I think back to the gathering—to the feeling of being entombed inside the cottage, with the planchette trembling beneath my fingertips.
I knew we weren’t alone.
I knew someone was moving my hand and choosing each letter very deliberately.
“Mitzi wrote everything down,” I tell him.
We walk across the backyard to Mitzi’s house. I rap my knuckles on the front door but there’s no answer. Then we walk around to the back of the house, to the rear entrance used by her clients. The back door is open and we can see through the screen door into the kitchen, to the Formica table where Mitzi served me coffee. I bang on the screen door and the Kit-Cat Klock stares back at me, its tail wagging. I can hear the TV playing inside the house, some infomercial for commemorative gold dollars: “These coins are highly prized by collectors, and guaranteed to hold their value.…”
I shout Mitzi’s name, but there’s no way she’ll hear me over the sales pitch.
Adrian tries the handle and the door is unlocked. “What do you think?”
“I think she’s paranoid and she owns a gun. If we sneak up on her, there’s a good chance she’ll blow our heads off.”
“There’s also a chance she’s hurt. Maybe she slipped in the shower. If an old person doesn’t come to their door, you’re supposed to check on them.”
I knock again but still no answer.
“Let’s come back later.”
But Adrian insists on opening the door and calling to her: “Mitzi, are you okay?”
He steps inside, and what else can I do? It’s already past three o’clock and the day is passing too quickly. If Mitzi has information that can help us, we need it as soon as possible. I hold the door open and follow him into the house.
The kitchen stinks. It smells like the trash needs to be taken out, or maybe it’s all the dirty dishes piled up in the sink. There’s a frying pan on the stovetop filled with congealed bacon grease. There are tiny paw prints scattered across the surface, and I don’t want to think about all the vermin that might be living behind the walls.
I follow Adrian into the living room. The TV is tuned to Fox News and the hosts are arguing with a guest about the latest threats to American security. They’re shouting at each other—shouting over each other—so I grab the remote and mute the volume.
“Mitzi? It’s Mallory. Can you hear me?”
Still no answer.
“Maybe she went out for a bit,” Adrian says.
And left the back door open? No way, not Mitzi. I move toward the back of the house and check the bathroom—nothing. At last I come to the door of Mitzi’s bedroom. I knock several times, calling her name, and then finally open it.
Inside the bedroom, the shades are drawn, the bed is unmade, and there are clothes all over the floor. The air is sour and stale and I’m afraid to touch anything. The door bangs against a wicker wastebasket, knocking the basin on its side, and crumpled wads of Kleenex tumble out.
“Anything?” Adrian asks.
I get down on my knees and look under the bed just to be sure. There’s more dirty laundry but no Mitzi.
“She’s not here.”
As I stand up, I notice the surface of Mitzi’s nightstand. Along with a lamp and a telephone I see a handful of cotton balls, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a length of latex tourniquet.
“What is it?” Adrian asks.
“I don’t know. Probably nothing. We should go.”
We walk back to the living room and Adrian finds the notepad on the sofa, tucked beneath the heavy wooden spirit board.
“That’s it,” I tell him.
I flip past shopping lists and to-do items before arriving at the last used page—her notes from the séance. I rip the page from the pad, then show it to Adrian.
I took Spanish in high school and I had friends who took French and Mandarin, but these words don’t look like any language I’ve ever seen. “The name Anya sounds Russian,” Adrian says. “But I’m pretty sure this isn’t Russian.”
I take out my phone and google IGENXO just to be certain—and it might be the first time I’ve googled a phrase that doesn’t return a single result.
“If Google doesn’t know it, it’s definitely not a word.”
“Maybe it’s some kind of cryptogram,” Adrian says. “One of those puzzles where every letter is substituted by a different letter.”
“We just decided she can’t speak English,” I tell him. “Do you really think she’s making up brainteasers?”
“They’re not complicated if you know all the tricks. Give me a minute.” He grabs a pencil and sits down on Mitzi’s sofa, determined to crack the code.
I start poking around the living room, trying to imagine why Mitzi left the house with her TV on and her back door open, when something crunches beneath my sneaker. It sounds like I’ve stepped on a beetle, some small insect with a hard brittle shell. I lift my foot and see that it’s actually a thin plastic tube, orange and cylindrical, about three inches long.
I lift it off the floor and Adrian looks up from his work.
“What is that?”
“A cap for a hypodermic needle. I think she’s been injecting herself. Hopefully with insulin, but this is Mitzi we’re talking about so who knows.” As I move around the room, I discover three more needle caps—on a bookshelf, in a wastebasket, on a windowsill. When you factor in the rubber tourniquet, I’m pretty sure we can rule out diabetes.
“Are you finished yet?”
I look down at Adrian’s notepad and it doesn’t seem like he’s made any progress.
“This is a tough one,” he admits. “Normally you look for the most frequent letter and you replace it with E. In this case, there are four Xs, but when I change them to Es, it doesn’t help any.”
I think he’s wasting his time. If I’m right about Anya’s language barrier—and I’m pretty sure I am—then communicating in English would be enough of a challenge. She wouldn’t try writing in code. She’d want to make things easier for us, not harder. She’d try to make her message clearer.
“Give me another minute,” he says.
And then there’s a knock at the back door.
“Hello? Anybody home?”
It’s a man’s voice, unfamiliar.
Maybe one of Mitzi’s customers, visiting to have his energy read?
Adrian stuffs the sheet of notepaper into his pocket. And when we enter the kitchen, I see the man at the back door is wearing a police uniform.
“I’m gonna need you to step outside.”
23
The cop is young—he can’t be older than twenty-five—with a buzz cut, dark sunglasses, and enormous arms covered in tattoos. There’s not an inch of bare skin anywhere between his wrists and his shirtsleeves—it’s all Stars and Stripes, Bald Eagles, and passages from the Constitution.
“We were checking on Mitzi,” Adrian explains. “Her door was open but she’s not here.”