Sammy Keyes and the Killer Cruise (19 page)

Kip’s head bobbles like a dashboard doll, where the head moves because someone’s jolted the car, not because it wants to.

“Does anyone even know you’re here?” I ask him.

“Noah.” His voice comes out groggy. Like it’s still waking up. So he clears his throat and adds, “He was here … a while ago.”

“Well, we’ll be back as soon as we take showers,” Darren tells him as he scoops an arm around my shoulders and pulls me away. And since I’m still wet from the downpour and cold from the ship’s cranked-up air-conditioning and looking mega-dorky in a halter dress and high-tops, I don’t put up a fight.

“Dude,” Marko says as we’re going up the stairs. “That poor kid.”

Which about summed it up. And since Marissa could tell I felt awful about leaving Kip alone in the library, she let me shower first so I could get back down there while she took hers.

The foghorns blasted as I was getting dressed, so I knew I’d be missing the sail out of port, but I hurried back down to the library anyway.

“Hey,” I said, sliding into a chair next to Kip. “Catch me up.”

First he looks around to make sure no one can overhear. There are quite a few other people in the library, but they’re mostly on the computers, and no one’s near us. And the Puzzle Lady’s gone, so really, there’s nothing to worry about.

Not that there would be anyway, but obviously Kensingtons are paranoid, so whatever.

Then he starts raking in all the papers that are spread across the table, going, “I started with a simple substitution cipher.”

“Like where 1 is
A
and 2 is
B
?”

“Right.”

“How high do the numbers on the note go?”

“To 99.”

“But there are only twenty-six letters.”

“If you loop the alphabet, it could go on forever.”

I let out a really intelligent “Oh.”

“Anyway, that got me nowhere. So I started shifting the origin of the numbers.”

“So 1 is
B
and 2 is
C
 … like that?”

“Right. It’s called a Caesar cipher, and I did it for twenty-six one-letter shifts.” He watches me, waiting for what that means to sink in. And when my eyes have stretched wide enough, he gives a little shrug and says, “I still wound up with gibberish.”

“Wow.”

“So I went online and found out about something called an Atbash cipher, which is a Caesar cipher in
reverse
.”

“Oh, so
A
is 26 and
B
is 25?”

“Right. And I did
that
for twenty-six shifts and wound up with …?”

“Gibberish?”

He nods. “Then I found out about this thing called a Vigenère cipher.” He fishes through printouts from the computer and shows me a page that looks like a cross between a word search puzzle and a letter graph, where there’s a set of alphabet letters across the top and another set going down the left column.

“So what do you do with this?” I ask.

“A Vigenère cipher uses a key word. So I thought maybe that’s what the word on my note was.”

“You mean the
LION
with the extra
N
?”

“Exactly.”

I study the big letter grid for a minute, then say, “But … this gives you back letters, not numbers.”

He frowns. “Yeah. But after you Vigenère cipher it, you can Caesar cipher the resulting letters and—”

“Whoa! Stop. That is
way
too complicated. And it seems like the possibilities are endless! I mean, if the first
one didn’t work, you’d have to try the shift thingy through the whole alphabet, right? And if
that
didn’t work, you’d have to try the whole reverse shift thingy!”

He holds his head and groans, “Exactly! It may also be a polyalphabetic cipher. Plus the notes were written as subtraction problems, so what does
that
mean? Or are they incremental dividers and
not
minus signs?” He shakes his head and says, “There’s also deranged alphabet ciphers.”

“Deranged?”

“Yeah. Like, rearranged? Where you take the letters of a word and move them to the front of the alphabet, then continue with the alphabet with that word’s letters missing.” He gives a defeated little shrug. “So I tried
LIONN
and
KENSINGTON
and
KATE
and
KATHERINE
with about a hundred numeric position shifts and wound up with nothing but gibberish.”

I paw through the pages on the desk and shake my head. “Unbelievable what you’ve gone through to figure this out.”

“It’s driving me crazy!” he cries, and actually yanks at his hair with both fists, just like you’d see in some cartoon.

I sort the papers into computer printouts, the code sheet, and piles of scribbled-on pages. Then I tell him, “Okay, let’s back up.”

He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes for a moment, then nods.

And out of my big mouth comes, “It can’t be as hard as you’re making it.”

“Not as—” He grabs for the papers. “What do
you
know?”

I slap down the pages and look him right in the eye. “Why would someone put coded notes under doors if they’re too hard to decipher? I’m sure they mean
something
, but whoever’s done this can’t scare you or extort money from you—or whatever the idea behind them is—if you can’t figure them out!”

He keeps on gripping those pages, staring at me.

I keep them slapped down, staring back.

Finally, he lets go and says, “Then what? And I
did
start simple.” He rolls his eyes. “It doesn’t get any simpler than a straight substitution.” He slaps the pages with the back of his hand. “And if
LIONN
’s not a key word, why’s it there?”

“What if it translates to a number? You know, like the numbers in the code would translate to letters?”

He blinks at me a minute, then real quick goes through each number’s place in the alphabet and comes up with 12, 9, 15, 14, 14, which he then writes down as one big number, and then as a big number with commas:
129,151,414
.

I sigh and shake my head. “That doesn’t tell us anything, does it? And it’s one digit shy of a phone number.” Then I go back to the paper with the coded message and say, “So the smallest number is 4, and the biggest number is … 99.” I study it another minute, then ask, “Did you check for a pattern? Or any repeats?”

“Like, frequency?”

“Yeah. What is the most common letter of the alphabet?”

“
E
, I think.”

“Can you Google it?”

He jumps up, and while he’s heading over to a
computer, I ask, “Can I try to work something out? Look for patterns?”

“Sure,” he says with a little wave.

So I take a blank sheet of paper and start tallying up numbers that repeat, and by the time Kip’s back, I’ve got the stats. “So 53 is in here five times. And 7, 16, and 60 all happen three times, and everything else is once or twice.” I look up at him. “What’s the most common letter?”

“
E
is number one,
T
is number two, and
A
is number three.” And after he’s studied the code paper a minute, he says, “There are also two occurrences of a 53, 60 combination.”

I nod. “And two 9, 53 combos.”

He looks at me. “So 53’s our
E
?”

“But … we have to figure out what 53 is if you cycle the alphabet, don’t we? Like, 53 would be the first letter, right? Twenty-six plus twenty-six plus one?”

He sort of stares at me, then a little smile flashes onto his face. “Right.”

So real quick I make a chart that goes from 1 to 26, then cycle around until I get to 99. Then I take the tally of numbers I’d already done and find out that
A
,
H
, and
P
have the most tallies.

Which makes me feel like I’ve gotten a whole lot of nowhere.

So finally I say, “Seems like a total dead end.”

He shakes his head. “To me, too.”

“Okay,” I say with a sigh. “Let’s get back to simple.”

But before we can get back to simple, Darren and Marko walk in. They’re wearing ball caps and old-school
Wayfarer glasses, and I can tell Kip actually doesn’t recognize them until he sees Marissa trailing behind.

“I told you,” Marissa says when they get close. “She’s already totally sucked in.”

Darren ignores the comment and smiles at us. “Ready for dinner?”

I grab Kip’s arm and kind of turn him to face me. “Don’t
even
tell us you’re not hungry.”

He laughs. “I’m
starving
.” Then his face falls, and he says, “No. I know what starving is, and I’m not that.” Then he laughs again and says, “But I
am
really hungry!”

It’s so weird to see him transform from Deranged Decoder into Hungry Teen that I laugh, too, and say, “Well, let’s go!”

I start to fold up my paper, thinking I’ll work on it more later, but while Kip hands over my calculator, saying, “Thanks for the loan. Maybe I can borrow it again?” I notice Marissa nudging Darren, and before I can put the paper in my pocket, Darren takes it and the calculator and slips them into his sports coat. “Not tonight,” he tells Kip. “There’s a comedy show and we’re dragging you to it.”

What’s funny is, Kip doesn’t argue. He just tucks away his papers and follows us to the Schooner Buffet, and during dinner and the comedy show, he even laughs out loud a few times.

Maybe that’s because dinner with Darren and Marko turned out to be a comedy show all by itself, once Marko whipped out a deck of cards and he and Darren pretended to be dogs playing poker. All the growling and yipping and chomping and snarling … It was bizarre, especially with
the Wayfarer glasses, and really funny, especially since they seemed to know exactly what the other one was snarling about.

So yeah, the night was like a double feature of laughs. And even though I really wanted to ask Kip some basic questions—like how come nobody but Noah seemed to ever check on him, and what he was going to do about the situation with his mother—there was never a good time.

Especially since Marko seemed to want to keep Kip’s mind miles away from Kensington madness, so anytime there was a lull—like sitting around waiting for Darren to get out of the bathroom, or waiting for the comedian to hit the stage in the Poseidon Theater—Marko gave him drum lessons. There were no drums, but that didn’t stop Marko. First he got his right hand going,
tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap
, then he added his right foot, telling Kip, “That’s your bass drum,
boom, boom, boom, boom!
Now here comes the snare!” And his left hand started slapping his left thigh. Everything Marko did, Kip copied.

Marko recruited Marissa and me, too, but we were just sort of extras in the Great Drum Escape—it was Kip he was really paying attention to. And while it didn’t take long for Marissa and me to be like, Okay, enough of that, Kip kept at it everywhere we went.

Which got annoying!

Even Darren thought so, ’cause when we were raiding Dessert Island after the comedy show, he finally said, “Can we maybe just eat?”

Kip stopped slappin’ and tappin’ and said, “Sorry!” but
Marko went, “Are you kidding? I wish I had some sticks on me, man. This young dude would be rockin’ right now!”

So I don’t know—maybe Marko had been right all along. Maybe Kip needed some drum therapy to get his mind off his family and help him through this cruise. All I know is Kip seemed to be a completely different person when we wound our way back down to Deck 9. He even stopped outside our cabins to give Marko a spastic, out-of-nowhere hug.

At least that’s what I think it was. It happened so fast, and then he was jetting down the hallway toward his cabin, going, “See you tomorrow!” and waving like a lunatic.

“Yeah, dude!” Marko called after him. “We’ll get you some sticks tomorrow. And maybe you can help us with sound check on Thursday!”

“Awesome!” Kip called back.

And it would have been, only sometime during the night, Kip Kensington disappeared.

That night my brain must’ve been wrestling with the Kensington code, because I had a weird nightmare where numbers were chasing letters. At first it was like a big swirl of digits and letters, but then the numbers got legs and arms and
knives
, and became an angry mob, hunting down letters. They had voices, too, and I could hear them yelling, “Get ’em! Get ’em!” but I don’t remember any faces.

The
letters
, though, definitely had faces. And no knives. Or legs. My face was in an
S
, Marissa’s was in an
M
, Kip’s was in a
K
, and Darren’s and Marko’s faces were on the top arms of an
X
. None of us could move. We were just petrified Letter People being attacked by the Number Mob.

What was weird—well,
weirder
—was that the knives didn’t hurt. Those numbers hacked away at us, but we were like sponges or something and just sealed back up.

And then an
N
appeared with Noah’s face, and for some reason he had a voice and hollered, “Why was six afraid of seven?” into the Number Mob.

All the numbers stopped and waited.

“Because seven eight nine!” Noah the
N
shouted.

Now, even though the numbers didn’t have faces, it
was clear they were all going, Huh? So Noah the
N
hollered, “Get it? Seven
ate
nine?” and all at once the Number Mob turned on the number seven.

Luckily, the phone rang and woke me up from my stupid number wars dream. The curtains were closed tight, so I thought it was deep, dark nighttime, but when I stumbled over to the desk to answer the phone, the clock said it was almost ten in the morning. And I could sort of hear Captain Harald’s voice announcing something over the hallway speakers about us being in Puerto Vallarta.

I fumbled with the phone before finally getting it up to my ear. “Hello?”

“Rise and shine, sleepyhead! I’ve booked us on a sailing and snorkeling expedition. Leaves in an hour.”

“In an hour?”

“What are you, a rock star? I can’t believe you’re still in bed.”

“Very funny,” I grumble, because he’s obviously having a good time paying me back for yesterday’s wake-up call.