Chapter Twenty-Six
The sun over Rome is almost entirely gone, a blue hue blankets the buildings, and the lights are golden blossoms in the distance. I stand on a balcony of a quaint hotel, waiting for Marek to return. A cool breeze rolls over my skin. The bruises all over my body have almost vanished, only a hint of them remain. Oyá healed me.
It’s our fourth night in Rome. Before crossing over the Tiber into the Trastevere neighborhood, Marek and I stopped in a library so I could use the public computer to send a message to Dalton through his Snapchat, letting him know I was okay. We also Googled Elena Kristoffer Prevot and found nothing. The decoder was useless. It just gave us a bunch of numbers and translated the name into Phoenician.
The door handle jiggles. I step back behind the wall next to the balcony door, a part of me saying it’s only Marek, the other part scared it’s someone else. Someone dangerous.
“It’s me,” Marek calls from inside the room. He’s unloading items from a shopping bag and placing them on one of the beds when I come in from the balcony. “Take a seat. Thought we’d have a picnic. I got meats and cheeses. Some fresh bread. And...” He pauses, reaching inside the bag. “This.” He pulls out a classic glass bottle of Coca-Cola.
I overexaggerate my excitement and sit on the bed and ask, “Do you have a bottle opener?”
“Shit. I didn’t think of that.” He places his finger on his chin. When he goes for his belt, I raise my eyebrows.
He removes it from his waist and uses the buckle as a bottle opener, then hands me the cola.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said.” I take a swig from the bottle, the sweet fizzy drink reminding me of home, making me miss Dalton. “About your grandfather’s games. Which ones did you play?”
He tears a piece from the loaf of bread. “Well, you know about decoding messages and espionage tactics. We did mazes, puzzles, chess, and solving things like riddles and anagrams. He was really into fitness.”
The smell of soppressata, a sort of salami, teases my nose, and my stomach grumbles. He slaps a few slices on the bread and tops it with a piece of Asiago cheese. He offers me the tower of yumminess, and I gladly take it.
“What kind of puzzles?” I open my mouth wide and take a bite.
He fixes himself an open-faced sandwich. “Crosswords, Picross, logic, and math puzzles.”
I swallow and take a swig from my bottle. “Did you ever hear your grandfather mention an Elena? Maybe she was a family friend?”
“Not that I know of.” He goes to take another bite and stops. “Oh wait. Anagrams. He always used names. First, middle, and last. And I would tease him that they were all old women’s names. Probably all his ex-girlfriends.”
I put my sandwich down on a napkin and grab a pad of paper and pen from the nightstand drawer. “Okay, let’s try it.”
Marek retrieves the slip of paper with the name on it from the silver canister and rereads it.
Elena Kristoffer Prevot
I stare at it. “So how do we do this?”
“We make words from letters in the name. Then put them together until it’s a sentence that makes sense.”
“Got it.” I study the names so hard my eyes start to water. “There’s ‘off’ or ‘offer.’”
“No. That’s too easy. Those letters line up in the name. My grandfather would scramble them. Those words are to throw off someone other than me trying to solve it.”
Just in case, I write them down on the paper anyway and spot more words. “‘Top,’ and there’s ‘life,’ ‘stone,’ ‘star,’ ‘plate—’”
He laughs. “You’re doing it wrong. Once you use a letter, you can’t use it again. ‘Life’ is good. My grandfather was attached to sayings about life. Here, let’s separate the consonants from the vowels.”
I scribble the letters down.
AEEEEIOO FFKLNPRRRSTTV
“Oh, yeah, that’s so much better.” I’m not even hiding my sarcasm.
“Well, we have ‘life’ so let’s take that out.”
AEEEOO FKNPRRRSTTV
“My grandfather would include ‘sport,’ too. Used it all the time. He did that so I’d be able to solve this. If he made it too hard, this would take forever. Remove the letters.”
I rewrite the remaining letters.
AEEEO FKNRRTV
I’m getting annoyed that I haven’t come up with any words. Squinting at the letters for so long is causing my vision to blur.
“How about ‘take’?” I ask.
“Okay, remove it and let’s see what we have.”
EEO FNRRV
Marek stretches his arms over his head. “I need a break.” He goes to the bathroom, and I continue shuffling letters around until I have “for” and “never.”
I straighten and bounce a little on the bed. “Marek! I got it,” I call.
life sport take never for
The door opens, and he hurries over. He leans over my shoulder, some sort of chemical still scenting his skin. Probably something used to keep the Trevi Fountain waters clear.
“Right here.” He points out two of the words. “Flip them. It’ll make more sense.”
“Okay.” I rewrite the words.
life sport never take for
And I write:
Never take life for sport
“You got it.” There’s excitement in his voice. He pats my shoulder, and his hand lingers there.
“What do you think it means?” I ask, trying to ignore the fact that all my attention is zoned in on where his hand is and it’s making my pulse flutter.
“I don’t know.”
I hop off the bed and spin to face him. “Of course. We’re in Rome. Life for sport. It’s the Colosseum.”
His face lights up. “You’re right.”
“We can go tomorrow.”
“Sounds like a great plan to me,” he says.
After we pack the food back into the bags and clean up, I take a shower. The courtesy robe is like a plush hug. I crawl in the bed closest to the balcony and listen to the shower run in the bathroom. Marek’s growing on me.
When this is over, and we’re back in our ordinary lives, will Marek and I stay in touch? More importantly, can we go back to being normal teens and possibly even go on a date? Who knows.
The door opens, steam rushes into the room, and he comes out wearing the other robe, hair wet. He pads to the bed across from me with a confident walk that I’ve noticed before but not really appreciated until now.
Yeah, I would date him.
Alone in the room with him, enjoying an Italian picnic, drinking Coca-Cola, and solving an anagram, I almost forgot all the stuff going on outside this hotel room. I flip onto my back and stare at the ceiling.
The room grows dark when an outside light somewhere turns off. I can’t sleep. Not with everything that’s happened the last few days. Not with Marek sleeping in the bed next to mine. And definitely not with the skeletons from the catacomb and the beasts at the fountain haunting my dreams.
I sit up and turn on the lamp on the nightstand. Marek sleeps with the pillow over his head, so I know the light won’t bug him. I grab one of the magazines from inside the drawer and flip through it. The articles are in Italian, filled with the hotel amenities and things to do around Rome.
It sucks that Marek had us dump our phones. I’m bored out of mind without it. Want to torture a teen? Throw away their phone. I could be checking my social media right now. Or catching up on the YouTube channels I follow. I angrily turn a page.
“Perfect.” I land on a page with a photo of the Trevi Fountain.
Pinching the glossy paper, I toss it over. The Colosseum dominates both pages. If I were here in Rome as a tourist, it would be on the top of my list to visit. I drop the magazine on the nightstand, turn off the light, and resume staring at the ceiling.
I roll over to my side, and my eyes blink—close, open, close, open, close.
…
Birdsongs float into the room, sun teases my eyelids, and the smell of coffee fills my nose. I smile but still can’t open my eyes. Marek must’ve woken early and gotten us coffee. He’s always so considerate.
I sit up and stretch my arms over my head.
“Your boy shouldn’t be leaving the balcony unlocked while you be in here alone.”
A man’s voice with an Irish accent startles me. I scramble back, hitting the headboard hard. The man is tall with dark auburn hair and a beard. He’s so tall he barely fits in the small chair across from the bed.
The man laughs. “You be as scared as a mouse with a kitten on its tail, that you are.”
“Settle down.” He takes a sip from a to-go coffee cup, his green eyes sparkling with amusement. “I brought you a coffee.”
I don’t move. My eyes search wildly around, trying to find an escape or a weapon.