Keyword Cypher

by E. A. House

  The Kingsolver residence was not very big and mostly open plan. Chris had a room in the middle of the house; to get to the door they had to cross the living room, which, when you were fleeing a large, sketchy man who may have had more than one gun, was much farther away than it had ever seemed before. And Chris was not much of a runner. He’d never actually failed gym class but he tripped over absolutely everything. It would have been just exactly Chris’s luck to do something like trip painfully over the coffee table on his way towards the front door, but what he had not expected to do was collide with an armed police officer three steps from the front door. Which was in fact what happened. Carrie, who’d been a hair behind him, skidded to a stop and tripped, and actually did crack her head painfully on the side table.

  Someone other than the startled man in Kevlar Chris had just flattened yelled, “Freeze!” over his head, and there was a magnificent thump, as though Sketchy Guy had tried to stop and instead collided with the ottoman. Chris gingerly picked himself off the police officer, handing over the gym bag as he did, and discovered that Sketchy Guy had in fact tripped over the decorative treasure chest parked conveniently next to the couch. The Kingsolver family had at least six legitimate seafarers in its tree, not including all the pirates, so a decorative style that tended towards nautical was the natural result of various inheritances. So it wasn’t as odd as it might have been for there to be a sea chest in the living room. If the chase had happened in Carrie’s house, they may have been rescued by the old diving suit that decorated theirs. This could have been even more interesting given the fact that the old diving suit had a tendency to fall over unexpectedly, making a magnificent crash; Chris’s dad insisted it was haunted. But then, Chris’s dad thought a lot of things were haunted.

  A lot of police officers were now pushing their way through the door, and like a dandelion or a telemarketer popping up out of nowhere when least expected or wanted, Dr. Kevin McRae appeared.

  “Okay,” said the man in the suit holding the badge, seven minutes and a lot of yelling later. “Is there actually a coherent explanation for any of this?”

  Nobody volunteered one. The obviously-​a-police-detective pinched the bridge of his nose and muttered something that sounded like, “Why do I always get the crazy ones?”

  It took three hours to take everyone’s statements and give the police a complete idea of what had happened, and even then Chris suspected that not a single person had told the entire truth to Detective Hermann, the previously mentioned man in the suit with the badge. Detective Hermann was an older man with a bushy white mustache and an air of resigned bewilderment that made you want to reassure him that you knew what you were doing, and the unfortunate first name of Melville, which he admitted immediately upon introducing himself. He claimed it was to get the awkwardness out of the way quickly, but it occurred to Chris at the two-hour mark that the detective was getting everyone to underestimate him and to confide in him all in one fell swoop, and his respect for the man increased tremendously.

  Chris’s parents arrived home in the middle of hour three. It was hard to say who was more alarmed: Robby and Bree Kingsolver, who came home to a house full of police officers, or the officer watching the door, who opened it to a middle-aged couple wearing matching blue-sequined cowboy hats and clutching a second-place ribbon. Detective Hermann stared at their square-dancing outfits for a long moment and then visibly resigned himself to a case that made no sense.

  Sketchy Guy, whose name proved to be Cliff Dodson, was almost painfully chatty. He readily admitted to ransacking Elsie’s office, breaking into the Kingsolver’s house, and being behind the wheel of the car that drove Elsie off the road, and seemed strangely averse to asking for a lawyer or to the common courtesy of confessing to murder away from the family of the victim. That his name really was Cliff Dodson Chris doubted. Of his insistence that he had acted alone, as he claimed multiple times and with increasing insistence, Chris had even more serious doubts. Cliff’s insistence that he’d gone after Aunt Elsie because she was in charge of a collection of gold artifacts that he believed he had prior claim to also didn’t ring true. Aunt Elsie had seldom, if ever, handled the few artifacts the Archive possessed. Clearly, Cliff Dodson had a deeper and more sinister reason for going after Aunt Elsie, and was hoping that no one would look beneath the surface for his true plot. Carrie, Chris knew, would say he was being paranoid.

  Kevin McRae turned out to have been responsible for calling the police. “I recognized Dodson from when I did some work with the park service. There’d been threats,” he explained. Dodson had apparently threatened park rangers for “hiding the gold for themselves,” which meant that at the very least this guy was both vicious and significantly lacking in intelligence. Dr. McRae also admitted to having been suspicious of how Elsie had died. “And I’ll admit part of it was simply self-interest,” he explained. “What happened to Elsie Kingsolver was a tragedy and just seemed too obviously an accident. I was worried that someone was after the Archive itself, and when my daughter mentioned being attacked on the road I decided it was imperative I call the police.” But Chris doubted McRae was telling the whole story. Why did you think Aunt Elsie’s death was “too obviously an accident”? Chris wondered. And why come running over here as soon as you called the police—if that’s really what you did?

  Chris and Carrie could add little, in the end, except that Dodson had broken through their picture window with a gun and gone right for them, a fact which Dodson thoroughly failed to explain. Chris and Carrie couldn’t, either.

  Or at least, Dodson failed to explain satisfactorily. He claimed, with much fidgeting and an even worse level of eye contact than before, to have assumed they had the gold because they were Aunt Elsie’s relatives. When pressed, he could not explain why he assumed the kids would be carrying the gold, and tried to change his story by claiming that he wanted to search the house for the gold, and finally Detective Hermann irritably marched him out to a squad car and then shepherded the rest of the crowd out as well. Chris and Carrie did not mention the box they’d found in Aunt Elsie’s office.

  “Which may have been perjury,” Carrie admitted worriedly much later, or earlier, in the morning. The police had left, McRae had announced he was going to go home and tell Maddison that everyone was fine and that the danger had passed, and Chris’s parents, before going off to bed for a few hours, had declared that they were never leaving home again. Chris and Carrie had been left alone, so that Carrie could call her parents and attempt to explain what had happened. Instead they were trying to decide if they’d broken any laws by not mentioning the box.

  “But everything Dodson and McRae said could have been true,” Chris pointed out. “In which case, the box doesn’t even enter into it.”

  “Uh huh,” Carrie said, but she still looked unconvinced and worried. “And do you think the fact that my fingerprints are all over the gun will get me in trouble?” Chris told her he really didn’t, partly because she’d admitted to that part of the story when the gun was bagged by a mildly impressed-looking deputy, and partly because the detective had looked thoroughly approving of her quick thinking. Although Chris still wasn’t sure where Carrie had learned what to do with a gun . . .

  “Mrs. Hadler did some interesting things before she became a secretary,” Carrie said. Chris decided that if Carrie didn’t want to tell him she didn’t have to.

  “Anyway,” Chris said, “I’m the one who may have stolen evidence.” And he dropped Carrie’s locket into her lap.

  “Oh my—where did you find this?” Carrie asked, gratifyingly astonished. “We looked everywhere!”

  “Dodson must have gotten to it first,” Chris said. “It was in that gym bag I grabbed from him. I snuck it into my pocket while everyone was staring at Mom and Dad.”

  “You snuck it out of the gym bag and into your pocket that was then bagged as evidence,” Carrie realized a moment later. “Chris!”

  “I didn’t realize what I was doing?”
>
  “Our story will be that we found it under the couch after everyone had left,” Carrie said decisively. She rubbed her thumb over the raised brass surface and then clasped the locket around her neck where it belonged. “If Dodson mentions it, we’ll just admit that I thought I lost it in the office, but I must have been wrong because I found it under the couch this morning, several hours after the police had left. I was exhausted and not thinking straight at the time. Nobody suspects you of tampering with evidence at all, and the worst that happens is we have to give it up as evidence for a while.”

  “Then we’d better hope that they don’t ask for it for a while,” Chris said. “Because we may need it.” Then he scrambled under his desk and unearthed the box, along with the notepad he’d been drawing on before Dodson so rudely interrupted, which he handed to Carrie. Carrie tapped the rough sketch of the compass with one finger.

  “The key was right in front of us the whole time?” she asked.

  “The key was right in front of us the whole time,” Chris agreed. “And,” he realized, “Aunt Elsie split the clues between us.”

  “You don’t think we missed a message on the locket itself?” Carrie asked. She’d reluctantly taken the locket off again, and was turning it over in her hands, looking for anything out of the ordinary. “Because I do not want to dunk the whole thing in lemon juice or roll it in ink or anything.”

  “If we need to we can try that later,” Chris suggested. He set the box firmly on his desk. “But right now, I think we should try using it as a key.” And he swung open the latch on the box.

  It took some fumbling, and the chain on the locket got in the way at first, but then the slightly raised edges of the compass met the depressions in the keyhole, and with a faint click the locket settled in place. Chris took a deep breath, and, gingerly, with his eyes squeezed shut and his breath caught in his throat, turned the locket to the right, waiting with baited breath for—

  “Uh, Chris?”

  “Yeaaaaagh!” Chris yelped, and turned to stare at Carrie. She was staring right back at him, head tilted and eyebrows raised.

  “What?” Chris demanded.

  “Did you, by any chance,” Carrie asked, fighting a grin, “watch Indiana Jones recently?”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with—”

  “Because you’re bracing yourself for a cursed whirlwind or ghosts or whatever you think is going to come bursting out of that box when it’s opened,” Carrie said. Chris deflated.

  “Was I really?” he asked.

  “You had your eyes closed and were leaning as far away from the box as humanly possible,” Carrie said.

  “Sorry,” Chris said. “I got carried away. Do you want to do it?”

  “No,” Carrie said, and so firmly that Chris was startled. “You started this, you decided to believe in it first, you should finish it,” she said solemnly. “And besides,” she added just as the lock clicked open and Chris lifted the lid of the box, “if the winds of the damned are going to come pouring out and fry the first person they see, better you than me.”

  “Seriously, Carrie?”

  “Just saying.” Carrie shrugged, and Chris lifted the lid all the way up with an irritated huff.

  There was no cursed whirlwind, nor was there any unearthly light. There wasn’t even a slight musty smell from old parchment or the gentle glow of precious metals, because there were no old fragments of parchment or gold and silver coins. There was instead a tightly folded packet of modern yellow legal paper wedged into the box, which when carefully unfolded proved to be nothing more than Aunt Elsie’s notes on the exhibit on the 1717 Fleet. It was staggeringly disappointing. Chris handed the sheaf of papers to Carrie feeling dizzy with disappointment.

  “Didn’t you already find a copy of these in Aunt Elsie’s desk?” Carrie asked, leafing through the tightly creased pages.

  “I did,” Chris said. “And it looked exactly the same. I’m pretty sure I saw her write some of these that weekend in April I stayed at her house.”

  “Then why would she—wait,” Carrie said, shaking a page free. “This isn’t a note on the exhibit, it’s another letter.” She handed the rest of the papers to Chris, who began paging through them himself, only looking up when he realized Carrie was crying.

  “Carrie?” he asked, startled.

  “I need,” Carrie said, stopped, started to put the letter down, decided halfway through the motion she should give it to Chris, and finally dropped it on the desk as if it were burning her, “I—need to call Mom and Dad, let them know what happened. And Maddison. I’ll just—be in the living room.”

  She flicked the letter at Chris and darted out of the room, in the direction of the bathroom, which had the worst reception in the house. But Chris didn’t think Carrie was thinking about phone reception. Carrie didn’t look like she was going to go call anyone; actually, she looked like she was going to go break down sobbing where nobody could watch her, but maybe that was what she needed to do?

  The letter, when Chris picked it up and smoothed it out as best as the creases would let him, was on the exact same yellow, lined legal pad paper as Aunt Elsie’s notes, in blue ball point and flowing cursive. Aunt Elsie had written in a small hand so it was only one page front and back, and Chris ran a finger across the deep impressions her pen had cut before he picked out the address and started reading.

  My dear Carrie and sweet, sweet Chris,

  Smarty-pants, you figured it out. I never doubted for a second that you would, but I hope you didn’t fight too much while you did. And I hate to say it to you, but such a big part of me wishes you didn’t figure it out at all. This box and the things inside are not a gift. They are a terrible responsibility—a curse, if I’m honest—and one I pass on to you with deep misgivings. In fact, if I have died a natural death at the age of a hundred-and-three and Chris stumbles over this letter amongst my books, this need go no further. Burn the contents of this box, tell no one what you found, and rest assured that you have quietly closed the door on years of heartache.

  But I very much fear that this is not the case, and so I tell you this. The notes on the 1717 Fleet exhibition you must have found in my office were incomplete. In the course of my ordinary research for the totally ordinary exhibit, I stumbled across references to a parish register from 1717 that contained an eyewitness account of the sinking of the San Telmo. Chris, I suspect, has already tagged that ship as the holy grail of lost treasure ships. And Chris, sweetie, by this point you probably realize that I tried to shut you down when you asked me about the treasure. I can only say it was for a very good reason, and that at the time I genuinely thought the ship was lost to me forever. Since then, things have changed. I truly believe that with the information contained in my notes you can find the final resting place of the San Telmo, or at least put together enough information for a treasure hunter who you both trust to find it.

  But very few treasure hunters can be trusted, smaller Kingsolvers, and I fear that the reason you are reading this letter is because one who cannot has taken my life. Yes, I have my suspicions. In fact I think I know. No, I’m not going to tell you. I can’t; if what I’ve pieced together over the last three weeks is true, the person who killed me would do anything to find this treasure, and even more to keep what they’ve done to get it a secret. I am not the first, nor will I likely be the last, to die. The one thing keeping you two safe is how little you suspect this person, and even then, I do not know how long that will protect you. The two of you are so very smart. You’re probably going to figure out who it is from this letter alone.

  So I am very sorry, but I can trust the two of you and only the two of you with this: take these notes and burn them, or take them and use them to find the San Telmo. Either way, be very careful, be cautious in your trust, and remember, always and forever, that I love you.

  The notes Aunt Elsie had been talking about were on the third page of legal paper, part of a list of letters Aunt Elsie had been thinking of scanning
and putting on the Archive website for the virtual exhibit. The clean copy of her notes, when Chris dug them out of the box in the garage where Aunt Helen had left them to be packed securely and stored in Aunt Elsie’s house for the time being—a fact which had made Chris’s dad moan about inheriting ghosts for a full half hour—just had a list of letters. One each from a Spanish survivor of the original wreck, an English privateer, a merchant who lost a vast amount of gold in the wreck, and a currently living local businessman who had found a piece of eight from the wreck while walking on the beach in the late eighties. But the notes Aunt Elsie had hidden included one more letter, from a deacon at Saint Erasmus’s Church, dated 1735. The letter was supposed to describe the prayers the church offered for those killed in the 1717 disaster and the “melancholy” of the parish priest who witnessed the disaster, and next to the list Aunt Elsie had written, “Ship he witnessed? Possible eyewitness account?” Comparing the two almost identical sheets of paper, Chris realized she must have copied out a clean set of notes without reference to the deacon’s letter and left them in her office.

  Because Aunt Elsie had filled in the blanks. In a different shade of blue pen—which suggested that the research had taken her a while—she had amended the notes. Under “possible eyewitness account” she had scribbled “definite eyewitness account! Church documents from 1733 refer to event, and previous description of event!” And under “ship he witnessed?” she had printed, and then almost scratched out in pen, “San Telmo.”

  Chris decided that his bedroom was too airless all of a sudden. The seriousness of the warning Aunt Elsie had included in her letter forced him to put the notes from the office in their proper place and close the box up before he practically fled into the back garden, where he had a small moment of hysterics among the hydrangeas.