Keyword Cypher

by E. A. House

  Keyword Cypher

  Treasure Hunters: Book #1

  Written by E. A. House

  Copyright © 2018 by Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.

  Published by EPIC Press™

  PO Box 398166

  Minneapolis, MN 55439

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  International copyrights reserved in all countries.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without

  written permission from the publisher. EPIC Press™ is trademark

  and logo of Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.

  Cover design by Laura Mitchell

  Images for cover art obtained from iStock and Shutterstock

  Edited by Ryan Hume

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: House, E.A., author.

  Title: Keyword cypher/ by E.A. House

  Description: Minneapolis, MN : EPIC Press, 2018 | Series: Treasure hunters; #1

  Summary: Chris Kingsolver is heartbroken when his aunt Elsie dies in a car accident—and shocked to get a coded letter in the mail after her death. Elsie left Chris clues to the location of a lost treasure ship as an inheritance—if he, his cousin Carrie, and their new friend Maddison can find it.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017949807 | ISBN 9781680768763 (lib. bdg.)

  | ISBN 9781680768909 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Adventure stories—Fiction. | Code and cipher stories—Fiction.

  | Family secrets—Fiction. | Treasure troves—Fiction | Young adult fiction.

  Classification: DDC [FIC]—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017949807

  This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

  For Grandpa

  AUNT ELSIE HAD LOVED LEAVING CLUES. WHEN Chris and his cousin Carrie had been small children in need of babysitting, Elsie had done puzzles with them, tried to teach them Morse code, and taught them how to make up secret codes so they could send each other messages that their parents and teachers couldn’t read. Chris had loved this; Carrie had claimed it was an indication of his degenerate nature and then snatched her diary away from him before he could read it. Their aunt had almost always hidden an extra twenty-dollar bill in every Christmas and birthday gift, and on the rare occasions her niece and nephew complained about the way she was always hiding gift cards inside tricky puzzle boxes, she’d argue that figuring it out yourself was much more fun than just getting the present. Then she’d give them a bunch of clues, because Aunt Elsie wasn’t actually sadistic and she did know that not everybody liked puzzles.

  She died in May of 2016, in a hit-and-run that tossed her car into a ditch where it ruptured a fuel line and caught on fire. She was less than a mile from her house. The impact, the coroner said kindly at the inquest that ruled the crash accidental, broke her neck before the explosion, so she wouldn’t have felt a thing. Not like that made anyone feel better. It wasn’t much of a stretch to say that the loss of Elsie Kingsolver devastated the community of Archer’s Grove, a small and mostly touristy island. Elsie Kingsolver had been the archivist at the Edgewater Maritime Archive since her return to the island fifteen years ago, right after the birth of her niece and nephew. She’d been from the area, too. The Kingsolvers went back several generations and had multiple sailors in their family tree.

  Elsie had been the odd one out. Well-behaved shipping and merchant activity was in the family blood, enlivened by youngest sons who ran off to sea to become pirates, although the last documented case had been in the late 1920s. And Great-Uncle Robert had technically disappeared while smuggling moonshine in Kentucky. But the wandering gene usually struck the youngest child of the family, which should have been Robby, Carrie’s father and Chris’s uncle. Instead, he had earned a business degree, married an accountant named Helen, and gone into banking. His older brother Brian was a pharmacist. It had been Elsie, the eldest child and only girl, who went slightly off-kilter, devoting her life to history and old paper. And it was in this that she had excelled. A born teacher and a natural parent despite having no children of her own, she gave presentations on the archival collection of shipping charters that actually drew crowds, volunteered at the local historical society, and did programs with the local schools where she dressed up as a pirate and led a treasure hunt. Her funeral was packed with mourners.

  Chris and Carrie read a poem about “slipping the surely bounds of earth” together, Carrie crying quietly and Chris staring fixedly out into the crowd, counting somber black-clad neighbors to keep himself from breaking down. It didn’t help much. Carrie later suggested that picturing everyone in his or her underwear might have been a better idea but Chris thought that that would have been disrespectful. And he also came away confused by the number of people at the funeral that he didn’t recognize. The funeral was held on an unfairly pleasant day, with a cloudless blue sky beaming down on the casket and a gentle breeze rustling the funeral flowers. All sorts of people had known and loved Aunt Elsie, so extended family, colleagues from grad school, and even the entire history department from the local college had come to pay their respects. So it was silly for Chris to expect to know everyone at the funeral. But a scattering of people in attendance were, quite frankly, sketchy looking.

  There was a broad-shouldered man wearing sunglasses and lurking in the back of the crowd, wearing gloves on a warm, sunny day. There was a dark-haired family clustered under a willow tree, also all wearing sunglasses, the daughter squashed between her parents. She was clearly the same age as Chris, but not someone he’d ever seen at school. And when Chris walked back to the gravesite to fetch an aunt’s purse, he found a tall man with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up over a baseball cap standing in front of the very new grave. His silhouette was just the tiniest bit familiar. Chris actually called out to him, but the man tucked a bouquet of lilies into the already overflowing offerings of flowers and walked away without responding, head down and hands in his pockets. His eyes were shaded by a pair of aviator sunglasses. In fact, Chris decided, there were an awful lot of people wearing sunglasses at Elsie’s funeral.

  “Maybe because it’s a sunny day?” Carrie suggested when Chris pointed this out to her at the wake. She was normally pretty pale, a side effect of having inherited the redhead gene from the Kingsolver side of the family, but today she was translucent and there were tear tracks on her cheeks. She had not, however, turned red with crying the way her brown-haired but very freckly cousin had. It was widely agreed that Elsie was—Elsie had been—particularly fond of Chris, who shared her interests and her free spirit, but Chris knew probably better than anyone else that Carrie had also had a special bond with their aunt. Aunt Elsie had delighted in Carrie’s quick mind and undeniable skill at logic and puzzles, if despairing at her niece’s stubborn refusal to be whimsical or suspend her disbelief for the fun of it.

  “There are an awful lot of people wearing sunglasses and acting sketchy at this funeral,” Chris said to clarify, and wasn’t surprised when Carrie raised a skeptical eyebrow at him.

  “Grief makes people do weird things, Chris,” she pointed out. Since she normally didn’t like chocolate but was currently eating her way through an entire platter of brownies, Chris couldn’t possibly dispute this, but he did think Carrie was missing the point, which was that—

  “Don’t you dare tell me that the men in black are responsible for Aunt Elsie’s death,” Carrie said suddenly, her voice hitching on their aunt’s name, and Chris swallowed his words, which had been to the effect that someone was behind Aunt Elsie’s death. Possibly the Unabomber. “It’s bad enough that—” She put her brownie down and swallowed.

  “She shouldn’t have died,” Chris said miserably. “An
d she shouldn’t have been killed by some jerk who didn’t stop, and we should have been able to figure out who did it.”

  Which was what hurt the worst. True, someone was responsible for the car crash, but in the sense of having made a terrible mistake and then fleeing like a coward, which left the Kingsolver family with no closure. Not a fitting end to the life of a woman who had reasons for everything, even—one usually discovered later—her sudden whims. For example, Aunt Elsie had once suddenly decided to take her niece and nephew to Mexico over spring break. This had necessitated much rushing around in order to get Chris a passport, and the trip was widely regarded as final proof that Elsie had completely lost her marbles. But when Chris’s dad surprised his wife with a trip to her beloved Ireland later that summer, he was able to keep it a secret up to the moment they got to the airport because the whole family, including Chris, had up-to-date passports. Aunt Elsie was proven both right and psychic.

  That someone who loved leaving clues wherever she went had left no clues as to how she died made it so very hard to lay her to rest. It hurt, but even worse, it was out of character. Chris didn’t think he was the only person who had somehow expected Aunt Elsie to either live forever or die in a way that was exceptionally well planned.

  The letter arrived in the mail three days after the funeral.

  Chris was supposed to sort the family mail when it came in but he did so irregularly, which had occasionally resulted in overdue bills. Once he had even racked up a library fine of fifty dollars and seventy-five cents by not noticing the mailed overdue notice. It had been a book on money management, an irony that Carrie had never quite forgiven him for and intended never to let him forget. Chris really spent more time in trouble for forgetting to sort the mail than he did actually sorting it. But in the wake of the funeral his parents had been less inclined to scold and more inclined to let things slide, and so it was five days after the funeral, when he couldn’t deal with wondering why Aunt Elsie had died or who the people in sunglasses were at the funeral or what the girl he didn’t recognize was doing there, that Chris decided he had to do something and so actually did his chores.

  School was not a distraction. School had ended the day after the funeral on a vaguely menacing note for Chris and Carrie, both sixteen-year-old rising juniors: the summer reading assignment had been three pages long, and had been dispensed with strict instruction to “skimp reading at your own peril.” Then there had been a class assembly in which the soon-to-be juniors were informed by the guidance counselor that they needed to start seriously thinking about their future plans, especially college admissions. This was good advice, and advice that Carrie had taken with something approaching panic, judging by how many admission applications she had already filled out. But Chris already had enough to worry about. And Mrs. Melliflure, the guidance counselor for the junior and senior classes, had spent so many of the past months dealing with panicked, last-minute college admissions that she had developed her end-of-year twitch, scaring students away rather than encouraging them to fill out applications. Not yet ready to face the stress of college admissions and not yet ready to go out and get a summer job, Chris had nothing to do at all but think, yet wanted more than anything to avoid doing so. Thus the mail sorting.

  “Bill,” Chris muttered to himself, sifting through a large and slightly damp stack of mail, “bill, bill—should have cleaned the mailbox out after that storm two weeks ago—National Geographic, letter from Grandma, letter from Aunt Elsie—”

  Chris stopped, turned the letter over, and stared at it. Aunt Elsie had not been one of those people who refused to deal with computers, but she’d been very fond of sending letters to her friends and family, usually full of fun facts, amusing anecdotes, and clipped-out cartoons. The letter now trembling between his fingers looked no different from any of the other letters Aunt Elsie had sent him, right down to the return address, and had been tucked into the newspaper dated the day before the funeral. It was, in short, a letter from beyond the grave.

  Or, as Chris realized when he peeled the envelope open in the privacy of his bedroom and actually read the letter, a perfectly ordinary letter from Aunt Elsie. In swooping blue cursive—her youngest brother hated blue-inked pens with a passion, and Aunt Elsie had used exclusively blue ballpoint since the eighth grade in joking retaliation for That One Time Brian Stole My Chocolate Bar—she talked about her plans for the summer library program, asked if Chris would be interested in dressing up as Captain Hook, and described the mathematical formula for determining the probability of intelligent life in the universe. She’d drawn an apologetic mosquito in the corner of the letter, looking guilty for biting people, and had taped a cartoon of an elephant tap-dancing to the back. And then at the very end she’d added a non sequitur:

  p.s. when you do the Christmas cards start with me.

  “Aunt Elsie, what are you trying to tell me?” Chris asked the letter. Being a piece of paper it didn’t say anything. Then the door to his bedroom flew open and he yelped and threw the letter under the bed. He needn’t have, it was only his mom.

  “Chris, honey,” she said, holding up the dampest of the bills by one corner, “did you start sorting the mail and then get distracted?”

  “I—yeah,” Chris said. “Sorry, Mom.”

  “Well, I’d like you to finish it at some point,” his mom said. “And then go find a clean dress shirt, one of the letters in the pile was from your aunt’s lawyer. We need to go start settling her estate tomorrow.”

  The instant she left, Chris scrambled under the bed and fished out the letter, along with a surprising number of socks plus one of his dress shirts—very crumpled—and settled down to think. Chris never did the Christmas cards. One year he had taken two ordinary store-bought Christmas cards, cut the embossed cover off one, glued it to the cover of the other with his gift to Carrie sealed inside, and then apologetically told Carrie he hadn’t been able to find her anything but the card. His parents had been irritated, Aunt Elsie had been amused and delighted, and Carrie had found the gift cards hidden inside unfairly quickly, considering how little she approved of gag gifts. But the Great Gift Card Debacle, as it was commonly referred to, made Chris the last person anyone let near the Christmas cards. If Aunt Elsie pretended to assume he was in charge of writing them, then she clearly meant him to see it as a clue. But a clue to what?

  Chris was still puzzling over the letter the next day, while avoiding his mother’s wrath—he hadn’t tried to outgrow his best shirt and tie—and wondering how long it would be before she tried to make him apply for a summer job again. The afternoon was spent in the conference room of Aunt Elsie’s lawyer’s office, with the Kingsolver family squeezed around a table, fidgeting. But then, halfway through a tedious discussion of who was to sort out what part of the money Aunt Elsie had left to everyone, Chris realized that Aunt Elsie’s lawyer might have known about the letter. Aunt Elsie’s lawyer was Mr. Protheridge, who was a small bald man with impressively bat-like ears. He wore a tweed vest and a watch chain with such determination that he made the outfit work, and when Chris pounced on him as his parents and aunt and uncle started discussing the terms of the will, Protheridge blinked and nodded.

  “Ah, yes, the letter,” he said, shuffling papers. “Elsie had that arranged well in advance.”

  Across the room, Carrie looked up sharply from where she was studying the locket Aunt Elsie had left her, and then refused to meet Chris’s eyes.

  “So, when did she actually write it?” Chris asked.

  “Well, presumably sometime the week before she passed,” Mr. Protheridge said, and when he spotted Chris’s confused look, he continued, “Elsie asked me to mail a letter to the address she specified in the event of her death when she first wrote up her will several years ago. But to be honest I thought it was a provision she’d forgotten about. She didn’t give me a letter to mail until the week before last.”

  “Did she say why?” Chris asked.

  “Not to me,” Mr. Protherid
ge said kindly. “She just dropped by quite late one night, reminded me about the provision she’d made for mailing a letter in the event of her death, and handed over a letter. It was addressed to you. I assume you received it?”

  Chris, suddenly aware of being in a public space with any number of ears about, mumbled something noncommittal and fled from the kindly and now confused lawyer, to sit in the car until the rest of his family wandered out of the office.

  “Aunt Elsie was trying to tell us something before she died,” Chris said to Carrie later that evening. They were sitting on opposite ends of the sofa in Carrie’s living room, not really watching a home-improvement show and listening to the faint sound of their parents talking together outside in the backyard.

  Carrie mumbled noncommittally and flipped the page of her magazine. She was turning the locket—it was brass, engraved to look like a compass and with a picture of a ship in full sail on the inside—over and over on its chain. It had been the one material thing Aunt Elsie left to Carrie.

  “You don’t think there’s something really wrong with how she died?” Chris asked. “And then she left me that letter right before her death? And when has Aunt Elsie ever done something that wasn’t secretly a puzzle?” Carrie shot him an evil look and deliberately turned up the volume on the television. They sat together in silence, the tension thicker than the humidity they were inside trying to escape.

  “Carrie!” Chris finally snapped when he couldn’t take it anymore. She looked up from her magazine with a wild-eyed expression that would have been a warning if Chris hadn’t been so angry. “What’s the matter with you? Do you even care?”

  Carrie was widely and justly considered the calmest and most sensible Kingsolver child, so the fact that she hurled the magazine to the floor with enough violence to rattle the coffee table and then went directly to screamingly angry was a shock to Chris. “Of course I care!” she howled, “but unlike you Aunt Elsie didn’t leave me a stupid letter! Everyone’s all ‘oh, Carrie’s the sweet, sensible one, we’ll let her do all the memorial stuff while we let stupid slacker Chris mourn in peace because he was’”—she made violent air quotes—“‘so close to his aunt. It’s not like Elsie even liked Carrie.’” She was now crying. “And it’s not like I can think there’s something wrong with the police report either because that’s Chris’s area of insanity and I’ve got to be totally fine! I’m the mature one! So take your letter and go—go choke on it!”