Mapmaker (8 page)

I felt Connor’s hand on my shoulder. I quickly typed in
the MapOut email account and logged in under my dad’s name. Right away his email account appeared, asking for three passwords.

Three? Who has three passwords?
Connor had told me he’d made it difficult, but this felt like paranoia.

“I have the first two,” Connor said. “The hackers emailed them to my dad, to his personal account.”

My hands hovered above the keyboard. I noticed they were shaking slightly.

172 Madeville Road. Connor spelled out the letters.

“The name of the street my mom grew up on,” I said. What’s the next one?”

“Your full name, all one word, and your birthday, month and day.”

I couldn’t help but smile. I typed in tanyabluebarrett2/18.

On-screen, the door opened and another password box appeared.

“This is where the hackers got stuck,” Connor said. “Your dad put a time lock on it, so if you type in the wrong password, it automatically shuts the computer down for twenty-four hours.”

I swallowed, sitting back in the chair. Now I felt pressure. There was another password he used sometimes, but it wasn’t coming to me. My mother’s name? Beth’s name? My sweet and long-dead childhood cat, Bootsy? No. It had to be something with letters and numbers. My dad had often lectured me about Internet security, especially when I first started going online. He was afraid of some creepy cyberspace predator out there. A mixture of letters and numbers. His voice floated back from the past:
“Something that’s meaningful only to
you.”
He had told me not to use names of family members but he had used mine—so had he broken his own rule, again?

My mind was blank. Connor sat beside me picking at the cuticle around his thumbnail. I saw him doing this from the corner of my eye, and turned, looking at him. He had had this habit since he was a kid. I had a clear memory of us, sitting in my dad’s outdoor shed right after his parents separated and his mother moved out. We were playing a game of checkers on a towel on the splintery floor. He was picking at the skin on his thumb so badly that he’d bled.

My head jolted up. I put my fingers on the keyboard. The poster in my dad’s shed, the picture on his office door, the cartographer that nobody else seemed to know or care about. That was it, the other password: Piri Reis.

Nothing happened. Nothing opened but nothing closed. The computer didn’t shut down. There was another part of the code. Letters and numbers. But what numbers? Maps were all numbers.

“Fifteen thirteen?” Connor whispered.

“The date the map was made,” I heard myself whisper back. Of course. Why hadn’t I thought of that? I hid a secret smile and shook my head, typing in the numbers. The screen unfolded, revealing a series of emails, and I felt a surge of relief. My eyes narrowed. The last was dated March 21. Five days before he died. I scrolled down the list. All were to and from C. Wright.

The name rang an instant bell. Cleo Wright: one of my dad’s oldest friends. “The hippie with the horse farm,” as Beth called her. She lived in New Mexico. Relief turned to suspicion. It couldn’t be. Had Beth been right? Was he
having an affair with some old flame he’d passed off as a friend?

I read the subject line of the last email aloud: “Alaska is an inkwell.” I turned to Connor, who looked equally baffled. “What does that mean?”

He shook his head. I scrolled down to read the email before that one, sent from my dad.

Blackout Alaska. Stakes. 72 miles. 41 North. End.

I clicked the last email he received from her. It had never been opened.

Leave this alone and cease contact. Confirm receipt of this email.

There was no reply sent from my dad. Had he ever even received it?

“Wait, let me see this.” Connor reached for the keyboard, typing in Alaska. He pressed the
SEARCH
button. Alaska appeared seventy-two times. Connor’s face went pale as he frantically scanned the text.

“What is it?” I could see the pale blue light from the computer screen reflecting in his flitting eyes.

“I’m not sure yet. I overheard my dad talking about Alaska on the phone a couple nights ago. He was agitated. Not pissed … like, nervous. I’m not sure if he invested money in Alaska or what is going on.”

A sound came from the hallway, a door closing.

I gripped Connor’s arm, putting my finger over my lips.

We stared at each other. Silence. Had I imagined it? No. We both turned to see the dark strip beneath the door light up from the motion sensor. The office was dark, the door was locked, but there was no escape. I tiptoed to the window,
peering out: nothing but a drop. Outside the office door, we heard footsteps and the muffled sound of voices. Lots of them. They drew closer, too many footsteps to count, until they seemed to be right outside the door.

My heart thumped wildly in my chest. But they kept moving.

Connor signaled to me to stay and put his ear against the door, listening. My mind raced through all kinds of nightmare scenarios of having to explain our break-in to Beth, to Harrison. I’d be fired, of course. Fired for trying to prove or disprove my dead father had been having an affair.

The last thing I heard were their footsteps walking upstairs to the floor above us.

“We better get out of here,” Connor whispered.

My pulse was still racing. Before I shut down the computer, I clicked on the emails from Cleo, sending them to myself. Then I turned the computer off. The office went dark. We quickly locked the door behind us and kept low, avoiding the motion sensor, as we made our way down the hallway—out the window to the back fire escape. The night air had grown cooler. The building was dark except for two windows from the floor above us. I didn’t feel safe. I don’t know what I felt. Confused. Exhausted. Angry.

For some reason, Connor didn’t climb down the fire escape; he climbed up, toward the lighted windows and the soft voices.

I glared at him. Did he want to get caught? But at the same time I was curious. Who else would be here so late at night? I found myself creeping up beside Connor, squinting through the bottom of the windowpane.

A group of five men and three women were looking at diagrams on a large computer screen. Grown-ups, in suits. It could have been a business meeting anywhere in the world. There was nothing strange about the scene at all, except for the hour. That, and I didn’t recognize any of the participants as MapOut employees. The only person I recognized was Harrison, Connor’s dad.

“I thought your dad was in Boston,” I whispered, turning to him.

Connor’s eyes were focused. “So did I.”

Rao’s was packed at 8:30
A.M.
A line had already formed out the door and all the tables were taken. Music from the Amherst College radio station sounded from the speakers and the spaced-out sounding DJ’s voice came through reciting a public service announcement. My eyes felt dry and achy from only an hour or two of sleep.

I kept turning to the door every five seconds, waiting for Connor to arrive.

He was late.

Last night, after spotting Connor’s dad, we’d bolted back down the fire escape. Connor needed to get home. He was nervous, panicky, muttering about how he needed to put the office keys back in the hidden compartment under the front seat of Harrison’s car before his dad got back and noticed they were gone.

I ordered a latte and a toasted poppy seed bagel with cream cheese and slumped down at the one empty spot at the
communal table. I tried not to check the time on my phone but couldn’t stop. At 9:02 I began to feel panicky, too. My hands shook as I lifted the coffee to my lips. I realized I was hungry. I chewed my bagel, listening to the chatter of the radio DJ. Anything was better than awful music.

Where was he? Maybe he had overslept? Forgotten to set his alarm? Somehow being the overachiever he was, that didn’t seem like something he would do. I double-checked our texts from the night before—starting at 1:55
A.M.
—just to make sure I hadn’t missed something, that I wasn’t losing my mind or imagining things.

When that last text
came, I put the phone down on my bedside table and set the alarm for 7:40
A.M.
I’d just turned off the lamp and sunk my head down on the pillow when I heard the cricket-chirp sound of another text.

Connor

Hey … ok you know I’m not the best texter in the world and it’s not my favorite way of communicating but I just need to tell you something.

Tanya

What is it?

The phone rang as
I stared at it, waiting for him to answer my text.

“Connor?”

“Hi. I’m sorry. I know it’s late.”

“That’s okay. What is it? Did you find something?”

“No. I’m not calling about that.” He drew an audible breath. I pressed the phone to my ear. We hadn’t spoken on the phone since we were kids. I remembered having quick and stilted conversations with him from my pink princess phone in my room. Mostly what I remembered was tangling the cord around my finger over and over again until it got stuck, untangle-able. I was still wondering why he had to
call
. I clenched the pillow in my hand, listening.

“I just wanted to tell you in person, not in text, that it was really good to see you today. I mean …” He sounded flustered, his words rushing together. “I mean better than good. To spend time with you.”

I held my breath. Did he really just say that? Or had I misheard him?

“Tanya? You there?”

“Yeah.” My voice sounded weak, hollow. The dark room swam around me. I pressed the phone against my cheek and ear. I felt frozen, waiting to unfreeze.

“Okay, well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow at Rao’s?” he finished.

I didn’t speak.
Be brave
, I thought.
Tell him
.

“Good night,” he said softly.

“Connor, wait.” I imagined I was shouting but my voice was just a whisper.

“Yeah?”

“Um.” I inhaled. “I wanted to say … I also missed you …” Now that I had started telling him this I didn’t know how to end it. I was aware I might be saying too much but at the same time I thought I had to explain what I meant in a way that would make it seem … casual. “I mean because we were friends when we were kids and our parents were friends. You knew my mom and my dad. I guess I just miss everything about that time. You know?”