The Vanishing Game (19 page)

She looked a little embarrassed. “That was a special request. It came in the mail a few days ago with a cashier's check for a hundred dollars. There was a note asking our gallery to hang it for a week. If it doesn't sell, I can take
it down. I've been promised another check for the sale price.”

I wondered why Jack was throwing around his savings like that.

Noah said, “I'm guessing artists don't normally pay you to hang their work.”

“No,” she admitted.

“But doing that would be a smart business move,” I added in a supportive voice, wondering how many sales she managed to make in a month. Still, Dixon dressed nice enough. Digging my Visa card out of my wallet and handing it to her, I said, “We'll take it.”

I was a little worried that I'd reached my limit on the card, but it went through and she handed me the receipt to sign.

Noah said, “Do you happen to have the mailer it came in, so we can check the postmark?”

“Sorry, that got thrown out.”

The front door opened and another customer came in. It was an attractive guy with olive skin who looked about thirty. He wandered to the far side of the shop.

After I paid for the painting, Dixon's mother started to wrap it in brown paper but Noah stopped her. “Don't bother. We'll take it like that.”

“Can we say good-bye to Dixon?” I asked.

She glanced at the arched doorway behind her. “I'm sorry. He had to run an errand for me.”

I was disappointed, and she must have seen. She added,
“Can you understand? It took almost two years for his bad dreams to stop. So many nights he woke up screaming. I don't want it to start again.”

“Sure,” Noah said. “We understand.”

I nodded in agreement, feeling sad for Dixon.

We walked away and she left the counter to talk to the other customer. He was one of those guys that practices being casual in his good looks. He was dressed in soft, loose-fitting slacks and a collarless cotton shirt. His brown hair, on the longer side, had gold highlights and was combed back from a face with strong features. The guy's stare followed me. Noticing his hand, I was startled to see a gauze pad on his palm.

We headed through the door, my spine stiff with tension as the wind snagged my scarf and lifted it. I turned to Noah. “That must be him, from last night!”

“I know.” His free hand went to the small of my back, guiding me across the street.

He unlocked the Jeep and tossed the painting in the backseat. We heard our names being called and Dixon ran to us. “Are you leaving?”

“We have to,” Noah said, his eyes on the gallery door.

“Oh.” The boy's voice sounded unhappy.

It pulled me back in time to when he was little. “Are you going to be all right?”

He nodded. “My mom is kinda shy around people she doesn't know, but she's real good to me.”

Dixon's mother came to the window, watching us with an anxious face. For most other kids, such a possessive mom would have made me concerned, but this was different. Because of all the neglect during his early years, Dixon was sort of an emotional black hole. No matter how much attention and affection was poured into him, I knew it would never be enough. So maybe that sort of smother-mother was what he needed.

“I'm happy for you, then.”

Noah climbed in the driver's seat. “Bye, Dixon. It was good to see you again.”

The boy took a step closer to me. “Jocey, before you take off I want to tell you something. I know everyone was mad at you that night about what happened. I wasn't. You did it to save me. After I left Seale House I ended up in a better foster home. That's how I met my new mom. She was their cousin and liked me right away. I came to live with her and now she's adopted me.” There was a sort of pride in his voice I'd never heard before.

“That's great. I've wondered about you a lot, Dixon.”

“Really? I worried when you ran away that night. I never got to see you again and thought it was my fault.”

Noah opened my door from the inside and called my name. I glanced up. The long-haired guy had stepped outside the gallery and was walking to his car. “It wasn't your fault, and don't ever think that, okay? Promise?”

“Promise.”

I gave him a hug and his thin arms went around my
waist. “Take care of yourself,” I whispered, finally breaking away and slipping inside the Jeep.

I shut the door and Noah shifted into gear; we sped away. I kept my eyes on Dixon until he went back inside the shop.

Noah treated the streets of Watertown like a racetrack, and I was surprised he didn't cause an accident or get pulled over by a cop.

I kept my eyes on the road. “So you saw the gauze pad on that guy's hand?”

“Yes. Have you seen him before, other than last night, I mean?”

I shook my head. “Why are we running away instead of confronting him? He didn't have a gun.”

“Don't count on it. If Paul Gerard is armed we probably wouldn't see it.”

“You know him?”

“Yes. And a face-off wouldn't be helpful. There's no way to make him tell us why he attacked you or what he wants. My black belt skills won't stand up against him.”

“You have a black belt?”

“Martial arts. Remember Don Iverson, the detective? He got me into it, because he wanted to keep me from spending so much time on the computer. Jack didn't tell you I studied martial arts?”

“Sure, but I just didn't know you were that into it.” I couldn't help but smile. “You became the black ninja after all.”

Bracing myself as he ran a red light, I looked over at him. “Noah, slow down. You're making me nervous. So who's Paul Gerard?”

“He worked for ISI as a specialist.”

“Is he a programmer?”

“No. He does other kinds of security. His job included giving orientations to new people the company hired. That's when I met him. Of course, all of that was before he quit.”

“He quit too?”

“Left more than a month ago because ISI had a problem with him. But I don't know what. I think he might have embezzled money from them. Though if that's true, they kept news of it from getting out.”

“Sure, since a security company wouldn't want their clients to know they can't protect their own assets. That could lose them a lot of business.”

“Just one more reason I'm glad I bailed.”

“But what does Paul Gerard want from me? What's the ‘it' he kept asking about?”

“How would I know?”

I touched the scarf covering my throat. “Do you have any idea how he burned me?”

“No … except when we met he talked about the deep martial arts stuff that's way out there. I guess he even studied at a monastery in Nepal. Or said he did, anyway.”

“Are you talking about like what happens in movies?”

“It might just be made up. But when he was here training me, I invited him to my dojo for a sparring session. He's very skilled. Even the owner of the dojo was impressed.”

“Great. So I stand no chance if he comes after me.”

“I think Gerard is trying to intimidate us. He wanted to make sure we saw him just now, to let me know who attacked you last night.”

I stared at the road, feeling that old creeping depression as Noah drove past the city limits and headed in the direction of Wellesley Island State Park. Situated along the St. Lawrence River, and part of the Thousand Islands region, it was green and lush.

We turned in and traveled for several miles. After looking in the rearview mirror, Noah slowed and pulled onto a narrow roadway. He followed it through thick groves of trees to a picnic area, then turned the Jeep around, facing back the way we'd come. With the overcast sky it was too cold for visitors so there were no other cars. Noah turned off the ignition.

He grabbed the painting from the backseat and used a pocketknife to slice off the back. Taped to the canvas were three things: a small plastic bag holding five puzzle pieces, a narrow strip of red paper covered with letters, and a key.

We examined everything. The paper was the most interesting. It was about a half inch wide with groups of letters in blocked printing.

“There's more on the back,” Noah pointed out.

I flipped it over, seeing different letters. “They look like chopped-up words.”

He scrunched down in the seat. “Here we go again.”

“What do you mean?”

“How much longer is this going to go on? It's one thing to send us looking for clues like we were kids again. It's another when it involves somebody like Gerard.”

I studied his dark expression. “You've never been afraid of anyone, Noah. Not even those senior bullies who chased us with lit cigarettes. Why are you afraid of this guy?”

“I'm not afraid for me. I'm not the one Gerard tried to strangle.”

“Oh.”

“I can probably defend myself okay. But it's going to be hard to try and keep you safe if Gerard wants to hurt you. Don't you get it, Jocelyn? He's all hot to get his hands on whatever it is that Jack is sending
us on this crazy chase to find. Which means we're damned if we get it, damned if we don't. Either way, Gerard will come after both of us in the end.”

My worry took a giant step forward in this scary game of Mother May I. “What are we supposed to do? Should we just drop all this and make a run for it?”

“No. We need the final prize. Whether it's Jack or something Jack left you. Otherwise, we've got nothing to help us figure out what's going on.”

He took the strip of paper from me, holding it between his fingers and examining both sides.

“It's a scytale,” I said. I could almost hear Jack's voice from all those years ago.

“See? It's a simple system developed by the Spartans during the fifth century. You just take a strip of paper and wind it around a rod like this pencil. Make the paper overlap. Then you write across it and leave a message.”

Noah and I bent close, watching him at work. He wrote one or two letters on each overlapping edge of paper, slowly turning the pencil to write several lines:

“Monique is stupid, Tabby is dumb, Geena is a crybaby, Nessa sucks her thumb.”

We laughed as Jack unwound the strip of paper and laid it out flat on the cafeteria table. The letters now made no sense because they weren't in their original order
.

“And one really cool thing is you have to use the right size of rod
.
If you write the letters around a thin paintbrush but wrap it around a pencil that's fatter, the letters don't line up. You can't read it. That's how the Spartan soldiers got their battle plans back and forth. The messenger would run miles with the strip of paper. He'd give it to a captain who had the same-size rod as the guy who sent the letter. If the messenger got captured or killed, the enemy couldn't decode the words.”