by The Angst Guy and Brother Grimace
Daria and associated characters and their images are ©2009 MTV Networks
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Synopsis
Charles Ruttheimer III, Private Investigator: man of action, solver of mysteries, cool under fire, in trouble so deep there's no way out... no way but the hard way.
Author's Notes
The idea for this story was spawned by the above quote in Richard Rhodes' Dark Sun, which revealed the abysmal state of security and materials accountability at Los Alamos in 1945-1946.
Acknowledgments
Great appreciation goes out to Greystar, who in a PPMB thread suggested using Upchuck in this story. It actually worked.
I
[coughing] Charles… Ruttheimer the Third here [coughing]. If you are listening to this message [coughing], then my mission was compromised and I am… alas… no longer among the living. It is up to you, if you have the courage and the will to take up my dark and mysterious quest… quest, no, that isn’t the right word. Mmm. Uh… quest, mission, goal… assignment. It is up to you, the living to take up my dark and mysterious assignment… Mmm, try again: Rrrowrrr! This is Charles Ruttheimer the Third, man of action and adventure, about to set off on my first assignment into the dark realms of mystery. Soon the world will… soon, the… need more effective foreshadowing at the start. Hmmm. Move on.
My adoring fans-to-be, this stream-of-consciousness monologue is being preserved for posterity using my new digital tape recorder, the size of a thick credit card and easily slipped into a shirt pocket to do its work. The sound quality is excellent at close range, but anything farther than arm’s length had better be an explosion or a fair maiden crying out for rescue to register. One hopes for the maiden, of course, but danger always lurks, nightmares always threaten. I’ve taken the liberty of disguising the recorder as a library card in case it is uncovered during a search of my person—though one of course hopes the searcher would be luscious and hungry, her hands soft but knowing, taken in by my cool, suave presence. No one shall be the wiser of my true array of technological might. Secrecy is all. Note to self: check the Wizard Security website later and see if there’s another surveillance equipment sale going on.
Today is the first Monday in June, and I am a free man. No more days of pain and drudgery in Lawndale High, no more the endless torment of study hall, the rantings of mad principals, and the random cruelties of misogynistic science teachers. A new millennium opens wide before me, ready to be penetrated. A new chapter has turned… new page, a new page has been turned, was turned, and… touch up this part for my memoirs.
A word of warning, future listeners: I was not jesting about the new chapter in my life, the start of a great series, perhaps. I have finally found my life’s goal, discovered my true pathway, achieved occupational Nirvana: I am going to be… a private detective. Ah, laugh, go ahead and laugh—but… mmm, add something ironic here. In any event, we will see who is the real fool. I like that, good line. We will see who the real fool is. Even better. Excellent.
This recording is being made in my upstairs room at Ruttheimer Manor, in the pleasant if deadly dull suburb of Lawndale. It is ten twenty-five. An entire summer beckons before college begins at Lloyd University in August, when the name Ruttheimer will bring squeals of erotic bliss from the bee-stung lips of gorgeous coeds everywhere. I’m…
What? No, I was talking to myself.
I’m not on the phone. I was rehearsing. Well, a play, of course. It’s The Third Man, by Graham Greene. He didn’t write the play, he’s dead now, but someone else…
Mother, there is nothing wrong with talking to one’s self. You do it too. I’ve heard you. Lots of times. You—
My room is clean, it only looks messy. I know exactly where everything… very well, yes, it will be done before dinner. Before lunch then. Yes, okay, now is fine. I’ll be down when I’m done. Yes, I will. Bye.
She’s gone. Ah, the manifold joys of living with one’s family before setting off into the wide, wild world. She means well, Mother does, heart of gold and everything, but she does not understand me. My father—a good man in every regard—he doesn’t understand either. It pains me to admit that no one does—but perhaps it is for the better. Yes, it must be that way. Charles Ruttheimer the Third, man of mystery and adventure, as thoroughly and completely disguised from view as The Shadow, clouding the minds of men. Too long have my talents been wasted on childish trivia, too long have the world’s enigmas gone unsolved. It is time for my deeds to be writ large on the world, time for…
I am cleaning, Mother. I really am. Yes, fine, I will.
I fear I must reinstall that infrared beam midway up the stairs to ensure my privacy, and I will have to conceal the device better this time. And I’ll lock my door… done. The privacy of my Fortress of Solitude is complete.
As I labor, picking up socks and underwear for the sake of family peace, I reflect upon the basics of my first case, which only this morning was thrust upon me in the form of a stark newspaper article. A former classmate of mine, the feisty Daria Morgendorffer… Ruttheimer, Morgendorffer, it could work... um, as of last night, the lovely Daria is in the care of Cedars of Lawndale Hospital. Why? It was a tiny article in the back pages of the city section among the reports of car accidents and power outages, taken by ambulance to the hospital for reasons unknown. The situation calls for care. I shall visit and offer her comfort and strength, keeping my eyes and ears open for the reasons for her internment… That’s not the right word. Intern… wait, uh… inter… no, that’s definitely the wrong word. Intern, internment… forget it. It will come to me later. We will find out the source of her incapacity, the nature of her hospitalization. That’s more like it, her incapacity.
My keenly logical mind suggests that it would help if I did a little scouting for information beforehand. And the best person to ask would be… the buoyant and delightful Miss Stacy Rowe, close personal friend of the fabulous—rrrowrrr!—Miss Quinn Morgendorffer, Daria’s younger sister. I shall ring her up, gather the four-one-one, then set off on my first…
Yes, Mother, just a moment.
Oh, the horror. I shall have to sign off—but there’s more to come, yes, much—
All right, I’ll be there in a mo—
II
Due to technical difficulties (“If you’re recording this, I’m going to break your arm,” Stacy informed me), I was forced to abandon stream-of-consciousness journalism for today. Instead I am summarizing my findings in the evening. It was a gut-wrenching day for this novice gumshoe.
The superb Stacy was a font of covert intelligence. “Quinn said Daria’s got the flu,” she informed me by phone. In the background I heard a peculiar whizzing sound that rose and fell in pitch. “She was up the other night being sick to her stomach—oh, sorry if that grossed you out—oh, right, you’re not Sandi, keep forgetting—anyway, Daria was throwing up and running a fever and everything. Quinn said she has bags under her eyes from losing sleep—Quinn’s eyes, not Daria’s—but her eyes don’t look baggy, just a little red. She kept her silk periwinkle scarf tied over her face so she wouldn’t catch any germs.”
“The flu?” Hardly any mystery or adventure in that. Ah, well. “It’s not flu season, my sweet. That happens in the fall.”
“Well, that’s what Quinn said, you got me. Oh, crap—sorry I said crap—one of the race cars went off the track.” The whizzing noise resumed. “Okay. Oh, and there was that other gross stuff about her going to the bathroom, but it was gross.”
I winced. “It does indeed sound like the flu. Oh, cruel nature and her viruses. At least Daria has family to care for her.”
“Uh, no, not really, it’s just her and Quinn. Quinn said her parents are in Pennsylvania helping her grandmother move into a nursing home. They’ve been gone since school let out. It’s her dad’s mother. I hope I don’t end up like that, stuck in a nursing home talking gibberish and wearing old people’s clothes. And the rooms smell like dried—um, never mind. Anyway, Daria had to go up there to help out but then she came back and got sick, so it’s just Quinn at home.”
“Hmmm, perhaps we should pay Miss Morgendorffer a friendly visit to cheer on her recovery. We could even collect Quinn, and—”
“Charles, no offense, but you did tell me I could say anything to you I wanted and you wouldn’t get upset with me or give me the kind of look that my mom gives me that means I’m retarded, right?”
“Correct-a-mundo.”
“Well, Quinn wouldn’t get in the same car with you even if she were dead and you were the hearse driver.”
I chuckled. “My sophisticated manner has that effect on women, my sweet. She’s skittish, nothing more. Perhaps you could drive her over, then, and I’ll meet you both at the main entrance.”
“Why are you so interested in Daria all of a sudden? I’m not trying to be nosy but you did say I could ask you anything I wanted and—crap, there goes that damn red car again. I said damn, sorry about that. No, I’m not, I did mean damn! My therapist says I apologize too much. I’m really sorry if I do. No, wait, I’m not supposed to say that. Forget what I said. What were we talking about?”
“My interest in Daria.”
“Oh, yeah, so why do you want to go see her? You’re not like stalking her or anything, right?”
“Tsk, tsk, I would never stoop to such unchivalrous behavior as that. I wish to meet her openly and encourage her recovery, as I said.”
“Do you have a crush on her?”
Since she began her most recent course of therapy before school’s end, the newly outspoken Miss Rowe had acquired a knack for derailing me with certain trivial questions. I fear my response time to this query lagged.
“Hello?” said Stacy, her voice rising. “Charles? Hello? Did I say something wrong? Hello?”
“Uh… no, no, nothing wrong. Let us say I am fond of Daria, but I am no cad as to take it further without reciprocation.”
“Oh. Okay.” To my delight, Miss Rowe did not ask what “reciprocation” meant. She was far smarter than she let on to others, but I could tell. “I was wondering,” she said. “Quinn told me used to have a picture of her on your webpage. Daria, I mean. I mean, Quinn wasn’t looking at your webpage, someone else did and she heard about it—Daria’s picture being there, I mean.”
“I assure you that with you and Quinn present, nothing unseemly would ever occur.”
“You’re right. Quinn. Hmmm. Yeah, I’ll ask Quinn. She’ll probably wear that periwinkle scarf again because of the germs. Maybe I could help her pick one out. I love picking things out for her to wear. She has a much nicer body than I do. My body just—oh! Sorry! Are you sure you’re not recording this?”
I placed a hand over my heart, careful not to cover the recorder’s microphone. “You have my word.”
“I wasn’t kidding about breaking your arm. Wait, no, I didn’t mean that. Sorry.” The whizzing sound in the background stopped. She took a deep breath, held it a moment, then slowly let it out. “Okay, I have to say I’m sorry I threatened you because my therapist says I have all this internal stuff that wants to get out but if it ever got out in a bad way I might turn out like that girl from that movie whose head spun all the way around while she threw up green stuff.”
“You are the soul of decorum, dear Stacy.”
“Whew. Thanks.” The whizzing noise resumed. “So, that’s all we’re going to do, make sure Daria’s alive? I mean, make sure she’s still sick? I mean—”
“That’s all, I assure you.” We chatted a minute more, then hung up. I must be honest, at least with myself, that I had more in mind than merely wishing Daria well. I was also saying goodbye to her before leaving for college in the fall, and saying adieu to my long-time crush on her. It is my curse to become involved with women who play hard to get. Daria’s method of playing hard to get involved the use of razor wire, land mines, and concrete bunkers with flamethrowers, which made her irresistible. Life moves on, however, and some impossible dreams must be left impossible.
I dressed for the occasion in a green silk shirt (to match my fiery emerald eyes), beige slacks, and a polished but comfortable pair of black loafers. Though there was no mystery about Daria’s influenza, I concealed a few espionage-related items in my person, just in case. If I was going to be—rather, if I was a private investigator, I would need to stay in practice. Then I headed for the garage.
Ruttheimer Manor isn’t one of those overbuilt, overpriced monstrosities in the gated kingdom of Crewe Neck, but it’s no tarpaper shack. My grandfather invested well after the Great Depression, and my father and uncles did respectable jobs with their shares of Grand-dad’s inheritance. Our timeless two-story home, designed by a student of the immortal Frank Lloyd Wright, has ten acres of land behind it for no other reason than to admire the willows around the pond. There is the cemetery, yes, but the less said of that the better. Even the garage is an architectural delight, with skylights, split levels, and room enough for my father’s two cars, my mother’s one car, and my own chariot of fire.
The Love Machine purred to life when I turned the ignition, and we rolled down the long driveway to the street like the lead car in a presidential motorcade. My darling 1966 Buick Wildcat convertible had been refurbished since the fiasco during the school’s homecoming parade two years past, when she developed electrical difficulties and gave up the ghost right on the street. With the aid of modern technology, my bank account, and my skilled and loving hands, she was revived, repainted a dark cherry red, and outfitted with unique accouterments befitting a man of mystery such as myself. I was unable to afford satellite radio—the up-and-coming thing, I know—but otherwise she is the envy of every man with better than 20/200 vision. We paused at a flower shop, then made it to Cedars of Lawndale in excellent time. I parked and left the top down for the mundane passersby to express their awe at the hot satin seat coverings.
Stacy and a delectable orange-redhead in a pink tee appeared in the lobby minutes later. The latter teen saw me and assumed the look of one who has discovered an unwanted odor emanating from a garbage can.
“He’s not going to do anything,” Stacy whispered loudly to Quinn. “I’ll make sure he behaves.”
“Maybe he’ll catch what she has,” Quinn replied with a frown. “Okay, let’s get this over with. My scarf’s in my handbag.”
“Oh, you brought roses!” said Stacy, looking at my gift. “That’s so sweet!”
“White roses,” I corrected. “For the purity of my intents.”
“Daria’s going to kill me,” Quinn muttered. She led the way to the elevators and caught the next one, which was empty. “Oh, sorry, no room for you, Upchuck,” Quinn said as she pulled Stacy in after her. “Catch another.”
“No, Quinn!” Stacy pleaded. “He won’t try anything! I promise!” The pigtailed girl then gave me a meaningful look that I had seen only once before, on the face of the lead actress in Blood-Drinking Cheerleaders from Hell. It was all I could do not to shiver.
“I will do whatever the ladies wish,” I said agreeably.
“Okay, fine, whatever,” said Quinn. “You stand on that side and I’ll stand on this side, with Stacy between us.”
A risqué response died on my lips as Stacy’s look intensified. “As you wish, my dear,” I said. With that, we were on our way to the sea green corridors of the fifth floor and Daria’s lonely place of confinement. Quinn swiftly obtained permission for us to visit, even though it wasn’t yet visiting hours (such a temptress—rrrowrrr!), and we were escorted to room 513.
Quinn opened the door first, peeked inside, then opened the door wider to admit us. “Hey,” she called softly. “How’re you feeling?”
Daria lay on a wheeled hospital bed covered by a white linen sheet that matched the color of her face. Damp strands of auburn hair stuck to her forehead. Her glasses lay on a bedside table, but she looked in my direction and groaned in recognition.
“Something disgusting followed you into the hospital,” she whispered hoarsely. “I’ll get security to remove it.” Her right hand reached for the remote control to summon the nurse.
“Wait,” said Quinn, moving the remote control out of her sister’s reach. “This won’t take a second.”
“Time’s up,” said the still-witty Daria, without cracking a smile. My eyes had adjusted to the low ambient light in the room. To my astonishment, Daria’s colorless face appeared sunken and drawn.
“Upch—Charles brought you flowers!” said Stacy brightly. “Is there a vase around?”
“No,” said Daria, “but he can stand on his head and stick them in his—”
“Is there anything I can bring you?” Quinn interrupted. “Books, magazines, CDs, nerdy geek stuff?”
“A gun with two bullets,” said Daria. She again looked in my direction. “One’s for me.”
Quinn frowned as she felt her sister’s forehead. “Jeez, you’re burning up. They know what’s going on with you?”
“Flu, I guess,” said Daria in a faint voice. “Got all the symptoms.”
“I know, I know,” said Quinn, wrinkling her nose. “Look, we won’t stay long—”
Daria eyed me. “Good.”
“—but Mom and Dad are still in Plainfield with Grandma M, and I just wanted to see how you were doing. Does that burn on the side of your hip still hurt?”
Daria glanced at Stacy and I with unease. “Uh, let’s not get into that right now,” she said. “My head is freakin’ killing me. Can you get the nurse to—”
“At once, my lady,” I said with a flourish. Ever the valorous knight, I handed the white roses to Stacy and departed for the nurses’ station in search of pain reliever for the Feisty One.
Only one nurse was present when I arrived, occupied with a phone call from the x-ray department. I idly glanced around the station, then noticed a lovely female doctor looking through a chart. What caught my attention was her white lab coat. The side pockets were of the right height to be at the lady’s hips, the same place Daria had a small burn. Had something in her pocket caught fire? Or had she merely bumped into a hotplate on a table? More likely the latter. None of my business, of course, but…
The nurse on the phone hung up and turned to me. “Yes?”
“My close friend in room five thirteen would like something for her headache,” I said, assuming a stricken expression to spur a rapid and sympathetic response. “She’s in a great deal of misery.”
“Sure.” The nurse checked something on a computer monitor, then got up and went to a cabinet to retrieve medication. I followed her back to Daria’s room, but lingered outside the door and listened instead of going in.
“Here, hon,” said the nurse. “Hold this while I’ll get a cup of water for you.”
“Shooting me would be quicker,” I heard Daria mumble.
“It would, but we need to take another blood draw from you first,” said the nurse. “The lab didn’t like the first one we took.”
“You can have all the blood you want after I’m dead,” said Daria irritably. “Just kill me now and get it over with.”
“Daria!” cried Quinn and Stacy in horror. The conversation was promptly overtaken by a flood of soothing words and sororal mothering as Daria took her pain pill.
The lab didn’t like the first blood draw? That was odd. Why not?
“Is she going to be here overnight again?” asked Quinn.
“Were you going to have a party at the house if I did?” Daria grumbled.
Quinn shushed her sister as the nurse spoke. “The doctor wants her around one more day until we can pin down what’s going on with her. It looks like she’s got the flu, but the lab said they didn’t think so. If she’s doing better tomorrow morning, you can come pick her up.”
“And I’m sure she won’t mind if everyone talks about her in the third person, as if she were deaf,” Daria growled. So ill, but so feisty.
Quinn and Stacy began offering Daria local gossip in an effort to cheer her or at least distract her from her ailments. My mind was elsewhere. The nurse came to the door, smiled at me in a vacant way, then returned to the nurses’ station. After a moment I followed her, moving quietly (step with the heel first if wearing shoes) until I was behind a tall cart of clean bed linens, next to the station desk. The nurse punched numbers on a phone.
“Sarah,” she said, “when are they going to do another blood draw on Morgendorffer, five-thirteen?” Silence, then: “Leukopenia?” Another pause. “Shouldn’t her WBC count be up if she’s—well, that’s what I thought, too. Seven-ish, then? Okay, thanks.” She hung up, but I was on my way back to Daria’s room.
In my line of work, it comes in handy to know a little about everything and a great deal about certain things in particular. Computers and the Internet were among my strong points. Another was the mastery of illusion, stage magic, and of the business world and auto mechanics I knew volumes. And then there was medicine, about which I knew more than I would have liked.
Leukopenia meant Daria’s white blood cell count was down, critically down. It made no sense. If she were fighting an infection, her white blood cell count should be elevated. What in the world was happening? Could it be a new kind of infection, one that suppressed the immune system? I could not envision any means of Daria acquiring an AIDS-like disease unless she had poked herself with an infected needle, and where would she have the unfortunate opportunity to do that? She had been dating young Thomas Sloane, to be sure, but neither one struck me as the sort who would throw caution to the wind. Sex, however, makes fools of us all. I hoped for their sake—and especially hers—that that was not the problem at hand.
Stacy came out of the room, pulling the door almost shut behind her. She blew out her breath with a drained look. “Quinn might spend the night with her,” she whispered. “Daria’s looking pretty bad. Quinn asked us to wait until she comes out so we can take Daria’s clothes home and get some things for her.”
“My car and my time are at your disposal.” As if there were any other response a true gentleman could make.
“Thanks, Charles.” To my infinite surprise, Stacy then stepped close and gave me a quick hug around my chest. “Thanks for everything,” she said into my shirt, then let me go. Her eyes were turning red with tears. “I have to go to the bathroom. Did you see one?”
I pointed the way to the nearest restroom sign, and she left me alone with my thoughts, dark with concern. The Mystery Lady, as I referred to Daria in private, was in serious straits. What could do to help beyond serving as a taxi driver? Perhaps nothing. One must do as fate commands.
Carrying Daria’s clothing, Quinn came out in time, visibly drained herself. She had not once mentioned her scarf, much less put it on. The situation must be dire indeed to forget such protections. We made small talk until Stacy returned, then Quinn gave Stacy a plastic sack containing Daria’s skirt, unmentionables, and socks. To me she gave Daria’s boots and green jacket. Stacy gave Quinn a hug, then the somber redhead went back to be with her sister.
Little was said on the way out of the hospital. It stuck me that I had not yet said my goodbyes to Daria. I did not want to think about saying a goodbye that might become all too permanent. Doubtless thinking the same thing, dear Stacy rubbed her eyes and sniffed until I offered her a clean handkerchief. “Thanks,” she said, struggling not to cry. We made it to the parking lot, where we discovered that a passing bird had mistaken the satin covering on the driver’s seat for an outdoor toilet. This lightened Stacy’s mood for a time, and she snickered as I removed the covering and tossed it in a wad on the floor of the back seat for later cleaning. I handed Daria’s things to Stacy after she took her seat on the passenger side. The green blazer bumped against the side of the car as I was transferring it to her care. A metallic clink, metal on metal, could be heard.
Something was in the jacket’s left pocket. I made a show of adjusting and folding the garment properly, then handed it to Stacy. By sleight of hand, I had searched both of the outside pockets of Daria’s blazer. The right held nothing. I had palmed what was in the left one. After closing Stacy’s door, I walked around the back of the car to get to the driver’s seat. As I did, I looked in my right hand to see what I had found.
It was a key. It felt strangely warm.
III
The key was an antique brass model of the sort one imagines using on doors in a Victorian home. The warmth of it against my palm was disturbing; for a second I thought it was alive and almost dropped it. The possibility that it was residual heat from Daria’s body was quickly erased by the realization that she had not worn this jacket since she had entered the hospital yesterday evening. Perhaps the green blazer had been hung near a heating vent, but even that rang false. In my disturbed state after seeing Daria’s condition, my normally keen mind was unable to add two and two without getting anything but zero, so I dropped the key in my right hip pocket and got in the car. The blue sky was cloudless in the early afternoon as we drove to the Morgendorffers’ home, a perfect day to cruise the city with the convertible’s top down. Neither Stacy nor I was in any state to appreciate the ride.
At our destination I parked in the driveway and we again collected Daria’s things. Stacy had a key to Quinn’s house, which surprised me as I did not recall seeing Quinn give her one. She glanced back and gave me a nervous smile as she unlocked the front door, but said nothing. I shrugged it off as a Fashion Club thing. Stacy, Quinn, and two other girls had been members of the Fashion Club at school, intent upon raising the standards of teenage feminine pulchritude. It might have worked if they hadn’t fallen into the trap that had snared every other girl on the planet, adopting Britney Spears as one of their role models for style. I’m not complaining—every man likes seeing females dressed as if they’d roll in the hay for only a smile—but the ultimate effect lacked elegance and class. Or maybe I’d watched too many Humphrey Bogart movies.
The Morgendorffers’ red-brick house was upscale but comfortable, free of pretentious decoration. The family room was accumulating empty popcorn bowls in the vicinity of the wide-screen TV, supporting Stacy’s story about the Morgendorffer parents being gone. Stacy led me upstairs to Quinn’s room and went inside. The room was as pink as one could possibly imagine, and more so.
Stacy started to hand me the bag with Daria’s underwear in it, then seemed to rethink that gesture in mid-reach. “Never mind,” she said, and she tossed the bag onto Quinn’s unmade bed. “Go put Daria’s boots and jacket in her room. It’s that one at the end of the hall by the stairs. I’ll be in there in a minute.”
It was a weird feeling to walk up to the door of the Mystery Lady’s room, turn the knob, and look inside. I had secretly idolized Miss Morgendorffer since her arrival at Lawndale High School three years before. Beautiful women—may Hugh Hefner forgive me—are a dime a dozen. No matter how much you like to admire the ladies, and I do, they eventually blur into a gray sort of sameness. A man jaded by beauty starts to look for something more to trigger his interest. Daria Morgendorffer had that quality in spades. She wasn’t beautiful in a conventional sense, but what she had was worth dying for.
To stand in the entrance to Daria’s Inner Sanctum and gaze upon its eccentric splendor took my breath away. It was a teenage girl’s bedroom, but you wouldn’t have known it. It was a place where the color pink shriveled up and died. The room was dark even with the window curtains pulled back in full sunlight. The walls were thickly padded in battleship gray canvas. A single square light was mounted in the center of the colorless ceiling. Someone had had the bad taste to paint the wooden floor a dull maroon, then throw a big brown oval rug over it. Spread over this was a light dusting of used furniture, open dictionaries, scattered papers covered in penned script, cracked CD cases and loose CDs, dirty white socks, Post-It notes, chemistry set components, and life-size anatomical models of human bones and internal organs. The windows had sawed-off bars around the edges and a support railing was mounted against the right wall leading to the door. It was a little piece of Arkham Asylum where any Gotham City character would have been right at home. It was pure Daria.
Not long ago during a graduation party I had been fooled into thinking another girl, newly graduated like Daria and I, would be the dark goddess of my dreams. The error proved to be as excruciating as thrusting one’s hand into scalding water. The girl had not at all been what she had pretended to be, nor what I had imagined she was. Daria, though, was unquestionably the real thing: an undiscovered county that would never be fully known or mapped, much less conquered, an intellectual equal unchained to the expectations and opinions of others. She was the rarest of the rare, a soul determined to chart her own course across the seas of life, for right or wrong. I looked upon her room, both feminist and anti-feminine, a room that shouted I Am Who I Am without a care as to what others thought of it, and I swayed on my feet, giddy with wonder and ecstasy.
Then, all too quickly, came sadness.
I made my way to her unkempt bed and set her boots on the floor. The blazer was laid over her wadded sheet and blanket. We were going separate ways come the fall. There was not much time to break through the mighty defenses she had erected around her, not much time to see even the distant shores of her undiscovered world. Clouding that future was her illness. All bets were off as to the outcome, if even the doctors were puzzled by her condition.
I grimaced and started to leave when my attention was arrested by her work desk and book shelves, which had been to the left of the door. She had a Mac computer and a personal library that would have made any literature professor proud. A scan of titles revealed a wide range of classical and modern interests: Sartre, Tolstoy, Byron, Faulkner, Conrad, Dickens, Pynchon, Defoe, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Twain, Vonnegut, Kerouac, and the obvious and expected Orwell and Shakespeare. She read tales of Homer and novels fresh off the Just Released tables at Books by the Ton. Frazier’s Cold Mountain was pressed against Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus and E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, atop which was a dog-eared paperback of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. My mind reeled. I almost laughed to see that Daria was a hard-core Jane Austen fan, no doubt her secret guilty pleasure.
“There you are,” said Stacy from the doorway, startling me out of my mental fog. “You’re not messing with anything, are you?”
“Oh! No, no, just looking, I swear.” I indicated the books with a sweep of my hand and struggled for words. “It’s amazing,” I said at last.
Stacy leaned close and skimmed the titles for ten long seconds with narrow eyes. “Hmmm,” she said, then set off for the tall bureau by Daria’s bed.
“‘Hmmm’?” I repeated. “That’s all you can say?”
“What?” she said, going through drawers and pulling out items in quick succession. These she stuffed into a large white cloth bag with a rainbow on one side.
“You read,” I said. “What did you think of what she’s read?”
Stacy turned and gave me a strange look, then looked past me at the crowded shelves over Daria’s desk. For a moment she seemed on the verge of walking over to give them a second look, but instead she turned away and continued her search for fresh underwear for Daria. “It doesn’t matter what she reads,” she said as if she were quoting her therapist. “I read what I like to read, and she reads what she likes to read. I don’t have to read what she does.”
“Well,” I began, “yes, that’s true, but—”
“Not enough mysteries,” she said with sudden resolve. She shut a drawer, looked for a second through two others, then turned back to me. “She doesn’t have anything by Paretsky or Grafton or Kellerman or Evanovich or Cornwell, she doesn’t even have one freakin’ Patricia Cornwell novel in there. She’s got Sherlock Holmes and an Agatha Christie or two, but that’s it. Not much science fiction or fantasy, either. The Lord of the Rings, but no Ursula K. LeGuin. I mean, really.”
I blinked in amazement. “Sweet Stacy Rowe, my dearest friend, you are a book snob.”
She drew back at that, eyes wide. Then her face hardened. “You told me you would never call me a name like that.”
I knew I had but an instant in which to act before she stomped out of the room and possibly out of my life. I fell to my knees and stretched my arms as wide as theatrically possible. “That’s wonderful!” I cried. “Only someone who loves books more than anything would ever say that! That’s magnificent!”
She glared at me with frozen hazel eyes—then her glare softened. “You called me a snob!”
“A book snob, dear heart! That’s the best kind! Only a book lover would say it. And you’re right, everything you said was spot on! She needs to read more, get out of her rut, expand her literary horizons! You nailed it with one stroke. It was brilliant!”
She sighed and rolled her eyes, then walked past me toward Quinn’s cathedral of pink. “You’re weird sometimes,” she said, the matter safely at rest. “I’m going to call Quinn and see if there’s anything else she or Daria needs. Don’t touch anything.”
I dropped my arms and heaved a deep sigh of relief. That was too close. I wasn’t always careful with my choice of words, a bad habit for anyone who professed to be Stacy’s friend. As I got up, I glanced at the tidy mess on Daria’s desktop. Handwritten papers riveted my attention. They were covered in code.
I picked up the sheaf of typewriter paper. It smelled old and dry, like something one would find in an attic trunk. Someone—it did not look like Daria’s handwriting, with which I had become quite familiar in school—had written out in pencil a great series of numbers and alphabet letters grouped into units of six each, at seeming random, on one side of each page. The number-letter groups were ordered in a nine by twenty-seven array on each page. A few groups had been removed with an eraser in the past, then carefully corrected in the same, precise hand. I could not imagine the purpose of it.
A further examination of her desk revealed that Daria—in her own handwriting—had been trying to make sense of the code. She was treating the code as a substitution cipher, counting the appearances of various letters or numbers and attempting to match them against an English-language frequency analysis table, the old ETAOINS system. E is the most commonly used letter of the alphabet, so the most commonly used encrypted letter would probably be E, too—except in this case it apparently wasn’t. Daria’s crossed-out attempts to interpret the code revealed frustration with the scheme, which produced nothing sensible.
“Is there a camera on Daria’s desk?” Stacy called from Quinn’s room.
I glanced around and spotted a disposable camera. “Yes!” I called back.
“Get it. Daria wants to have the film developed.”
“Okay.” I put down the coded papers and picked up the camera. Under the camera was a large silvery coin. I leaned close and gasped. Was there to be no end of surprises today? It was a rare Ben Franklin half dollar, dated 1946, in superb condition and 90% silver. The unmarred surface was almost mirror-like. Was it uncirculated? Where in God’s name had Daria gotten it? With the greatest care, I reached over and touched the coin on its edge to move it closer and see it better, taking care not to smudge its bright surface with natural skin oils.
I gasped and drew my hand back immediately. The large coin was warm.
Just like the key.
I immediately took the brass door key from my back pocket—still warm!—and tossed it on the desk, wiping my hand on my pants. The sensation made my skin crawl. There was something wrong in the most elemental sense with a metal thing that stayed warm when by all reason it should not. I stepped back from the desk, uncertain as to what to do, then resolved to leave the room with only the camera. The key, the coin, the coded papers, none of it was really my business. Not yet, anyway.
At the last moment, I changed my mind and grabbed the coded papers, folded them, and stuffed them inside my shirt. Daria might want to dabble in cryptography to wile away her time in Cedars of Lawndale. Surely she wouldn’t mind the gift, and if she did—no harm done, and we were soon going separate ways, as was said.
Stacy met me at the top of the stairs, and we left the house to return to the hospital. On the way we worked out a plan to swing by a camera shop whose excellent all-female staff had served me well on many occasions. I went inside, dropped off the camera with a request for pickup in an hour (pausing only briefly to compliment the lovely ladies on their enchanting outfits), then drove on to the hospital. Stacy did not need my help carrying the things up to Daria's room, so I dropped her off by the main entrance and pulled off to the side to be out of the way of traffic.
Many possibilities crowded my mind and gnawed at my confidence. The Ruttheimers are notorious for their self-assurance, which has made them both daring and foolhardy, depending on the consequences of their bold actions. More often than not my family has come out on top, but the penalty for impulsiveness is occasionally ruin. I needed to think out this situation more deeply than was my custom.
What would make a metal thing warm all of the time? The only possible thing I could think of was radioactivity, but that was absurd. Scientists and bomb-makers who handle plutonium have commented on its warmth, the result of alpha particles that the dull, dangerous metal gives off. Radioactive objects made of other materials—say, if they had become extremely contaminated in some manner—would also feel warm, but where would—
The key had been in Daria’s left jacket pocket. Quinn’s face suddenly leaped from memory as she leaned over her stricken sister and spoke: Does that burn on the side of your hip still hurt?
And I recalled that exposure to radiation kills white blood cells, destroying the immune system. And severe radiation poisoning starts off much like the flu—
The blood in my veins turned to ice. I snatched my cell phone from my pants pocket and punched the speed-dial for Stacy’s number. It rang four times before she picked up. “Hello?” she said. “Charles? What—”
“Listen to me, Stacy! Listen! Does Daria have a burn on the left side of her hip? Is it on her left side?”
“What? Uh, wait.” I heard the mumble of background conversation, then: “Yes, she does. How did you—”
“Stacy! Stay right with her, I’ll be right back!”
“Are you leaving? Where are you going?”
“I can’t talk! Stay there!” I thumbed off the phone and started the car, then realized I did not have a key to the Morgendorffers’ home to get the key and coin safely out of the way of anyone else coming into the house. And I had handled both items myself! I’d even had the damned key in my pants pocket! Mother of God! Had I just sterilized my branch of the Ruttheimer family tree?
Think, think, think—the warm coin, the camera, the half dollar was sitting under Daria’s disposable camera. If the coin were radioactive, the film would be overexposed by prolonged bombardment with beta particles and gamma rays. I had researched it myself, toying with the idea of using strips of cardboard-covered camera film to detect hidden radiation sources. The Love Machine roared and swung out of the parking lot, onto the street, and back to Click Chicks as fast as she could take me.
Laura the counter clerk looked up as I banged in. “That was fast,” she said. “They’re not done yet, though—”
It took a moment to catch my breath and speak coherently. “The film,” I gasped, “I just found out… it might be… uh… overexposed!”
Laura looked at me a long moment over the top of her glasses, shook her head, and picked up the phone. She poked two numbers and waited. “Hey, that guy Upch—um, Charles Ruttheimer is here again… the kid, yeah, and he said…” She paused and her forehead wrinkled up in surprise. “It’s what?” She glanced at me. “Okay, I’ll tell him. Thanks.”
She hung up. “Bethany said the film was overexposed,” she said. “Everything on that roll is pitch black.”
God, no! “Tell her to throw out the camera and film, right now! I’ll explain later!” I bolted for the door.
“Do what?”
“The camera! Throw it out, don’t touch it, get it out of your shop!” I left, dodged parking-lot traffic, and jumped into the Love Machine. The cell phone came out and speed-dialed Stacy again.
“Charles!” Stacy fairly shrieked. “What are you doing? Are you trying to make me upset? I’m almost hyperventilating here!”
“Okay, calm down. Listen to me.” I stopped myself, took a deep breath as she once had, and let it out. “I’m coming to pick you up. We have to get back into the Morgendorffers’ house as quickly as possible. I don’t have time to explain.”
“No!” Stacy snapped back. Her shout was followed a moment later by a background “Sorry!” to Quinn and Daria, then she said, “Hold on.” I heard her stomp out of the hospital room and shut the door. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t have time to explain!”
“No! You do have time to explain! Don’t you dare treat me like I’m stupid! You told me you were never going to do that, so stop it!”
I closed my mouth, opened it, then closed it again. And saw it from her point of view.
“I’m sorry,” I said in a low voice. “I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Well… well, good!” I heard her panting on the other end of the line, on the edge of an anxiety attack. The panting then slowed and her tone dropped. “That’s good,” she said and drew a breath. “And I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
“Apology accepted.”
“And I accept your apology, too.”
“Thank you.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
A pause. Stacy cleared her throat. “What did you want to tell me?”
“I think Daria has radiation poisoning.”
Another pause. “Say that again, I don’t think I—”
“Daria is suffering from radiation poisoning. She accidentally picked up some things that were radioactive, I don’t know where she got them, but that’s what’s making her sick. You need to tell the nurses and doctors there that she has acute radiation syndrome.”
“Wait, wait, wait, let me write this down. I’ve got a pen and paper in my pocket.” I heard her fumbling around. “Okay, start over.”
I repeated what I had said. “The burn on Daria’s side came from a radioactive object she was carrying around in her green jacket. I found it and put it on her desk in her room, but you and I need to get back to the house and get the radioactive things out of there so no one else gets hurt.”
“Okay, hold on, just a second.” Stacy could be heard breathing deeply and slowly. Her voice lowered to a near whisper. “You mean radioactive, like a bomb or something.”
“No, not like a bomb, but dangerous anyway. Picking up the key and the coin can hurt you. The radiation from the things she was carrying around made her sick. Go tell the staff exactly what I’ve told you, then come outside so we can get those things out of Daria’s room.”
“No,” said Stacy after a beat.
“Uh, what?”
“I’m going to tell the doctor what you told me,” she said. Her voice filled with steel. “Then I’m going to call the police and have them go to the house and get the radiation stuff themselves. You are not going to pick up those things if they’re dangerous. So you come back to the hospital as soon as you can and help me tell everyone what’s going on.”
For a few moments all I could hear was her frightened breathing. She had dared to stand up and test our friendship, trusting she was in the right.
And she was, of course. I knew it, too.
“Okay,” I said, feeling much calmer. “I’ll be on over. Give me ten minutes.”
Stacy let out her breath. “Thank you, Charles,” she said. She gave out a sound halfway between a cough and a sob, a solid harbinger that a good cry was about to break free, and hung up.
I dropped the cell phone into my lap. That was that, then. All I had left to do was to go back to the hospital, explain everything to the police and hospital staff, give Daria her coded papers… which the police would then confiscate…
The Kwik-Stop Photocopy Shop was open when I drove up. It took five minutes to finish twenty one-sided pages, then I stuffed the copies in my car trunk under the spare tire—adding all espionage-related accessories on my person that I did not wish to end up in an evidence box. That done, I drove back to Cedars.
IV
Silly me, I had expected to record this mid-case summary from my bedroom instead of a hospital room at Cedars of Lawndale. The hospital staff was most insistent on my remaining for overnight observation. As the night nurse is exceptionally rrrowrrr!—what else could I do? I expect to be released in the morning. My Girl Friday, Miss Rowe, will likely also be released, though her parents and not I will take her home. Mr. and Mrs. Rowe seem to believe I am in some way responsible for their daughter’s exposure to radioactivity, though she has done her best to set the matter right with them.
The hospital staff did not disbelieve Stacy when told them Daria was suffering from acute radiation syndrome, but they had understandable difficulty with the whys and hows and whens of it. When I arrived at the hospital I elaborated on her warnings in the confident, knowing manner of one long accustomed to such hazards. Afterward there was a brief opportunity to talk with Stacy, Quinn, and Daria, until someone from Radiology arrived with a Geiger Mueller counter, ran it over us, and declared us all contaminated. That was when the fewmets struck the proverbial windmill.
In retrospect I must say that I never felt quite as well scrubbed and sterile (not in the reproductive sense, I hope) as I did after my first-ever decontamination shower. Our floor was first sealed off by hospital security. We were then each assigned a room near Daria’s, everyone who was already in those rooms was moved out on the spot, and hospital staff appeared wearing bright blue coverall bodysuits and face masks, looking quite befuddled to be wearing them. I will spare my audience the chaotic details of the next few hours. We each found ourselves in bed with plasma IVs we did not need, all the while poked and prodded and made to give blood samples until we were close to anemia. Then—the police showed up and began questioning us and searching our clothing (Thank God I got rid of my detective equipment when I did!), as doctors and nurses took vital signs and performed tests. It was a three-ring circus. From the sounds I discerned in other rooms, Stacy and Quinn underwent similar torments. My interest was piqued when I heard Quinn suddenly cry out, “Watch it! I’m ticklish there!” Oh, to have been a fly on the wall!
I had hoped to give an exclusive television interview or two that evening and present the world with its first look at the suave and masterful Charles Ruttheimer, P.I., rescuer of maidens and human bulwark against radiological terrors, but the police and hospital would have none of it. I was forced to content myself with watching TV news footage of my tearful mother standing outside in the hospital parking lot, calling me her “precious baby” and praying for my quick release. It was all I could do to keep from grimacing. My cousins would never let me live that down.
And the police did confiscate the coded papers I gave to Daria, as I had expected. The testy exchange between Daria and the officers carried down the hall quite readily before she was moved off to another room in the Intensive Care Unit.
I was able to assemble a fair picture of events elsewhere from blaring police radios, the TV news, and the chitchat of hospital staff. Police entered the Morgendorffer home, using keys given them by either Quinn or Stacy, then discovered evidence of radioactive contamination and summoned a hazmat team from the fire department. If I thought a circus was playing out in my hospital room, what then took place at the Morgendorffers’ was the chariot-racing Circus Maximus of all time. The helicopter coverage of the crowd was especially entertaining.
My deep satisfaction at having at last achieved the fame and recognition that I so well deserved (and knowing such attention would thoroughly infuriate a certain man-hating science teacher I knew) was tempered by several wee, nagging concerns. One: to how much radiation had our little group been exposed? Daria’s fate began to weigh on my mind after she was moved to the ICU. She left as feisty as ever, per her threat to sue the police for taking her papers. Yet even my unease over the post-contamination quality of the Ruttheimer family jewels paled against the sure knowledge that the fair Daria had taken a greater exposure than the rest of us put together, and over a far longer time. There would be consequences. My blood chilled as her fate played out in my imagination.
Two: how on earth had this situation come about? Where had Daria gotten the key, coin, and papers? Was there anything more to be discovered? The TV and police radios were of no help here.
Three: how had Daria not noticed the warmth of the key and coin? The coin was unblemished, implying she had handled it with a cloth to preserve its pristine state. The key, however, she had in her own pocket. Didn’t she sense anything out of the ordinary?
Four: was there something in those coded papers that could be of use to us in our present predicament? Would I even have the chance to peruse them? The possibility that my Love Machine was being roughly decontaminated—or even disassembled!—brought me anxiety, but not quite so much as the fear that the photocopied papers would soon be discovered, and I would be suspected of a deeper involvement in current events that the police had been led to believe. Not that the subsequent notoriety would be such a bad thing—women flock as eagerly to the bad boys as to the good—but the time I would spend in prison before matters were straightened out might make me long for the day when my high-school science teacher locked me in a closet to demonstrate the effects of sensory deprivation. She claimed to have forgotten about the “experiment” when class was over, but a kindly janitor let me out after school when he heard my pleas for help.
As the evening wore on, the TV news coverage expanded to take in the decontamination of Click Chicks, which caused me to wince. So much for my Favored Patron discounts. Then coverage switched to a bank in a small town called Plainfield, Pennsylvania, which was also being searched and decontaminated. I recalled that Plainfield was where the Morgendorffer parental units were staying. What was the connection? By sunset the federal government was involved. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had dispatched investigators, the FBI had shown interest, and an emergency team from FEMA was on its way. The local science store sold the last of its dosimeters and Geiger Mueller counters in minutes. Fear, if not panic itself, was palpable in the air.
In the midst of this, I received a visitor: the inestimable Stacy Rowe herself. She came in pulling her wheeled IV stand, wearing an ill-fitting and unattractive hospital gown with equally loathsome slippers. A nurse accompanied her as chaperon.
“Hey,” she said with weary smile. I could tell she was mortified about her outfit, but she bore its lack of style as best she could.
“Greetings!” I sat upright and put the TV remote aside. “This is a welcome treat. To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”
Stacy sat down in a chair at the foot of my bed and adjusted her garments. “I’m kind of scared,” she said. She glanced at the nurse, then looked back at me. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.”
“We are in the best of hands, so fear not,” I said. “Tomorrow we will be declared fit and sent on our way.”
“I’m not worried for me.” She bit her lip and looked at the nurse again. “Can I talk to him alone for a minute? You can leave the door open, okay? Just for a minute?”
“Just for a minute,” said the nurse with a sigh. “No funny stuff.”
“I assure you my intentions toward this young lady are honorable,” I told her with complete sincerity.
“Right,” she muttered as she left. “I’ve heard that one before.”
I turned to Stacy. Her pigtails had been combed out and her hair washed and dried, but her hazel eyes bore a haunted look. “I’m worried about Quinn,” she said in a stage whisper, nervously watching the doorway. “She’s really worried about Daria, and they took away her cell phone so she can’t call her parents or friends or anyone.”
“Daria is in worse straits than any of us,” I said. “Quinn will pull through, as always.”
“Yeah, I know, but…” She bit her lip. “Quinn’s been the best friend I could’ve ever had. I don’t know what I would do without her. She’s been—” To my astonishment, her eyes began to fill with tears.
Ohhh.
“You asked me once if I had a crush on Daria,” I said, keeping my voice low. “Am I out of line if I ask if—”
“No!” she said, cutting me off with an angry shake of her head. “That’s not it! Don’t ever say that again.” She sat in silence, still watching the door. “That’s not it,” she repeated, then gave a ragged sigh. “Let’s don’t talk about this anymore, please.”
When a Ruttheimer missteps, he puts his leg in the mire up to the hip. “Did you hear anything about how Daria came to acquire the key and coin?” I asked, fishing for a swift change in subject.
“Oh.” Her manner lightened. “Yeah, I did. I can’t believe that you—no, wait, I can believe it was you. Did you really pick up a radioactive key and stick it in your pants pocket?”
I spread my hands. “It didn’t have a label saying it was dangerous.”
“You idiot,” she said mildly. “Quinn told me what happened, before—” She gestured at our surroundings “—all this happened. Her mom and dad were trying to get her dad’s mother into a nursing home in Pennsylvania. I think her grandmother had a stroke or something, she was babbling a lot. Anyway, they called Daria to come up and get something for them out of a safe deposit box, and I guess what she got was all that stuff she had that you got that the police took.” She frowned. “What exactly did she have? There was like this key and what else?”
I quickly told her the truth about everything I had found and done—leaving out only the part about copying and hiding the coded papers. She nodded. “That’s so strange,” she said. “Why would anyone give her such awful stuff?”
“I doubt it was meant to be given to her,” I said, thinking it through. “If she was helping her parents, the items must have belonged to her father’s family, her grandmother and grandfather.” I now knew why the bank in Plainfield was being investigated. That was where the safe deposit box had been. How severe was the contamination there?
The nurse peeked in at this point, but left when Stacy begged for five more minutes. “I’m sorry I snapped at you,” Stacy said in a subdued tone. “Quinn’s been helping me through some stuff I was talking about with the therapist. I don’t want to talk about it right now.” She bit her lip, looking at the floor. “It’s not really all that bad, I guess, but—”
“Say no more,” I commanded, raising a hand. “The Chuckster was out of line to have asked.” The topic then turned to Stacy’s family, which produced the news about her parents’ uncompromising dislike of me. In the good news, her older half-brother was coming in to check on her. She talked about him fondly, a twenty-something truck driver who sent her postcards from all over North America. The two were very close, a rare thing in a world of horrid sibling rivalries. He sounded like my kind of guy. I hoped he did not bear me a grudge, as I wished to meet him.
Our conversation at an end, Stacy arose and took a step toward me, perhaps for a hug. Alas, the nurse had the poor timing to reappear at that moment and escort her away. No fraternization among radioactive invalids was allowed, it seemed.
I was in no mood for TV. My mind idly turned to the coded papers. A substitution cipher seemed unlikely, given Daria’s defeat using frequency analysis. Might there be a key word or phrase that would aid in breaking the code? An intriguing possibility. If the papers had been picked up from the bank where Daria’s paternal grandparents lived, they (assuming one or both of his parents had written them) were probably meant for Daria’s father alone. Would he know what to do with them?
Key word, key—could the brass key have had a code phrase inscribed upon it? For a moment my heart leaped—but I recalled no such writing on examining the key, which was simple and unadorned. Perhaps the writing was extremely small, but if so it was irrelevant now. Could the physical key itself have been necessary to break the code, by laying it over the text from the beginning and seeing which letters could be seen through the key’s hollow-center grip? A tempting possibility, but I did not have the key. I then realized the message could be read in a vertical line down each page, which any fool could see, so that possibility was out as well.
Numbers and letters grouped into units of six characters, ordered in a nine by twenty-seven matrix on one side each of twenty pages. A transposition array, perhaps? That would be painfully obvious, but I would have to try it. Each row of digit groups would have to be reordered in a six-by-nine array, then a nine by six array, then a three by twenty-seven array, and so on. I would have to read rows across, columns down, zigzagging, in spiral form—ye gods! Programming my computer to solve it would take as long as doing it by hand. It gave me a headache just to think of it. Was it worth the trouble?
The puzzle grew ever more complex. If memory served, a lot of numbers were mixed with the alphabet letters. What kind of message would have so many numbers in it? Perhaps the numbers were decoys in a null cipher and were meant to be thrown out before further decryption was done, or the letters were the decoys and the numbers were to be kept, each linked to an alphabetic substitution code. My head throbbed.
Three was the lowest common prime divisor of six, nine, and twenty-seven; could the key be based on the number 3? Perhaps every third letter in each group was to be kept or thrown out, or every third group of letters, something like that. That would be a disappointingly simpleminded way of doing it. It was worth a try, but seemed unsatisfying. The solution cried for more.
Frustration with the code led my mind to wander. Knowing the enemy is half the solution to any problem. What could I infer about the person who originally rented the safe deposit box? Someone had long ago (when?) taken the time to rent the box, drop the secret papers inside with two grossly dangerous items, and leave it for someone else to find, a victim who would somehow be given the means to open the box. This did not strike me as the work of a simple man. The box renter would have had to protect himself from the items’ radiation unless he were suicidal or amazingly ignorant. Ignoring the latter possibilities, a simple code would be unlike him. Could the papers be a red herring? Might they be meaningless? Creating twenty pages of fake code for no reason defied logic. They had to mean something.
My reflections continued as I absently listened to the nighttime chatter of nurses down the hallway. One could not assume good intentions motivated the renter of the box. The box was a death trap so bizarre and horrifying that it could have been constructed only by a calculatingly cruel individual. Usually only one person at a time has access to a safe deposit box. The box’s contents were not intended as terrorist devices for spreading fear. The box was a deadly weapon with a definite target. I could not imagine Daria was its intended mark. Someone else in her family, then? Her parents had the means to open the box, which they had transferred to Daria. They would never have put her in harm’s way, which meant that the intended victims were… her parents? No, not both—her father. It was his family’s hometown, after all. Unless I was missing valuable pieces to the puzzle, a lethal gift had been left for her father to open, but his daughter had unwrapped it instead. It was the only possibility that made sense. The box-renter knew her father well enough to bear a grudge against him—but who could it be? His parents? I shook my head. No sane parent would do that. A family “friend,” more likely. Then how had the means to open the box been given to her parents?
I heaved a sigh and prepared myself for bed. It was just past ten-thirty. I was brushing my teeth, my faithful IV stand at my side, when the possibility dawned on me that whatever was in the coded papers might be as fatal as the key and coin. I would have to proceed with care if a toehold was found for cryptanalysis. I wondered if Daria’s father had access to a code book that would solve the mystery—no, that was too complicated and assumed too much.
Then I realized I was making the entire affair way too complicated. Even basic decryption techniques like frequency analysis might be unnecessary. The simplest thing to imagine, for the purpose of preserving my sanity if nothing else, was that if Daria’s father had the key to break the code, he could sit down at a desk and unlock the papers’ secrets in no time. The use of elaborate matrices, polyalphabetic ciphers, and long word-substitution code books was right out. The code had to be obscure enough to not be obvious at a glance, but simple enough to be used in one go. That made perfect sense. It fit Kerckhoffs’ principle of encryption, that the best codes should not require secrecy and should create no difficulties if found by an enemy. Knowing the encryption technique, the algorithm, was the first step. It was unlikely to be complicated. Without the hidden key, the actual values to be plugged into the algorithm, nothing could be done. The key might even have been right in front of me at some point, as it would have been in front of Daria’s father had he begun decoding with only the contents of the safe deposit box before him.
I had looked the papers over as carefully as possible during the photocopying. No possible key in the form of a scribbled word or number in the margins had been visible. Either the key was locked in Mr. Morgendorffer’s memory, so only he could get the right answer, or else the means of finding the key was known to him, but the specific key could somehow be found if one but knew where to look. I considered the case of the Beale Ciphers of 1885, which purported to lead to a fantastic buried treasure. Could the code be a book cipher? If so, I was stumped. No reference to any book existed. The Bible was commonly so used, but Daria’s family did not strike me as especially religious.
The slinky, dark-haired night nurse interrupted my thoughts to take my vital signs for the twelfth time that evening. I asked about the possibility of a sponge bath to soothe my shattered nerves, but she only laughed and walked off. Feisty temptress! With no recourse to solving the mystery, I donned the hospital’s pitiable excuse for pajamas, crawled under the covers (one arm out for the IV tube), and attempted to get some sleep. It was no use. My fevered brain continued to work overtime, relentlessly struggling with the coded secret. I began to imagine myself as Daria’s father, sitting down at a table with only a pencil and the items from the lock box before me. Twenty papers, a brass key, and a coin. Twenty papers, a brass key, and a coin. Twenty papers, a brass key, and…
My eyes opened wide. The cipher’s key had indeed once been right in front of me, but it was not the key.
It was the coin.