by E. A. House
And before Chris could say anything at all, she had fled the living room and slammed the door of her bedroom so hard paint chips fell off the doorframe.
She did not come out of her room for the rest of the night, even when her mom poked her head in and asked if she wanted any caramel ice cream, and Carrie loved caramel ice cream as much as she generally hated chocolate. Chris was forced to sit at the kitchen table, and eat ice cream, and to talk politely about his summer plans to his aunts and uncles all by himself. It was exhausting, and stressful, and Carrie’s outburst had hit a couple of sore spots—Chris knew he wasn’t as responsible as Carrie was, but he wasn’t a complete slacker—and all in all he was very relieved when his parents decided it was time to walk the three houses down the street to their own house.
“You were a good sport today,” his dad said as they were collecting shoes in the living room in preparation for leaving. “I know it must have been hard.”
Chris shrugged. His anger had faded, and guilt was now creeping in to replace it, squeezing into the spaces not yet filled with grief. “I didn’t mean to fight with Carrie,” he said.
“I know, kiddo,” his dad said gently. “Carrie didn’t mean to fight with you either—she’s having as much trouble as you are with this but you let yourself be upset and she hasn’t yet.”
“I didn’t mean to—” Chris started, and then jumped a mile when Carrie yelled,
“You never mean to do anything!” from her bedroom. He’d forgotten it was just down the hall from the living room.
“I still think there’s something up with the letter,” Chris said to the shut door in question, his stubborn conviction that there was a mystery here warring with guilt for dragging Carrie into something she didn’t want to do while she was grieving, and with the knowledge that he should really leave Carrie alone until she cooled off.
“Well then,” Carrie snarled, “why don’t you just figure it out?”
AND SO CHRIS TRIED. HE GOT UP THE NEXT MORNing and sat down at his desk with the letter and decided, then and there, that he would find the hidden message if it killed him. He looked at the letter in sunlight and bathed it in lemon juice to see if either method revealed something written in invisible ink. He tried every letter substitution he knew and a few he made up on the spot, and finally he gave up, threw the letter into the trash can, and said, more or less to himself and the desk lamp, “This is impossible.”
“Nah, just wildly improbable,” Carrie said, directly and unexpectedly behind him, and Chris gave an undignified yelp and jumped a foot in the air.
“Where did you come from?” he asked.
Carrie sighed. “I came in through the front door,” she said patiently, rummaging the letter out of the trash, “like a sane person? I’m here to help with the letter.”
“I’m pretty sure I read too much into it,” Chris mumbled, feeling uncomfortably guilty. It was one thing to decide that Aunt Elsie had left him a coded message in her last letter and waste all his time looking for it, but dragging Carrie into a quest that was likely a coping method wasn’t fair to her. She was probably—Chris could even admit to himself—having a harder time of it, since there hadn’t even been a goodbye letter for her and he’d kind of held that over her head and now he was still making a fuss over Aunt Elsie paying special attention to him even after her death and—
“Did you check for invisible ink?” Carrie asked suddenly. Apparently sometime between slamming the door in his face last night and turning up in his house this morning she’d decided their fight didn’t matter.
“Yeah, got zip,” Chris said. “And she always sent us invisible ink letters on blue paper anyway.”
“I know,” Carrie said, with something in her voice that made Chris sit up and realize she was holding the envelope, not the letter. “And did you notice what color the envelope was?”
The envelope was blue. A familiar, pretty awful shade of blue that Chris and Carrie had both loved as children and subsequently grown out of, but more importantly the exact shade of blue that Aunt Elsie had regularly used for invisible ink letters. Chris scrambled up the sponge and some lemon juice and swiped a corner, and joined Carrie in a delighted “Yes!” when a thin line of Aunt Elsie’s neat capital letters appeared. Then they both drooped again.
“And it’s also in a code,” Carrie said as they looked at the envelope.
“Now do you agree that this is impossible?” Chris asked, re-reading the letter for the fortieth time, and was surprised when Carrie shook her head.
“No. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but your wrongful death theory is actually starting to make sense if Aunt Elsie went to this much trouble to hide a message in a letter to the family slacker.”
“Start with me,” Chris said to himself, actually managing to ignore Carrie’s traditional jab. “She left me one obvious clue, and that was ‘p.s. when you do the Christmas cards, start with me,’ so what does she—hey, wait!”
“Not actually going anywhere,” Carrie said, picking up the pad of scratch paper covered in previous attempts to work out substitutions and frowning thoughtfully at it. Chris, who had just had a revelation, made desperate grabby hands at it.
“Do you remember how Aunt Elsie started teaching us codes when we were six?”
“Start by reversing the alphabet, and then—oh!” Carrie said. Aunt Elsie had taught them fun with codes by showing them the reverse alphabet one, and then how you could substitute any letter for any other letter as long as you kept it consistent or had a key.
The first thing they’d ever done was use C for A, since both their names started with a C. And if you started with ELSI and left off the second E, so you didn’t repeat letters for ABCD . . . “‘Dear Chris,’” Chris read, “‘smart boy, if you are reading this then I am dead.’”
Chris stopped and looked up at Carrie. She was wide eyed, and without Chris asking, she quietly went over and closed his bedroom door.
“‘So you and Carrie need to do me a favor,’” Chris continued, reading from the page. “‘In my office at work there is a floorboard with a burn mark. I hid a box under that floorboard, and I need you two to find that box and look at what I put inside. Remember that I love both of you. Start with me.’”
“Okay,” Carrie said. “I—actually I kind of suspected something like this?”
“You suspected Aunt Elsie of . . . of secret Indiana Jones adventures?” Chris asked. Honestly he’d often suspected Aunt Elsie of having secret Indiana Jones-style adventures, but he’d always had enough self-respect not to tell Carrie.
“No,” Carrie said, “but out of everyone we know, who is—was most likely to discover a secret someone might kill for?”
“Aunt Elsie,” Chris admitted. “Do you think we should tell our parents?”
Carrie hissed. “Ehhh . . . no?”
“Carrie!”
“I’m not sure they’d believe us,” Carrie admitted. “I’m not sure I believe us, but I’m really suspicious and my grief is making me do risky things.”
“Okay . . . ” Chris said. “Then what do you think we should do?”
Carrie looked at her watch and groaned. “Well, I’m about to be late. I promised Mrs. Hadler I’d help sort files in the school office today, so—talk about it more tonight?”
“You could skip?” Chris suggested, and then quailed under the death glare Carrie gave him in response. Mrs. Hadler was the school secretary and Carrie had been her office aide during a study hall. Mrs. Hadler was also the most terrifying secretary Chris had ever laid eyes on, so turning up tardy when you’d promised to help her out was out of the question, even if she did by some fluke of nature actually like you.
Mrs. Hadler actually liked Carrie. In fact, she liked Carrie enough that when the school district told Mrs. Hadler to digitize the school’s student records before the start of the next school year, Mrs. Hadler offered Carrie a summer job sorting student files and then entering the data. Aunt Elsie had raised an eyebrow at this part-t
ime summer job because of the gigantic confidentiality issues it raised, and then sighed and told Carrie to be very careful not to do anything that could be considered an invasion of privacy, nor to believe everything she found in the files. The incident her junior year involving the VW Bug and the high school chess team, Aunt Elsie had added, was a fluke in her otherwise flawless record, no matter what Carrie’s father or the guidance counselor’s files said. Chris’s mom had made several pointed comments about how at least Carrie had a summer job, and Chris was still holding out a faint hope she’d drop the subject of him getting one.
“Okay!” Chris said as Carrie scrambled her scattered purse together. “Go help Mrs. Hadler, and I’ll do something productive while waiting.”
“Yeah,” Carrie said distractedly, slinging her bag over her shoulder, but then she stopped halfway out the door, turned fully around to face Chris, and actually pointed a finger at him. “But don’t do anything stupid,” she said.
Since in Chris’s experience Carrie usually preferred to let him do something stupid and then look horrified at the result, she was clearly worried. So in an effort to show that he was taking the whole situation seriously, Chris went out of his way to do things around the house that weren’t stupid. He started by finishing up the mail sorting and then cleaned his room, in the process finding an incredible number of ballpoint pens that did not work, fifteen dollars in spare change, and far too many hair bands considering he didn’t have long hair. These he collected in a cup on his desk in case Carrie wanted them back. Then he went to answer the ringing house phone, which turned out to be the library, calling about the overdue books, and flicked the hairbands all over the living room while reassuring the librarian that he would find that copy of The Kon-Tiki Expedition. Somewhere. Then he did a load of laundry, lost his patience, and was in the process of heading out the door to start tearing up floorboards at the Edgewater Archive when it occurred to him that this was exactly what Carrie was afraid he’d do.
“Okay,” Chris said to himself, “something not stupid.” Well, Carrie could hardly object to his looking up the hours of operation for the Archive, along with any available floor plans and maybe some Google Maps images of the back door, because Chris and Carrie were too used to visiting the Archive whenever they wanted and being let in by their aunt, who’d had a key. And it was possible—and possibly probable—that in this case they might need to break into the Archive under the cover of darkness to pull up the floorboards.
The small part of Chris’s mind known as his common sense pointed out, in a voice that sounded a lot like Carrie’s, that they might do better to just walk in the door and say they wanted to clear out Aunt Elsie’s office for their parents. Chris sighed to himself, consigned the visions of cat burglary to his overactive imagination, and pulled up the Edgewater Maritime Archive’s webpage.
As its name was intended to suggest, the Edgewater Maritime Archive was a small institution devoted to preserving the documentation of Florida’s seafaring past. And according to the Archive’s mission statement proudly displayed over an artfully taken picture of the front doors:
THE EDGEWATER ARCHIVE FOCUSES ON COLLECTING BOOKS, PAPERS, CHARTS, AND MAPS THAT ARE ABOUT OR BY THE EARLY EXPLORERS AND SETTLERS OF FLORIDA’S COASTS, AND IS ESPECIALLY PROUD OF ITS COLLECTION OF SPANISH MISSION CHURCH DOCUMENTS AND SMALL BUT WELL-SELECTED COLLECTION OF SHIPWRECK ARTIFACTS AND RELATED DOCUMENTS.
Chris had read that blurb off the website, his aunt’s paperwork, and even the Archive’s front doors so often he had it memorized, but seeing the familiar words and knowing that the institution had lost his aunt hurt. In fact, a lot of the research Chris set out to do about the Archive was unexpectedly painful.
The first and most painful thing was the scrolling banner, which was still displaying Aunt Elsie’s “Lost Ships of the 1717 Fleet” web exhibit. It was intended to be the first part of a much larger exhibit on Florida’s lost and buried treasure, and Aunt Elsie had been in her element searching out gold and silver coins, fragments of ships’ hulls, letters and journals from long-ago mariners, and paintings of various shipwrecks.
The 1717 Fleet had been her jumping-off point for the exhibit, because persistent rumors suggested that Archer’s Grove might have been the end of the line for one of the still-lost and thus still-full-of-gold treasure ships of the fleet. Aunt Elsie had been swamped with research for the past four months, and the very last time Chris had spent the night at his aunt’s house he’d spent the morning getting an impromptu history lesson about Spanish treasure ships.
This was because Chris’s parents had been square dancing competitively since college. They’d met at a dance, which made significantly more sense to people when Chris explained that his father had gone to school in Iowa on an excellent scholarship. But this meant, in turn, that the Kingsolvers were sometimes out of town on the weekends for square-dancing competitions, and although they really had no problem with Chris staying home alone, he generally just spent the night at his aunt’s. In fact, Chris’s dad was of the opinion that Chris was safer home alone than in his sister’s obviously haunted house. This was probably why Aunt Elsie had left her house to him, to be kept for Chris when he turned twenty-one. Aunt Elsie had a suspect sense of humor.
But leaving aside the question of whether the old Georgian mansion was haunted, the history of the 1717 Fleet had been explained to Chris when he wandered downstairs that Saturday morning a few months ago and found Aunt Elsie eating carrot muffins and taking notes from three books at once.
“So,” she’d said when he hit the last step, which moaned at the slightest pressure and was probably where the ghost stories came from, “want to hear about another lost opportunity for a Hollywood blockbuster?”
Chris had agreed, and Aunt Elsie had flicked a few pages and begun.
“In the year 1717, following several years of blocked shipping between the Americas and Europe, a fleet of Spanish galleons congregated in Cuba for the trip to Spain. They numbered either twelve or thirteen, depending on the account, and were loaded with precious metals, mainly silver and gold in coin form—honest-to-goodness pieces of eight and something called cobs—along with silverware and Chinese porcelain, and the massive dowry of the Princess Annamarie, all of that loaded aboard the still-lost San Telmo. They say,” she added, “that the princess’s dowry was six times that of any previous dowry, and that it included not only several famously fine-wrought golden crowns but also an emerald the size and shape of a goose egg and a dagger studded with diamonds. Anyway, the fleet was en route to Spain in July of 1717 when, having been delayed into hurricane season by the necessity of waiting for merchants to stuff the ships with treasure and for the last pieces of the princess’s dowry to turn up—” Aunt Elsie made an ‘as you do’ gesture with both her hands “—it encountered a hurricane and sank near the Florida coast. Recovery of the vast amount of gold and silver the ships were carrying began immediately, but salvage, treasure hunting, pirates, and uncertainty over just where some of the ships sank hindered the search, and today there are still ships left unaccounted for and coins from the wreck washing up on Florida beaches.”
Aunt Elsie had shuffled her papers importantly, and grinned at Chris. It was her “take that, Indiana Jones” grin, and usually indicated that she was about to make life very interesting for everyone around her.
“The plan,” Aunt Elsie had added, “is for a web exhibit showcasing the letters we have from some Spanish sailors after the fact, and then, if I can cajole certain museums, for a bigger in-house exhibit using some artifacts, and maybe an extra exhibit on the long lost San Telmo.”
“Sooo, do we have a new summer project?” Chris had asked. He’d been poking through Aunt Elsie’s selection of muffins at the time, and so hadn’t been looking at her face. But if he remembered correctly, there had been just the tiniest hesitation, just enough to make Chris look up to see if Aunt Elsie had heard him, before she’d hummed and shaken her head.
“You would need a
very good, very new lead to go looking for the San Telmo,” she’d said, cutting a muffin in half. “Or some advancements in search technology. Neither of which I see happening, so we’re just gonna have to spend the summer keeping Carrie from getting at our sealed student records.”
“Shoot,” Chris had said, and there the matter had rested. He hadn’t known, then, that the web exhibit would be the very last exhibit Aunt Elsie did for the museum.
She had already put together a map, several short videos, a narrative of the history of the 1717 Fleet, a picture gallery that advertised the Archive’s collection of first-hand accounts of the aftermath of the wreck and its excellent, if tiny, collection of gold and silver coins, and had been in the final stages of preparation for the physical exhibit when she’d died. Someone had added a discreet memorial link to Aunt Elsie’s staff page below the watercolor of “An artist’s rendition of the San Telmo mid-catastrophe.” After sparing a moment to wonder, as he always did, if the San Telmo really had a prow carved to look like an octopus, Chris followed the link. He grinned at the picture in which Aunt Elsie was wearing her famous historically inaccurate pirate hat and was about to go back to looking for a plan of the building when something on the staff page caught his eye.
The ‘House Archivist’ position was already filled. She’d been gone for two weeks, and already the board had hired somebody to fill her position? Really? They’d hired a somebody named Kevin McRae, in fact—no picture yet—just a two-sentence blurb about how he was “looking forward to preserving and sharing the treasures of our Florida history.” Feeling both justifiably angry and a little unnerved—because surely you didn’t usually fill an archivist position this fast—Chris re-read the tiny blurb, checked the staff directory to see if they had a picture somewhere else, and finally, when that yielded nothing, turned to Google. When Carrie came by at around five in the evening he was trying and failing to find Kevin McRae on Facebook and LinkedIn, and so involved was he in his futile search that Carrie managed to sneak up on him again.