Keyword Cypher Read online

“Huh,” Maddison said, and asked Chris a bunch of other questions about cyphers and codes, until it occurred to him to ask her what she took ghost hunting with her.

  “A digital and film camera, temperature gauges, handheld recorder, and EMF meter,” Maddison replied promptly. “And dad will be delighted for me to fill in, he has to be out of town until late that night. And he’ll be glad to see me actually use the EMF meter, I spent two years’ worth of Christmas money buying it.”

  “What does it even do?” Chris asked. “Detect ghosts?”

  “It registers changes in electromagnetic fields,” Maddison said. “The idea being, if there is a ghost in the area it has to be made of some type of energy, so an unusual amount of electrical energy in an area that can’t be explained by normal means might indicate the presence of abnormal phenomena, like, for example—”

  “A ghost,” Carrie finished.

  “Yep. But an EMF runs about two hundred dollars when they’re cheap, so it took me forever to save up for one and I really want to use it.”

  The rest of Saturday was mercifully peaceful, and Sunday went by almost without incident. Carrie hadn’t been lying when she’d told Maddison the only thing they planned to do was watch bad television, and Chris was mildly surprised that Maddison still came over to Carrie’s house after lunch.

  “We’re still moving in,” she said by way of explanation. “Mom is shifting couches around and her expression was getting scary.”

  Carrie claimed the living room couch and waved Maddison into the seat next to her, and Chris settled on the floor with the television remote. Then they spent half an hour channel surfing and trying to convince Carrie that watching the National Chess Tournament wasn’t actually that interesting, until Chris finally found a marathon of ghost-hunting shows and hid the remote from his documentary-obsessed cousin.

  “What on earth are you three watching?” Aunt Helen asked when she wandered into the living room at noon, scaring them all half to death. Chris jumped, flailed, and fell off his perch on the back of the couch. Maddison squeaked and banged her head on the coffee table. Carrie squashed a pillow more tightly over her head and resolutely continued “watching” the show from under the decorative blankets and all the throw pillows.

  On the television, someone dropped the camera and accidentally kicked it. Aunt Helen sighed, and with a pointed expression, began plucking pillows away from Carrie.

  “Ghost hunting,” Chris finally said from the floor. His tailbone felt bruised and he’d spilled his cheese puffs. “I think they would actually find a ghost if they were quiet for five minutes.”

  “Orbs are notoriously unreliable sources of ghost phenomena,” Maddison said, rubbing her head. “And most EMF meters are tuned to pick up household appliances, which includes cell phones and power lines! I don’t know why they’re all excited about what’s going to turn out to be a lens flare, or why I’m still watching this.” She paused, looked sheepishly at the coffee table, and added, “You don’t happen to have a bag of peas you don’t want?”

  “Why don’t you three go in the kitchen and get some ice,” Aunt Helen said. “And then maybe watch something with less screaming? There’s probably even a little ice cream left,” she added hopefully when nobody made signs of moving. Finally Carrie groaned dramatically and, still wrapped in a blanket and looking more like a ghost than anything they’d seen in four hours of television, wandered into the kitchen.

  There was actually a lot of ice cream left, since the Professor was terrible at estimating serving sizes, so after giving Maddison a bag of chopped carrots because they were out of frozen peas, Chris and Carrie also got out the ice cream and had a small argument over toppings.

  Chris didn’t see any reason to put toppings on chocolate-chip ice cream. It already basically had toppings: the chocolate chips. Carrie responded by dumping half a can of honey-roasted peanuts on her bowl, because she was contrary, and possibly also insane, and—

  “Uh,” Maddison said, clutching her bowl protectively to her chest in the face of matching stares from Chris and Carrie, who had just then noticed the bowl of ice cream Maddison had quietly put together while Chris was trying to wrestle the peanuts away from Carrie. “Was I not supposed to use the maraschino cherries?”

  “It’s fine,” Chris said. “But, um—”

  “It’s a strange combination, that’s all,” Carrie said hurriedly. Maddison’s bowl of chocolate-chip ice cream was topped with maraschino cherries.

  “It’s a family tradition,” Maddison said, still hugging her bowl defensively to her chest. She looked understandably unnerved by what was admittedly undue interest in her snack choices. “Mom calls it ‘poor man’s Cherry Garcia.’”

  “It must be more widespread than we thought,” Chris said. “My mom calls it the same thing.”

  “Mine becomes lactose intolerant whenever we have it,” Carrie added. Then she grabbed the peanuts from Chris while he was distracted and made a mad dash for the living room, which only failed because Maddison was innocently standing on a corner of her blanket. They had to get out two more bags of frozen vegetables to deal with the bruises—Carrie fell flat on her face and Maddison got flung into a wall—and never did find out if the old mill was haunted.

  After Maddison left Carrie told Chris he ought to go ahead and propose right this minute, since he’d never find a more perfect girl and she would be able to pass on the maraschino-cherry-loving gene to their offspring. Chris stared at the front door that Maddison had only just walked out of in mild horror, then reminded Carrie that some traits didn’t need to be passed down, and suggested that the maraschino-cherry-loving gene might be recessive. Carrie argued that even then they’d probably have at least one kid in which it was dominant, and Aunt Helen came back from the store to find them arguing over a Punnett square.

  Professor Griffin dropped off a set of keys for Chris and Carrie late Sunday afternoon, extracting their most sincere promises that they would not lose them in the process.

  “And don’t have any wild note-taking parties either,” he said, tossing the keys back and forth and back and forth and finally at Chris. Professor Griffin was sitting in the kitchen having coffee with Chris’s mom, a brave decision, as Chris’s dad was cooking. “I don’t want to hear that you’ve been a bad influence on poor Maddison.”

  “Who’s Maddison?” Chris’s mother asked. “And are you sure you won’t stay for dinner, Willis? Robby is cooking.”

  “Honey, that’s not the best way to convince him,” Chris’s dad called, as something in the oven started smoldering and the fire alarms went off.

  “Maddison is Dr. McRae’s daughter,” Professor Griffin explained to Chris’s mom as they evacuated just in front of the dense billows of smoke. “She’s been working at the digitizing project up at the school with Carrie and I think they’re getting to be friends.”

  “Oh Carrie, that’s sweet of you,” Chris’s mom said to the newly arrived Carrie, who’d stopped halfway up the driveway with a bag of apples. She was eying the house and the smoke wafting out from the front door dubiously. Carrie was lucky enough to have parents who didn’t catch the stove on fire regularly.

  “What’s sweet of me?” Carrie asked. “Bringing over apples to go with the pork roast that may not be happening?”

  “It’s just a minor fire!” Chris’s dad yelled from inside the cloud of smoke. “We’re still eating at five!”

  “Making friends with Maddison,” Professor Griffin said, completely unbothered by the interruptions. “It’s very kind of you. From what I can tell Maddison could use a friend, especially considering her—er, that is, considering the stress we’ve all been under.”

  Chris and Carrie exchanged a look, Chris as sure as Carrie that the professor had started to say something completely different.

  “Carrie,” Professor Griffin continued, boisterous to a degree that was probably faked, “I was just telling Chris—”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the pork roast!” Chri
s’s dad interrupted, holding said roast triumphantly over his head.

  “No wild parties in the Archive,” Professor Griffin finished, as Chris’s mom steered her husband back into the kitchen very carefully, in order to prevent a repeat of the time he’d accidently dropped a roast chicken on his feet. Chris’s family had never been asked to host Thanksgiving, and his dad had still managed to ruin the turkey twice.

  “No wild parties,” Chris promised the professor solemnly, jangling the keys.

  Professor Griffin grinned and ducked into his car. “I think I’ll creep out while your father’s trying to destroy the pork roast. I’ll be back Tuesday to pick those shinies up, all right?”

  “Oh,” Chris’s Aunt Helen said even later that evening, when she dropped by to pick up a loaf of lemon bread and fetch Carrie and gossip with Chris’s dad, her first lieutenant in gossiping, “Maddison’s been over at our house a few times. Bree, she’s such a sweet kid. We ought to have the whole family over for dinner sometime.”

  It occurred to Chris, as his mom and aunt made plans to trap him in the house with Dr. McRae for a whole evening, that his family might be more the death of him than all the possible plotting of whatever shadowy unknown figures might be after something his aunt had known. Maddison was okay (please, please let her be okay) but her dad had—Chris got a notebook out after dinner and started a list.

  Kevin McRae had taken the job at the Archive right away, despite having refused it before. He had gone to the funeral of a woman he had no apparent connection to; tried too hard to be friendly with her family, particularly her niece and nephew; searched the desk and office of the woman he replaced; and arranged a suspicious car accident to ensure she needed to be replaced.

  “Technically we have no proof he did the last two,” Carrie said when Chris showed her the list. It was Monday evening. They were sitting on Chris’s front porch in the last of the sunlight, waiting for Maddison’s mom to drop her off so they could go search the Archive after hours. In honor of the occasion Chris was dressed in all black, although since it was eighty degrees in the shade he had reluctantly decided not to wear a turtleneck and a beanie. He had mourned the loss of this cat-burglary staple all evening, and was suffering still further because Carrie absolutely refused to join him in attire.

  Carrie was wearing a blue sundress patterned all over with red frogs, because she had no appreciation for what was likely to be the one and only time they got close to being cat burglars. That she looked so much cooler than Chris—both in temperature and, sadly, in attractiveness—only made it more upsetting.

  “Okay,” Chris said, scribbling ‘somebody’ slantways next to the last two points. “But you see what this adds up to, right?”

  “Well,” Carrie said, “I see a list that is going to be very awkward to explain if it falls out of your snazzy black cargo pants and Maddison finds it . . . ”

  “Maybe I’ll just go stick this in my desk,” Chris said.

  “Good idea,” Carrie said. “And yeah, it does look suspicious. It looks like Aunt Elsie knew something somebody didn’t want her to. And it looks like she was murdered to keep whatever it was a secret. And McRae’s actions do suggest he’s after that secret, too.”

  “Or that he knows we have more of the puzzle pieces,” Chris said slowly. It was beginning to hit him that if Aunt Elsie had been murdered for what they were trying to find, then whoever did it was still out there and might even now be marking out two new targets. “I’ll just . . . go . . . put this away . . . ”

  In the end he hid the list in his sock drawer, because Carrie claimed that no sane person would ever touch his socks, and Maddison seemed sane enough. Although when he got back to the front porch Maddison was on the stoop, also dressed in all black and wearing a fanny pack. Backwards.

  “I’m not insane!” Maddison said, before Chris could do anything more than stop short in astonishment. “It’s silly but it’s super convenient,” she added, doing jumping jacks. “See, no hands! If a ghost comes at me I can run like the wind without dropping anything.”

  “Actually, that is pretty convenient,” Carrie agreed. “I just have a shoulder bag, and Chris just has a lot of pockets and a secret desire to be a cat burglar.”

  “Well, who doesn’t?” Maddison asked.

  THE EDGEWATER ARCHIVE WAS EVEN CREEPIER THAN usual after hours. The parking lot it shared with the dentist next door wasn’t even deserted and it still managed to look spooky, as though something large and angry was hiding behind one of the few cars still scattered across the blacktop. By unanimous and silent decision Carrie parked as close as possible to the building, and directly under one of the streetlights.

  The front door groaned alarmingly when Chris turned the key in the lock and yanked it open, and the inside of the building was pitch black.

  “Don’t turn on the lights,” Chris said when Carrie made to flick the ones in the hallway on. She pulled a flashlight out of her purse in response, and snapped it on almost in his face. “Ow,” Chris protested. “It’s the Board of Directors! They’re trying to save energy and if we turn lights on after hours Professor Griffin might get in trouble for letting us in here.”

  “Yeah, that’s not foreboding at all,” Carrie grumbled. She grudgingly fished another flashlight out of her bag for Chris and handed it over. “Let’s just get in, find my necklace—”

  “And do one sweep for ghosts?” Maddison asked hopefully. She was wearing a headlamp, and still looked enchanting. Chris was very glad it was too dark for anyone to see him blush, because he was blushing very much.

  “Do one sweep for ghosts,” Carrie agreed, “and then get out. Hey, Chris,” she added sweetly—Chris looked at her and immediately quailed, because that was her plotting face—“maybe you and Maddison can go over the building for ghosts and meet me at the office? With any luck I’ll have found my necklace by then.”

  “Good idea,” Maddison said, pulling a video camera and a television remote out of her fanny pack. “It’s always best to have more than one person on these sorts of things, for independent verification and stuff.” She handed the video camera to Chris, tucked the remote back into her pack, and set about taking a preliminary temperature reading, failing to notice the silent communication Chris and Carrie were engaged in over her head.

  It wasn’t very good silent communication anyway. Chris gave Carrie a series of significant looks and raised eyebrows that she stubbornly refused to comprehend, and even his silent hand-flailing when she nodded angrily at Maddison as if to say, “Well, what are you waiting for?” failed to get a response. Chris was reasonably sure that Carrie was trying to help with his crush, but if this was how she defined helping he wondered how he would survive if she ever disliked a girlfriend.

  Actually—she had not liked Lindsey Ipcress very much. Chris didn’t think Carrie was responsible for the Ipcress family moving halfway across the country, mainly because he couldn’t imagine how she could be responsible for the Ipcress family moving halfway across the country, but he had never been quite sure.

  “I’m thinking we should start with the basement and work our way up to the third floor,” Maddison said, the remote back in her hand. “Chris, you’re holding the camera upside down. And this is not a television remote, it is my EMF meter,” she added, effectively guessing what Chris had been too embarrassed to ask.

  “Oh,” Chris stammered. “Right, sorry. Are you sure we shouldn’t stick together?”

  “I ain’t afraid of no ghosts,” Carrie said.

  Maddison grinned; Chris winced at the reference.

  “And I want to find my necklace.”

  “Catch you in a bit,” Maddison agreed, marching purposefully for the stairwell. Feeling like he was walking into a bad idea, Chris followed her.

  “And don’t let a ghost scare you into each other’s arms!” Carrie called as they were just reaching the door.

  Chris groaned. Maddison snorted.

  “Is Carrie trying to tell us something?”
r />   “Uh . . . ” Chris trailed off. Carrie was trying to tell him something, all right. Mainly that she was evil, and tired of his mooning. “Um . . . ” Chris tried again, holding the door open for Maddison while on autopilot. “I still don’t really understand what an EMF meter does?” He could almost feel Carrie’s disappointed scowl.

  “Oh,” Maddison said. “That’s understandable!” She stopped on the landing and handed the EMF meter to Chris. It continued to look a lot like a television remote, with red, yellow, and green markings on one end. “Basically, if it lights up like crazy there’s something weird going on with the electromagnetic field in the area,” Maddison explained. “The electrical activity in the area isn’t behaving normally. When ghost hunting, since most people assume ghosts have to put out some kind of energy, unusual patterns of electrical activity might be caused by ghosts.”

  “Maddison?” Chris said slowly. “Are a lot of so-called ‘ghosts’ just bad wiring?”

  “Yeaaaah, pretty much,” Maddison said. “But I don’t think Carrie was trying to tell you to ask me about ghosts and faulty wiring . . . ?”

  “Oh,” Chris said. There didn’t seem to be a way out. “So, I kind of, maybe, sorta . . . ” One of Maddison’s eyebrows was slowly rising into a puzzled expression, and she had crossed her arms. There was no way this could end well. “ . . . haveabitofacrush,” Chris finished in a rush. “It’s not on you!” he added when Maddison dropped her gaze. “I mean, it is on you, but it isn’t anything you did or didn’t do so there’s nothing to worry about, I’ll just go change my name and move to Argentina and live as a hermit and—oh I’m gonna kill her.”

  Suddenly he realized that Maddison was laughing.

  “Er,” said Chris.

  Maddison huffed and looked him square in the face. “Are you trying to tell me you have a crush, and that the crush is on me?” she asked. She had Chris cornered against the stair railing, and he spared a brief thought to jumping over the side to avoid the awkwardness of the ensuing conversation. But the steps to the basement level were dark and the drop was far and that would be very final, unless he came back as a ghost. And if he came back as a ghost, Maddison would still believe in him enough to want to have the conversation. So, it was pretty much a terrible idea.