Keyword Cypher by E.A. House

Author:E.A. House
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABDO
Published: 2018-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

CARRIE CALLED PROFESSOR GRIFFIN AND ASKED HIM if she could come by the Archive and look through her aunt’s old office for her missing necklace that evening. She did the deception in stages; first tearing the house apart “looking” for the necklace; then having a worried conversation with her parents in which they actually encouraged her to call the Archive; and then finally spilling the whole story to the professor over the phone. He was nicely sympathetic. Carrie told Chris as much at ten that night, as she was climbing in his bedroom window again.

“Next time,” Chris said as she landed hard on the edge of his bed and managed to pull off most of his sheets, “I climb in your bedroom window like some demented Santa Claus.”

“Santa goes down chimneys,” Carrie pointed out. “I got us back in the Archive, by the way,” she added, as Chris grumbled that Santa had to enter somewhere when the house had no chimney, so why wouldn’t the window be the most logical alternative? Then he registered what else she’d said.

“Oh, what did Professor Griffin finally say?”

“Well,” Carrie said, bouncing slightly on the bed and kicking at the exercise ball, “some of McRae’s boxes are already in that office.”

“Oh no.”

“And there’s a committee meeting on Saturday so they don’t want us in the building. But Professor Griffin doesn’t think anybody will mind if we come in Monday evening after hours and look for it, so long as we keep McRae apprised of where we are so he isn’t worried about his stuff.”

“Oh no. Really?”

Carrie held up a hand. “So, I told him I happened to be friends with McRae’s daughter and asked if it might be okay for her to be there instead of her dad, and Professor Griffin said that was totally fine.”

“So all we have to do is convince Maddison to help us search an empty office for your missing necklace in the middle of the night.”

“Well,” Carrie said, “when you put it like that.”

But Maddison proved to be much more enthusiastic about the idea than Chris and Carrie expected. In fact, when Carrie and Chris asked her the next day when they all reconvened, this time in Chris’s living room again, she was so excited-yet-trying-to-hide-it that for a terrible moment Chris feared she was secretly planning something herself, but then she worked up the courage to admit that it was the idea of spending time in an older building after dark that was exciting. Because she wanted to look for ghosts.

“I have a camera and an EMF meter I’ve only ever been able to use on people’s houses and this is a whole abandoned building at night!—aaaand you probably think I’m weird.”

Chris thought she was spectacularly pretty and that the sun made her hair shine and her eyes turn an even deeper blue but his brain-to-mouth filter was still good enough that he managed not to say it.

“I do keyword cyphers for fun,” he said instead, which was skating dangerously

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