Chapter Five
My breath tastes sour in my mouth with the thought of Mr. Conte watching me while I never suspected he was there. Eyes staring, camera on me. How can I ever feel safe again, knowing what I do now?
I shake my head to rid myself of the thoughts, but the fears remain.
“All right. I hope there’re answers in here.” I open the other two doors of the cabinet. An old-style safe takes up the entire space—bottom to top. “What do you think is in this? A body?”
Crap. I just said that out loud.
Marek’s brows are a straight line over his dark brown eyes, and his lips are even straighter. “He was a good man,” he says, and I wonder if he’s trying to convince himself or me. “A loving grandfather.”
It sounds like he’s quoting Adam Conte’s eulogy. “I’m sorry. It’s just… Well, put yourself in my shoes. Your grandfather was stalking me.” I search the front of the safe for a way to open it. “There isn’t a knobby thing on this.”
“A knobby thing?” he repeats, watching me curiously. All the tiny hairs on my arms rise, and my breath quickens.
“You know, a spinner. To unlock it.”
He smiles. I like his smile. It’s a bit crooked and shows his almost-straight teeth. His right canine sticks out just a little past the rest of them. I bet he had braces when he was younger and didn’t wear his retainer at night when he was supposed to, like me. My front teeth are a tad off because of it.
I run my hand across the cold gray metal door. There isn’t a latch or anything I can find. My fingers bump over an etching near where a knobby thing should be. It isn’t light enough in the basement to see, so I use the flashlight on my phone and study the marking. It’s a nautical star. The size of a pendant.
I glance over at Marek. He’s studying the hinges on the other side of the safe.
“Your necklace.”
He looks over at me. “What?”
“It must be the key.” I rub my finger over the etching again. “It matches this.”
He leans over my shoulder. You’d think he would smell bad after working out, but he doesn’t. There’s this manly kind of scent to him, mixed with a musky deodorant.
Marek removes his star pendant and slides it across the etching until it fits inside like a puzzle piece. The safe sighs before an unlatching sound comes from it. He opens it, and I swear both our jaws hit the floor at the same time.
There are piles of money in different currencies on the shelves inside. Heaps of bonds and several jewelry boxes are on the lower two. On the very top is a CD in one of those flimsy plastic cases.
I lift a bundle of euros. “What did he do? Rob banks?”
“I hope not. It would kill my gram.” He plucks the CD out of the safe. “I wonder what’s on this.”
“Maybe instructions on robbing a bank or stalking people.”
He frowns at me before plodding over to the computers and sitting in the large leather desk chair. “Guess we should find out.”
Though it’s cool down here in the basement, the tension is stifling. I suppose it’s poor taste to keep insulting his grandfather. But really, I’m the victim here, and I still don’t have any answers. For all I know, Adam Conte could’ve murdered my parents. And Marek frowns at me? Now I’m annoyed. He could be more sympathetic to my concerns.
Ana, if you want them to like you, you have to be nicer. That’s what my dad used to say when I’d come home upset that the kids at school hated me. He was right. My snide remarks earned me middle school enemies.
Besides, Marek is probably freaking out as much as I am.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t say stuff like that. This can’t be fun for you.”
“Yeah, it blows.” He finds a CD player, inserts the disc into the tray, and presses play. Adam Conte flashes onto one of the screens. He adjusts the camera before sitting down in the same chair his grandson now occupies. He has less gray hair and fewer wrinkles, and his suit is tweed with patches on the elbows.
“When was this recorded?” I pull a chair over and settle beside Marek.
He reads the writing on a piece of masking tape sticking to the CD holder. “Thirteen years ago.”
Mr. Conte clears his throat. “To my progeny. If you are viewing this video, then I’ve passed on to the next life. In the time when people worshipped other gods and goddesses, our family, along with five others, rose up to protect the world from the immortals’ wrath. Our ancestors have kept the balance between mortals and immortals since called on by the all-powerful one. This is all I can say on this recording. With strength of body and a mind fed with knowledge, you have been trained since the day you could walk to be a caretaker of something more powerful than you can realize. I have left you with a sort of treasure hunt. We have played many games in practice for this, and all you have to do is remember them, and you will know what to do from here.”
Adam Conte clears his throat again.
“Should I die, someone will deliver a possession of mine to you. Solve the cipher and follow the bread crumbs, and all will be revealed to you.”
Immortals?
“This makes no sense,” I say, rubbing an itch from my nose, trying to keep from sneezing. Though the basement is neat and very organized, it’s dusty. “Do you understand him?”
Marek shakes his head, his eyes stuck on the screen. “No.”
Mr. Conte leans forward and shuts off the camera.
Marek and I sit there, just staring at a wallpaper of the universe on the computer screen. My mind races. I wonder how Marek is feeling. The man he’d loved, maybe even looked up to, had some sort of weird obsession with gods. He was delusional, for sure. Living in some made-up fantasy or something.
“We used to encrypt messages to each other and use a decoder to transcribe them,” Marek says. He smiles at what I’m sure is a memory. “It would annoy Grams. She thought he was keeping things from her. I guess he was.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, not really knowing what to say. But even though I’m on the thin line between creeped out and scared to death, I do feel sorry for him.
He rolls his chair closer to me, and my breath does a somersault over my tongue. “Excuse me. Just need to get into this drawer. I saw some of them in here.” He yanks it open and scoops up a bunch of decoder rings into his hands. “This is them. Decoder rings. The letters line up to a number for each one. They’re all different. Gramps would change them out for each game. It could be any of these. And what am I supposed to decode?”
The sudden recall of the contents of Mr. Conte’s satchel jolts me. “There’s a ring in the bag. One of those.” I point at the decoders in his cupped hand.
He dumps them back into the drawer, the rings clinking against each other. With one quick and extremely agile move, Marek is on his feet, up the stairs, and out of the basement before I can register his departure.
My mouth purses, and my eyes stay stuck on the open door up the stairs, waiting for Marek to return. I want to pinch myself, wake up from this messed-up dream or nightmare. I need a judge and jury to sift through the evidence and tell me if this is real—the verdict is still out—but I’m very much awake.
Marek thumps down the steps with the satchel in hand. He plops back on the desk chair beside me and unfastens the straps. He claws inside the bag and pulls his hand out, the ring pinched between his fingers.
“This has to be the one.” He drops the bag behind him on the seat and searches around the desk.
“What are you looking for?” I ask.
He stops and glances over his shoulder at me. “There has to be a message from him. Look for something with lines of numbers on it.”
I grasp the bag, plunge my hand inside, and carefully remove the contents, placing them on the desk. The envelopes are different sizes and colors, from ivory to beige. I shuffle through them and stop on one with Marek’s name on it.
It’s a letter from Marek, with a crayon drawing of two stick figures—one tall, one tiny—under a large tree with some purple leaves and some green leaves. Written in orange at the bottom of the page is Marek’s name with a backward “e.” The fact he couldn’t stay within the lines suggests he was young when he drew it.
“What’s that?” Marek’s sudden question startles me.
I hold it up for him to see. “You sent this drawing to your grandfather.”
His eyebrows push together. “That’s horrible. Good thing I gave up on my artistic ambitions. I sucked.”
“I think it’s cute.”
Our eyes lock, and it’s the first time that I truly see his face. I was too busy trying to avoid gawking at his bare chest to notice it. His jawline is prominent, his nose straight, his lips are on the fuller side, and his hair is wavy. He’s definitely pleasant to look at.
Stop.
Stop. Stop. Stop. He’s the grandson of your stalker.
He grabs a lighter resting on the desk between the keyboard and a damaged tissue box. “Invisible ink. He hid the message. It’s on this. Why else would he have an old letter of mine in his bag? Open the envelope at the seams.”
I slip my finger into the opening of the envelope, slowly tear it open until it’s completely free with no folds, and hand him the dissected paper.
He takes it and holds it over the lighter.
“No.” I grab his arm. “Don’t burn it.”
“I’m not.” He tugs his arm out of my grasp. “We used to write private messages with lemon juice and water. I don’t think he’d use my drawing, so it has to be the envelope.”
“How can he make a secret message with lemon juice?”
“You squeeze a lemon, add a little water to it, and then write your message using a cotton swab on a piece of paper.” He flicks on the lighter. “Hold a flame to the paper, and the lemon will turn it a different color to reveal the message.”
I can hardly believe it, but it works. The hidden numbers turn brown on the white paper. “Now what?” I ask when he finishes exposing the cipher.
“We decode it.” He leans over the decoder ring, turning one of the dials. There are three windows. One with numbers, one with the alphabet, and the other with unusual symbols.
“What are the symbols in that window?”
“I’m not sure. It looks like some foreign alphabet. Read the numbers to me, and I’ll write the matching English letter down.”
I flatten the envelope on my lap. “I thought it was going to be actual invisible ink. Okay, the first one is twelve.” I continue calling out the numbers from the envelope until we reach the last one. “What does it say?”
He straightens. “It says, the first clue is with number three on the list.”
“That’s kind of anticlimactic.” I heave a sigh that shows how frustrated I am. The hands on the very plain clock above the monitors are almost at noon. Dalton and I figured that I should leave here by one to get home before Jane. Actually, I can leave by two, since we left some wiggle room in our estimation. “So who’s number three on that list?”
“What list?”
I give him an incredulous look. “The whole reason I’m here. That list. With my name and my parents’ names on it.”
“Oh.” He retrieves it from the bag and stabs it with his finger. “Here. Shona Jackson. She’s eighteen and lives in New York. Freshman at NYU.”
It’s over. The clue leads to someone out of town. I stand. “Well, that’s it. I’m never going to know why your grandfather was watching me.”
“Come on. Do you always give up so easily? I’ll Google her.” He grasps the mouse by the keyboard and clicks. “It’s locked. I don’t know the password. Do you have a smartphone?”
“Yes.” I lean back and tug my phone out my front pocket.
“She lives on 57th street. Apartment 15B. The address is listed beside her name.” He slides the list on the table closer to me.
I enter the address into the search box. The information loads on the screen of my phone. “Joel Jackson owns the building. Must be her dad.”
“Great.” He pops up to his feet. “It’s less than a three-hour drive from here. We’d get there before four.”
It takes a few seconds for my mind to catch up to what he’s suggesting. My eyes practically bug out, and I shake my head. “No. No way. I can’t go today. I have to get home before Jane—my mom does. She’ll freak if I’m not there.”
He looks down at me, eyebrows pinched, lips in a straight line. “I thought you wanted to get answers. Here’s our chance. This girl has a clue my gramps left me. What about tomorrow? Wait. Where do you live?”
“Philly,” I say.
“Perfect. I’ll come to you, and we can grab the express.”
Tomorrow. A Saturday. The day before Dalton and I take a bus to some boring bereavement camp by Thompson Lake in Maine. I can tell Jane I’m hanging out with friends before we leave. Dalton will cover for me.
“Okay,” I say. “We have to go at eight in the morning and be back by six at night, no later than seven.” I glance up at the security monitors on the wall above the computers and gasp.
The guy from the gas station, in the Audi with the Thor license plate, strolls up the driveway, flipping his keys in his hand.