Keyword Cypher

by E. A. House

  “Chris,” Carrie said, “this is Maddison, she’s new in town and she’s been working in the office with me. Her dad’s the new archivist at Edgewater.”

  The world didn’t exactly stutter to a halt, but Chris felt as though his stomach switched dimensions for a second.

  “Oh,” he said, uncomfortably aware that his voice started out an octave higher than normal and then took a swan dive. “Dr. McRae?”

  “He’s my dad,” Maddison agreed wryly, with a self-deprecating sweep of her hands. “Maddison McRae, at your service. I’m shamelessly exploiting your cousin’s good nature.”

  “It’s apparently hard to make friends in a new area when school is closed for the summer,” Carrie said. “I mean, unless you want to become best buddies with Mrs. Hadler—”

  “I like her,” Maddison said, chewing on the strap on her sunglasses. “She’s fierce.”

  “And terrifying,” Chris added, still trying to deal with the dizzy heat haze that was swimming in his vision whenever he looked at Maddison. She was just so incredibly pretty. And funny, even though he’d only known her for a few minutes. And—oh no . . .

  Carrie, blissfully unaware of her cousin’s sudden revelation that he had a crush on the daughter of the villain of the piece, added to his mortification by saying, “Well, if you’re Chris, Mrs. Hadler’s the devil walking among us. He tried to pass off a fake absence note in third grade and she caught him.”

  “Carrie,” Chris protested, because it had been years and nobody in the family would let him live that down. Also now Maddison was looking at him.

  It wasn’t as though Chris had never had a crush on someone before; he’d pined for Lindsey Ipcress from first grade all the way through eighth, when her family suddenly moved to Wisconsin over winter break. And he’d actually asked Nancy Brewer to the spring formal last year. It was just that something in his head bounced up on springs when he saw Maddison, and he felt that he wanted nothing more than to talk to her forever but also that he’d melt into a puddle if she looked at him too long.

  “Oh my gosh, what happened?” Maddison asked, turning all the way around in her seat to stare at him. Chris tried furiously to be cool and not melt, because it felt like he had a giant neon “I Have a Crush on You” sign flashing over his head. “Did she turn into her secret dragon form and eat you?”

  “She . . . called my parents, and I got detention, and then she graded my technique and execution,” Chris said, forcing himself to meet Maddison’s eyes and not blush too much. Maybe he should be thankful they were talking about something embarrassing, it gave him an excuse to turn red.

  “Also,” Carrie said, “she told him he had a great future ahead of him as a counterfeiter. Chris always leaves that part out to garner more sympathy.”

  “Good for you,” Maddison said. “Counterfeiting’s a useful skill, not that I would know or anything.”

  “Heh,” Chris managed. “Me neither. One try, and then I was scared straight!” Then he realized that he had just insulted her compliment, unless she’d meant it ironically, which he couldn’t tell, and—oh this was a disaster.

  “Ah-hem,” Carrie added, making both Chris and Maddison jump, and realize that she was already leaning against the side of the car. Which she had parked in the parking lot of the movie theater at some point while Chris was shooting himself in the foot. “We’re here, by the way,” Carrie said, unfairly amused. Then she opened the door for Maddison while Chris was still fumbling with his seatbelt.

  The movie, presumably picked by Carrie because it was conveniently playing just after she and Maddison got off work—she appeared to want to make friends—was called Space Nazis at Roswell. Almost the only good thing about the movie was the convenient timing. It was a movie about Nazis fighting aliens in the 1950s in New Mexico and there were a dozen confusing plot holes and a strangely violent subplot involving llamas. And all but one of the main characters died in the third act, preceding the unexpected reveal that the nuclear launch codes had in fact been stolen by Sasquatch.

  Chris was particularly confused because there had been no mention of a Sasquatch in the movie until the last act, although Maddison had innocently parked herself in the seat beside him and asked if he wanted some of her popcorn and his sudden crush had made concentration so difficult he could well have missed it.

  “Actually,” Maddison said when he brought the subject up over pizza in Carrie’s living room—the unexpected Sasquatch, not the unexpected crush—because Carrie invited Maddison over for takeout and Chris was suffering for conversation topics, “when they find the footage of Fritz sneaking into the bunker it’s shot like the Patterson tape.”

  “The what?”

  “Most famous film footage of Bigfoot,” Maddison said, gesturing with a slice. Seeing Carrie’s quizzical look she shrugged and added, “It’s cryptozoology and folklore, I think it’s fun. You can find it weird if you want.”

  “Believe me, we’re both a lot weirder,” Chris said, googling the Patterson tape. “Wow, this is shaky—oh, I see what you mean.”

  “It looks like a person in a gorilla suit,” Carrie said, peering over his shoulder.

  “Many people agree with you,” Maddison said gravely through a mouthful of pizza.

  “Anyway, Bigfoot? Aliens?” Carrie asked.

  “You caught that,” Maddison said.

  “I guessed,” Carrie admitted. “Nobody mutters about ‘grays don’t do that’ and ‘that is not the hollow earth theory’ unless they know a little something about aliens.”

  “Yeah,” Maddison sighed, poking her pizza to avoid looking at them. “It’s just a hobby. I’m the kid of a history professor and an art gallery manager. Developing an interest in the otherworldly was self-defense. It keeps people from trying to talk to me at regional history conferences.” Chris manfully suppressed an irritated look at the mention of Maddison’s father but apparently wasn’t fast enough, because Maddison saw him and blew out another sigh.

  “See, there’s my dad, making things complicated again.”

  “It really wasn’t—” Chris started.

  “It’s not your dad,” Carrie said. “It’s that he took our aunt’s job so suddenly . . . ”

  “I know,” Maddison said. “I don’t know why he did, either. I mean, they’d asked him if he would think of coming in and consulting occasionally on this lost mission in a national park project—he teaches American history but his specialty was early Spanish colonization of the Americas—and he said no like three times, but then they gave him first priority when the whole post was open and he took it.”

  “Was the pay better?” Chris asked.

  “I think it’s the same,” Maddison said. “He bounced around a bit when I was little so he didn’t have tenure, and it wasn’t a locked-in position or anything, but Mom runs an art gallery and we aren’t desperate for money. Dad just came home one evening and said ‘we’re moving.’ It’s been weird.”

  “Tell me about it,” Chris said.

  “Oh,” Maddison said. “I’m so sorry, that was rude, me complaining about having to move.”

  “It really isn’t your fault,” Carrie said. “It was an accident, and you’ve been more than kind, and the strange things our parents do shouldn’t reflect on us.”

  “I hope so,” Maddison said. “Dad’s been acting squirrely. And he insisted we go to your aunt’s funeral, did you notice?”

  “I thought I recognized you,” Chris admitted.

  “Our moving truck hadn’t even made it to the house yet,” Maddison said. “Mom and I had to stop at a department store just to get something black to wear, but Dad insisted that we go. He claims it was only respectful, but I just think it was tasteless, and I know it made Mom furious. Plus, when the moving truck did get to the house we were at the funeral, and all the basement boxes ended up in the attic.” She paused. “Did your aunt, I don’t know . . . know any Kevin McRaes?”

  “Not that I know of,” Chris said. “The name isn’t at all
familiar.”

  “Huh,” Maddison said.

  “Did your dad know any Elsie Kingsolvers?” Chris asked.

  “No,” Maddison said. “I think I’d remember a name like Kingsolver. I just wondered—I mean, if they had known each other and then had a falling out—it might explain something?”

  “As far as I know there’s nothing,” Chris said. Carrie was spinning the ring on her finger to avoid looking at either Maddison or Chris, but for what reason Chris didn’t know.

  “It’s a mystery,” she said finally, looking up and breaking the slowly gathering tension as she did so. “So! Maddison—how do you like the neighborhood?”

  It was a transparent attempt to change the subject but Maddison seized it.

  “Well, the first and only local event I’ve been to was a funeral,” she said, but she was smiling a little. “There don’t seem to be many kids my own age around, and my Dad is going around muttering about sixteenth-century charters.”

  “That’s more or less to be expected,” Carrie said, getting up and gathering the now-empty pizza box and the discarded paper plates. “Almost everyone we know is either on vacation or away at camp right now, in order to avoid the tourists.”

  “Or helping their cousin work a lobster boat in Maine,” Chris grumbled, and Carrie whacked him on the head with the pizza box.

  “Who’s lobstering?” Maddison asked.

  “Chris’s best friend Jacob,” Carrie said. “And my friend Sadie. We’ve both been left for a lobster, or in my case a chance to get loads of practice piloting a boat. It’s just me and Chris until the last week of July.”

  “Can I join you?” Maddison asked. “Otherwise I’ll spend the whole summer reading books about local ghosts and trying to research the Bermuda Triangle. And looking forward to the weekly Bigfoot documentaries on TV.”

  Chris gave Carrie a meaningful look, because she was perpetually leaving Bigfoot documentaries on in the background, but Carrie just ignored him.

  “Sure,” she said. “Although I should warn you we were basically going to watch a show about finding ghosts and argue about it all day Sunday.”

  Chris and Carrie had a very strange relationship with television shows about “experts” hunting mythological creatures or doing overly scripted archeology, and they both knew it. It was a product of their fathers’ joint aversion. Robby and Brian Kingsolver were both violently opposed to that sort of show, but not, as far as their kids could determine, for moral or artistic reasons. They simply refused to watch anything on any channel that was about finding Bigfoot or Atlantis, and when asked for a reason, complained about believability.

  Chris actually thought the shows were interesting, Carrie seemed to find them amusing on a comic level, and neither of their mothers cared. Except Aunt Helen, who had to avoid any television with rapidly flashing lights because she got migraines.

  What Aunt Elsie had thought of the Great Kingsolver Television Debacle nobody knew, because she didn’t have a television. Why Robby and Brian Kingsolver had such an aversion had never been clear; most of the family treated it as an amusing quirk and neither Chris’s uncle nor his dad were interested in explaining, preferring instead to watch six hours of cat shows or accidently catch the fruit salad on fire rather than watch one episode of Treasure Hunters. Chris’s dad had difficulties cooking.

  Maddison left not long after agreeing that ghosts were better than loneliness, because her mom was on her way home from work and could pick her up. Chris waited until the car had pulled all the way out of the drive to collapse to the couch, dizzy with suppressed feeling.

  “You invited—” he started.

  “She’d been helping me sort student records since last Monday.” Carrie’s eyes were dancing with amusement.

  “But you didn’t—”

  “I knew she was familiar but I couldn’t place her until I met her dad the other day.”

  “So you—”

  “Invited her to the movies with us, yes.”

  “And I—”

  “Have the world’s biggest crush!” Carrie gasped, and burst out laughing. Chris scowled at her. Carrie continued to laugh, a little hysterically, and finally sat down on the couch hiccupping with giggles.

  Chris gave her his most plaintive and woeful expression and she finally subsided, more or less.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s been a long week and . . . your face!”

  “She’s just . . . ” Chris tried, and then couldn’t think of an appropriate adjective and gave up. “And her dad may be out to kill and eat all of us . . . ”

  “Leaving aside the question of just what you’ve been watching on television,” Carrie said, “I don’t think Maddison knows any more than we do.”

  “I think we may know a lot more than she does,” Chris said. “I mean I think I do—you don’t think that she—”

  “No, I don’t think she knows anything at all about this mess,” Carrie said. “Otherwise I don’t think she’d have asked us if our aunt knew her dad.” She stopped. “Do you think?”

  “It doesn’t seem likely,” Chris said. “She never even mentioned him to us, and none of our parents recognized his name when the professor mentioned it.”

  “Then why go to the funeral?”

  “To scope out the lay of the land?”

  “Now there’s a scary thought.”

  Chris began digging his shoes out from under the couch. “I like her, though,” he said to the cushions, not trusting himself with face-to-face at the moment. Carrie smacked him lightly on the arm anyway, but all she said was, “Yeah, I liked her too. That’s why I offered to pick her up on my way to work tomorrow.”

  “You’re trying to kill me,” Chris groaned.

  CARRIE CALLED PROFESSOR GRIFFIN AND ASKED HIM if she could come by the Archive and look through her aunt’s old office for her missing necklace that evening. She did the deception in stages; first tearing the house apart “looking” for the necklace; then having a worried conversation with her parents in which they actually encouraged her to call the Archive; and then finally spilling the whole story to the professor over the phone. He was nicely sympathetic. Carrie told Chris as much at ten that night, as she was climbing in his bedroom window again.

  “Next time,” Chris said as she landed hard on the edge of his bed and managed to pull off most of his sheets, “I climb in your bedroom window like some demented Santa Claus.”

  “Santa goes down chimneys,” Carrie pointed out. “I got us back in the Archive, by the way,” she added, as Chris grumbled that Santa had to enter somewhere when the house had no chimney, so why wouldn’t the window be the most logical alternative? Then he registered what else she’d said.

  “Oh, what did Professor Griffin finally say?”

  “Well,” Carrie said, bouncing slightly on the bed and kicking at the exercise ball, “some of McRae’s boxes are already in that office.”

  “Oh no.”

  “And there’s a committee meeting on Saturday so they don’t want us in the building. But Professor Griffin doesn’t think anybody will mind if we come in Monday evening after hours and look for it, so long as we keep McRae apprised of where we are so he isn’t worried about his stuff.”

  “Oh no. Really?”

  Carrie held up a hand. “So, I told him I happened to be friends with McRae’s daughter and asked if it might be okay for her to be there instead of her dad, and Professor Griffin said that was totally fine.”

  “So all we have to do is convince Maddison to help us search an empty office for your missing necklace in the middle of the night.”

  “Well,” Carrie said, “when you put it like that.”

  But Maddison proved to be much more enthusiastic about the idea than Chris and Carrie expected. In fact, when Carrie and Chris asked her the next day when they all reconvened, this time in Chris’s living room again, she was so excited-yet-trying-to-hide-it that for a terrible moment Chris feared she was secretly planning something herself, but then she wo
rked up the courage to admit that it was the idea of spending time in an older building after dark that was exciting. Because she wanted to look for ghosts.

  “I have a camera and an EMF meter I’ve only ever been able to use on people’s houses and this is a whole abandoned building at night!—aaaand you probably think I’m weird.”

  Chris thought she was spectacularly pretty and that the sun made her hair shine and her eyes turn an even deeper blue but his brain-to-mouth filter was still good enough that he managed not to say it.

  “I do keyword cyphers for fun,” he said instead, which was skating dangerously close to secret territory since Aunt Elsie had sent her last message in a keyword cypher, but was still safer than: “You have such pretty hair.”

  A keyword cypher, Chris explained to Maddison when she asked, was a super-simple type of encryption where a key word (hence, keyword) was used to stand for letters of the alphabet. Thus, if CHRIS was the keyword, you would first write out the keyword:

  C H R I S

  So that it stood in for the letters of the alphabet:

  A B C D E

  And then the rest of the alphabet, minus the letters that made up the keyword:

  C H R I S A B D E F G J K L M N O P Q T U V W X Y Z

  And then, with this standing for the regular alphabet, write out a message,

  C H R I S A B D E F G J K L M N O P Q T U V W X Y Z

  A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

  So that HELLO would now be DSJJM.

  “My aunt used to call this the simplest but most effective cypher to learn,” Chris told Maddison. “Because all you have to do is pick a name, which is simple enough a six-year-old can understand it. But it’s plenty hard to guess the name if you don’t know it, which makes it a lot trickier than something like a Caesar cypher, and so it’s a good tool for teaching someone about cyphers.”

  “So, if I wanted to use my name?” Maddison asked.

  “You would have to skip one of the Ds for it to work—like Carrie would have to leave out an R—but otherwise you’d be fine.”