“Truthfully, Nik, it all feels sort of empty. I mean, after single-handedly
saving the world as I did.”
She chuckled. “Yeah, maybe you, Batman, and Lone Vengeance should form a support
group.”
“Sure, we could call it… I dunno… Cape-Anon. Although, superheroes are generally
anonymous already, so it would have to be Cape-Anon-Anon.”
“Good night, Rook.”
“Good night? But you got my Spidey sense all tingly.”
“Hold that thought.”
Home alone with no obligations after a harrowing few weeks, and a deep fatigue she
thought she would never sleep off, Nikki contemplated an evening of scented candles,
bubble bath, and soulful divas on the boom box. But that felt like distraction; more
superficial than the inner healing she craved.
Besides, she knew she could never relax with missing pieces or loose ends.
She brought out the cardboard tube and set it on the coffee table. Puzzle Man,
however unnerving a partner, had proved his worth and managed to crack the code. The
message felt incomplete, but with the arrest of Carey Maggs as the leader of the
conspiracy, Heat told herself to let it go.
But she couldn’t.
Back to her mom. Back to lack of closure.
Why, she wondered, would someone work so hard to construct a coded message that,
essentially, didn’t reveal information? Her mother was more practical than that. No
wasted effort, everything for a purpose. The apple didn’t fall far.
Nikki slid the papers out of the tube and laid them out before her. Then she stacked
them and held them to the light, getting the same message as before: Unlock the
Dragon.
As she had done, ad nauseam, she considered the significance of each word. Nikki
focused on “Unlock” because that felt like a call to action—one she hadn’t
taken. That’s what kept her persevering. Nikki had not unlocked anything.
She had spent eleven years going around that apartment searching for locks or secret
boxes. Her father had let her go through some of their things that he had brought to
his condo in Scarsdale, and she had found nothing there. So no more house searches.
Heat stared at the message until her eyes glazed. Then she spread the four pages
apart, kicking herself for going back to square one like that. But she did.
Why was this so difficult? What had Puzzle Man said? That the hardest code to crack
was the one that’s only known by two people? The sender and the receiver.
If Nikki were the intended receiver, she wondered, why choose her? When her mother
was murdered, Heat was a theater student at Northeastern, not a cop, and with no
hint of becoming one. Or maybe her mom knew more about her nature than she did. Or
simply trusted her completely.
“So, Mom,” she said aloud, “what’s just between us here?”
She tried not to picture the mother of her nightmares sprawled on the kitchen floor.
Her gaze fell across the room, and the ghost of her recent dream came to her:
Cynthia playing the piano in the corner, saying, “You know…”
It began to seep through as she laid her eyes on the four pages again. Nikki removed
her focus from the coded marks themselves and contemplated the sheet music they had
been written on. A recollection drifted to her on a trail of time’s smoke.
Those four pieces comprised one of Nikki’s piano recitals when she was sixteen. She
rushed to the piano bench and dug out the old program. There they were on the list.
Those four songs, and no others.