he think about us during the day? Wonder why we have to work? I wish I could stay with him every minute.
Goosebumps broke out over my arms. I flipped a few pages and read another passage:
Last night when Lisa gave Jonas his dinner, he bowed his head and whispered. We hadn’t even sat down yet. So we did, and I asked Jonas to pray again for all of us, and he said, “Dear, Jesus. Bless them because I already prayed for me.” We couldn’t stop laughing.
There were more entries like this. Stuff about me or my mom. His fond memories. He certainly didn’t sound like a man who would betray his wife to her death. Why did Kimbal have this? And why had he tried to decipher it? What was he looking to discover?
It was time for practice. I wasn’t about to leave the journal in the car, so I took it inside and put it in my gym locker. Then I suffered through one of the most tedious basketball practices of my life. Coach yelled at me three times to get my head out of the clouds.
When it was finally over, I went home and read the rest of the journal part of the journal—all six pages. And I might have cried a little.
All this time Kimbal had this? Why keep it from me? Why keep it at all? My mistrust for him ballooned into anger, so I set about trying to decipher the journal, starting with the last coded sentence in the book. The word “Mail” caught my attention because it was a word I recognized but the “M” was capitalized in the middle of the sentence. I stared at it until I realized it might be Liam spelled backwards. On a hunch, I found a tiny mirror in Grandma’s bathroom and held it up to each page. Sure enough, I found more names that were written backwards. Liam, of course, as Mail. Also, Lisa: Asil, Loraine: Eniarol, and Earl: Lrae. It seemed my dad wrote all names this way. Perhaps it made it easier for him to find certain entries without needing to decode anything.
Breaking the cipher would be harder, though I did have a cheat. I dug through my desk drawer, looking for it. Mr. S had done a series on ciphers last year, and he’d passed out a photocopy of a Caesar Cipher Disk. I finally found it, then realized it was only a photocopy. So I went into the kitchen, found a pair of scissors, and did my best to neatly cut out the center circle. Then I taped the outer ring onto a blank sheet of paper in my notebook. I bent a paperclip through the center of the middle circle and stabbed it through the notebook page. A little tape and some smoothing out, and I had a decent enough cipher to work with.
I started by looking for both one letter words, “a” or “I,” and a three-letter word that repeated, hoping to find the word “the.” I found a couple three-letter words that matched, but not enough to convince me I was right. I went ahead and used the cipher disk to decode them, then wrote out the alphabet to see if they matched.
Nothing.
The doorbell rang. A flash of annoyance ran though me. It was probably UPS with a package for Grandma. They’d leave it on the doorstep.
What if my dad had had used a Vigenère cipher instead? That would have required a keyword. Though it seemed too easy, I set about checking every six letters to see if the keyword might be five letters long. It was tedious, but I did manage to find a pattern. I went with my hunch and started writing a decode chart for the five-letter keyword Jonas. I skipped ahead and tried what should be the letters A, I, T, H, and E, but they didn’t fit.
Of course Jonas would have be
en too easy. Kimbal would have guessed that. I looked at the backwards names again, the only part I could read. I got an idea and started decoding again, this time for the keyword: sanoj—Jonas backwards. I checked the A, I, T, H, and E.
They matched.
I cackled, then continued writing out the decode chart with my new keyword. The doorbell rang again. I paused, frustrated, then decided if it was important, whoever it was could call. I checked the volume on my cell phone, then went back to work on the decoding chart.
A knock on my bedroom door made me jump. The door swung open, and Grace poked her head inside.
She grinned. “Hey.”
“What are you doing coming into my house like you live here?” I asked, kind of annoyed.
“You guys don’t lock your front door.”
“So that means you can just barge in?”
“I saw your car on the street. And I figured your grandma was at her Bible study.”
Women’s Bible study. Monday nights from six to nine. As if in sudden understanding, my stomach growled. I was on my own for dinner.
“You still shouldn’t be here,” I said. “Your mom wouldn’t like it.”
She came in and shut the door. “Did you find anything?” She nodded at the journal.
I told her about the diary-like entries in the back and how I was trying to break the cipher. “I think I found the keyword, but it’s going to take a while.”
Grace wandered deeper into my room. I glanced up, then around the place, suddenly concerned I’d left it a pig sty. But it wasn’t too bad actually, so I went back to work.
Grace came and sat beside me, leaned her cheek against my shoulder, and watched me write. Not even the smell of coconut could distract me. I briefly wondered if I could find an online decoder for the Vigenère cipher that might go faster, but a few more letters and I was done. Now I needed to check it. I started with the sentence at the top of the page that began with “Liam.” I tried to go slow, but I was so excited, my hand was shaking. Sure enough, the letters slowly formed into words.
Grace grabbed my left hand, picked up my arm, and climbed onto my lap, facing me.
“Can I help you?” I asked, amused.
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