The Downward Spiral

by Ridley Pearson

  There was something wonderfully exciting about receiving a secret note, especially from a boy, a particular boy whose handwriting was familiar to me. A boy clever enough to know what chair I would choose.

  For a moment, I didn’t believe I could possibly be so predictable. I couldn’t possibly sit in the same chair at every meal! Was I that much a creature of habit? It was true that I liked looking out the bay window to the view of the forest to the west. It was also true that I often—perhaps more than often—claimed the chair to the left of Mrs. Habersham, teacher of Western Civilization and assistant soccer coach. I liked Mrs. Habersham, considered her a good teacher and someone I looked up to. But could I afford such predictability? Weren’t people considered boring when they did the same thing over and over?

  I snagged the mashed potatoes. I might allow the roast pork to slip past, the soggy green beans. But butter-infused, creamy mashed potatoes? Never.

  I ate hungrily, eager to excuse myself. After wolfing down the potatoes I received permission to go to the washroom and headed in that direction. The same direction as the staircase leading down to the computer center.

  Sherlock had never explained his possessing a master key to the school’s locked doors. If he didn’t want to tell me, I wasn’t going to ask a second time. With the rumble of voices and dishes clanking overhead, Sherlock admitted us into the off-limits computer center. This wasn’t the computer lab, where programming and technology was taught. The computer center was the brains of the administration—the school’s network routers, administrative backup, academics, admissions, alumni. The way Sherlock described it, the room had massive storage capacity and something he called “redundancy,” which I took to be backup of the backup.

  As far as Sherlock and I knew, no one came down to the center unless there was a glitch. We were likely safe until lunch ended and classes resumed in another forty-five minutes.

  I didn’t consider myself a rule breaker. Father had raised James and me to comport ourselves admirably. Yet here I was, breaking and entering. Growing up wasn’t so great after all.

  “Why am I here? What’s going on?” I asked, feeling horribly guilty about our trespassing.

  “Making progress,” Sherlock answered, adjusting his sling so that he could type with two hands.

  “Please. No games. I’m not in the mood.” I offered to do the typing, but this was Sherlock.

  “Did you attend chapel last night?” he asked rhetorically. “No, you didn’t. I was looking for you. If you had, you might have shouted in the middle of the scripture reading at the start of the service.”

  “You attend chapel?”

  “International students are required to attend all religious services.”

  “No way!”

  “I promise you, it’s true. I actually find it relaxing, and the music’s wonderful, but may I continue?”

  I nodded, feeling something different about Sherlock Holmes. Once again, something mysterious.

  “The scripture was from First Timothy. It was about bringing nothing into this world and carrying nothing out.”

  “Sherlock . . . is this really—”

  “Important? Yes, of course it is relevant, Moria.” We were sitting side by side in front of one of the many terminals in the center. Behind us was a glass wall partitioning off a second section of the center, where rows of racks held dozens of boxes with blinking lights and a dizzying number of colorful cables.

  “I happened to have followed along with the scriptural selection, you see?”

  “Not at all,” I said.

  “It was First Timothy six, verse six and seven.”

  “Fascinating,” I snapped sarcastically. All I could think about were the mashed potatoes I was missing.

  “Any guesses as to First Timothy six, verse ten?”

  “None whatsoever. Did you try any of the pork roast at lunch? I missed the pork.”

  He arched his left eyebrow at me in a menacing way. That eyebrow of his could communicate more than his spoken words.

  “What? I’m still hungry,” I said.

  “First Timothy six, verse ten: ‘For the love of money is the root of all evil—’”

  “Stop!” I said. It was just an expression, but Sherlock apparently took it as a direct order. “Go on,” I said.

  “Which is it, stop or go?”

  “That’s the saying burned into Father’s desk,” I reminded myself aloud. “In the drawer with the gun and the page of gibberish.”

  “You and I,” Sherlock said, “suspect your father scanned your family Bible. Our one attempt to prove or disprove that fact was interrupted by Proctor Sidling. That is, until now.” He adjusted his sling at the shoulder. I helped him and he didn’t stop me.

  “What does that have to do with a verse from First Timothy?”

  “I’m getting to that,” Sherlock said, in a tone of voice I recognized as unintentionally irritable and intolerant. My friend was running out of patience with me. He refreshed the screen and logged on to the system using Mr. Randolf’s name and password.

  “How can you possibly know his log-in?” I asked.

  “He’s a math teacher, Moria. An older man. He types incredibly slowly. My third or fourth day of class I stood by his side as he logged on. Observation, dear girl, is the key to undoing all secrets. Don’t forget that.”

  The system admitted him. I could hardly believe his arrogance.

  “We don’t even know if there is a scan of the Bible,” I reminded him, wanting to interject some reality and pop his bubble.

  Rather than take it as an insult, he took it as a challenge. So Sherlock of him.

  “We have the benefit of two facts, Moria. Hmm? We know, within a day or two, the date the Bible was stolen. Ergo, the dates the Bible might have been scanned. Secondly, it’s a large volume, with a good deal of content on every page.”

  “A big file.”

  “Exactly! Precisely! Brava!” Sherlock crowed. “An extremely large file.”

  “So,” I said, beginning to understand, “we limit our search to only a few days, and we look for the biggest files created on those dates.” I made it a statement not a question, because I could see he was already querying the system to make just such a search.

  Seventy-two files had been created during the three-day period in early September when the Bible had been discovered missing. Of those, only three were over ten gigabytes.

  Artwork_submission.pdf

  14_5_22_5_18_13_15_18_5.tiff

  Admit_early914_c&ghl.tiff

  All three were further password protected.

  “We’re cooked,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” said he. “Challenged, but who doesn’t love a good mystery? Look at the one with the numbers. You see the three fives? The ones by themselves—you can’t count the one that’s in fifteen. Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Not to me it isn’t,” I said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You must!”

  “Not a clue.”

  “But it is just that: a clue. I might have missed it except for the repetition. But then it just jumps right out at you!”

  “Does it?” I said. “The two eighteens or the three fives?”

  “For me it was the three fives,” he said. “The fifth letter of the alphabet is . . .” He waited.

  I counted. “The letter e.”

  “So a word with three e’s in it. That’s where it started and stopped for me,” he bragged.

  I was already counting through the alphabet up to eighteen. “R! Eighteen is r.” I pulled a pen from Sherlock’s pocket and wrote on my forearm: _ e _ e r _ _ r e. “No clue,” I said again. “Two words, maybe? A name?”

  He spelled: “N-e-v-e-r-m-o-r-e, dear girl. Nevermore.” He clicked on the file.

  “Did you really figure that out in your head?”

  “I did.”

  “Wicked!”

  “So,” said he, turning to me, “what’s the password?”

  �
�You’re joking.”

  “You know perfectly well what the password is. Or close to it, anyway.”

  “Do I?” I said. “Is everything a competition for you?”

  “Of course! Where’s the fun in it otherwise?”

  “I’m a girl,” I said, as if that explained it. He looked at me curiously.

  “It was only a hunch, mind you,” Sherlock said. “I suppose I should have prefaced my invitation as such. But since you and I do these things together, Moria . . . Well, don’t we? They’re far less fun when done alone. . . . Aren’t they?”

  “Yes. Far less. Absolutely!” I heard my voice crack and regretted trying to speak.

  “Your father, being a smart . . . even brilliant man, left you breadcrumbs to follow, starting with the key in the ashes. Remember, that was intended only for you. He would have left you several paths to follow. No two of us think the same.”

  “He couldn’t have expected I’d find this scan, if that’s what it is.”

  “Oh, that’s what it is. ‘Nevermore’? Are you kidding?” Sherlock said. “But whatever the paths, there had to be commonality.”

  “I’m sooooo confused.”

  “The file is named ‘nevermore.’ Thus a connection to the hidden space in the desk. The password is . . . ?”

  “Just quit it, would you?”

  “First Timothy six-ten. The scripture selection.”

  He typed in Timothy6:10 for the password.

  INVALID ENTRY

  “First Timothy,” I said.

  Sherlock tried 1Timothy6:10.

  INVALID ENTRY

  1Timothy610

  INVALID ENTRY

  “Father liked acronyms,” I said. “Try—”

  Before I could complete my thought, he typed 1T610.

  INVALID ENTRY

  1T6:10.

  The screen refreshed.

  I threw my arms around his neck from behind and kissed him somewhere in his head of hair. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “It’s from 1696,” he said breathlessly. “Good Gatsby.”

  I felt tears push for release and I wasn’t sure why. Sherlock began advancing pages. There was an elaborately drawn family tree beginning with Noah and continuing for several pages. Then, a hand-colored illustration depicting a portly man dressed in a brown tunic with a lace collar, Van Dyke beard, and groomed mustache. He was seated. A ship occupied the upper left corner and there was some Latin to the right of his head. All I could make out was “James Ashlyn Wilford.” The name was familiar to me, I realized. In his left hand he held a cross on a long necklace. In an otherwise dark painting, sunlight burst from the bottom of the cross, casting a rainbow of faded color onto a heavy book in his lap. To his right a globe of the world sat on a dark table.

  “I know him,” I said.

  “From?”

  “I’ve seen a painting like this. I’m related to him. He led one of the first trading expeditions into China. I’m pretty sure that’s right. He was nearly killed a bunch of times. One of my great-great-whatever-grandfathers was named after him. My brother, too. He started the trading company. The Moriartys came to run the company by marriage in the mid-1800s. Father explained all this to James and me after Mother . . . left. I don’t remember most of it.”

  The following pages held the Moriarty family tree, with this man’s name at the top. He’d made himself into God with all his descendants following. The branches went on for pages. The surname Wilford became Moriarty, confirming what I remembered. Small, elegantly drawn boxes held names written in delicious calligraphy. James and I were on the second to last of the added pages, blank beneath us.

  Once into Genesis, certain letters were circled by smudged chalk, pencil, or ink.

  “Code,” he whispered reverently.

  “You can’t possibly know that.”

  “I suspect it’s a code of some sort.”

  “You read too many mysteries.”

  “You can never read too many of anything.”

  I laughed. He smiled.

  “Codes, if it is coded, have keys to unlock them. The key for this would have to be something quite old. This Bible has been in your family for hundreds of years. Each generation would have had to be able to find the key in order to decipher it. So it’s something mathematical. Something easily passed along.”

  “Look at the light in the painting,” I said, pointing out a Godlike beam that shone from the end of the cross and onto the book.

  “Never mind how pretty it is,” Sherlock snarled. “Can you think of a date, some number that’s been passed down to you?”

  “The date of the expedition, I suppose. Not that I know it.”

  “Brilliant!” he barked.

  I startled and probably blushed as well.

  He turned back to the illustration. There was no date to be found.

  “Simple enough to research,” he said. “That could easily be it, Moria! Brilliant bit of logic there on your part!”

  “Thank you.” I don’t know why I said it. I bit my lip out of embarrassment.

  “I don’t think we can fill in the pieces without finding that hidden room in your house.”

  “If we find a hidden room in our house. We don’t know if it even exists.”

  “We did the math, Moria. One hundred forty-four square feet. Numbers don’t lie.”

  CHAPTER 19

  LEAVING LUNCH, JAMES HAD A BOUT OF CREEPING flesh, spiders up your sleeves, shiver-and-gulp. He was being watched, just as Crudgeon and Lowry had told him he would be. He spun and looked carefully all around. No one.

  Impossible.

  He passed Eisenower on the common room steps. “Follow me,” James whispered. “When I slap my side, I want you to catch up and tackle me.”

  “What the bells?”

  “The moment I’m down, take off.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “No,” James snapped sarcastically. “I’m making conversation. Get a brain, would you?”

  He took the path leading toward the chapel. Nearing the little church, as he veered onto the lawn, he gently slapped his leg while never breaking stride.

  He heard Ryan coming toward him. Eisenower hit him like a truck.

  James went down hard, banged his head off the ground, and felt dazed. He’d had a plan. What had it been?

  Eisenower let go of him. But not voluntarily. He’d been pulled off, not an easy feat given Eisenower’s solid weight.

  “Hey!” he heard Eisenower complain.

  James rolled over to get a look.

  A thin man in school overalls threw two blows: one to Eisenower’s side, and a second into the boy’s middle. A red-faced Ryan Eisenower woofed out air, staggered back, fell to his knees, got up, and ran off.

  The thin, sinewy intruder pulled James to his feet and over to the east wall of the chapel, out of view of all but the state highway. James reversed their positions at the last second, pushing the man against the chapel’s ivy-covered wall. The man could have easily prevented James from doing so. The fact that he allowed it told James everything he needed to know.

  “The tree grows roots and limbs,” James recited.

  “Of equal reach without and in,” the man said. A Scowerer.

  “You’ve been assigned to protect me.”

  No comment.

  “You, and how many others?”

  No comment.

  “Listen, we both know you’ve sworn some kind of oath to me.”

  “A blood oath, to be sure.”

  TMI, James was thinking. Blood? He couldn’t see the man’s face well under the golf cap, only the shape of a narrow head and pointed jaw of stubbornness.

  “Your name?” James asked.

  “Espiranzo.”

  “I need you to tell me something, Espiranzo. You’re protecting me from the Meirleach?”

  “I’m protecting you from anyone who might try to harm you.”

  “What is it the Meirleach want? What do they really want?” James asked. />
  “We face competition from the Meirleach. It is true. It is not my place to explain this. You must forgive me.”

  “I will not. I want answers, and I’ll have them.” Father had used expressions like that with James when disciplining him. James regurgitated them without thinking. To his total surprise Espiranzo replied immediately.

  “The loss of your father—God rest his soul—allows our enemies a brief moment of opportunity.”

  “Enemies.”

  “Of those we have many.”

  “But me?” James said. “What can they possibly want from a kid?”

  “Your father possessed documents, personal treasure, secrets. History of our society. These materials naturally pass to his successor. You, sir. The firstborn son. It’s possible the Meirleach may believe they can use you to arrive at this information.”

  “You mean torture me or something?” James said. On the boat on the cold Cape Cod morning, James had been told to look for a journal or diary Father might have kept. Lowry had told him it wouldn’t be a computer file, but something more permanent and private. He was to search Father’s bedroom top to bottom, his office, the basement and attic. James wondered if Lowry’s impatience to find the thing had anything to do with the Meirleach.

  “I doubt they would risk that kind of treatment.”

  “Trade me.”

  “Possibly. But no one is going to harm you. I promise you. The boy should not have been allowed to reach you like that. Report me if you want.”

  “No! And I appreciate that. I really do. But what about these materials? Would the Directory know how to get them?” The Directory, a group of ten or twelve, ran the Scowerers. James would someday be the head of the Directory.

  Espiranzo hesitated, taking time to blow into his cupped hands for warmth. “I know nothing of the Directory.”

  “The materials, then.”

  “Like any successful business, our society prizes information. The Meirleach as well. Names. Contacts. Contracts. Alliances. Possessing such information could help advance the cause of the Meirleach, and it would certainly hurt our own.”

  “What about my sister?”

  Espiranzo nodded. “I understand your concern, but it is you who are prized. It is said a record was kept by your family for many generations.”