Hellerman pod-hippie situation that had erupted earlier that day. Strangely enough, the first movie on channel two that night was Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which has pretty much the same pod-oriented story line. It almost made me feel as though I was on the right track with the pod-hippie theory. I put on Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and turned the TV
volume almost all the way down, watching the movie while listening to the music, and thinking things over.
I know it doesn’t make much sense, but somehow the puzzle of my dad’s teenage library and the mystery about his death had become connected in my mind. I would decipher part of a cryptic notation in Catcher, CEH 1960, or be struck by something in Brighton Rock, CEH 1965, and it would somehow feel like I’d gotten somewhere on the “accident” issue, too. At weird moments, like that night, I’d also have this crazy sense that the other puzzles in my life, like Fiona and Sam Hellerman’s increasingly odd behavior, were somehow connected to my dad and The Catcher in the Rye as well. I mean, they all got muddled together sometimes.
I’d always wondered why the police, at least to judge from the newspaper articles, appear to have put so little into the investigation of my dad’s death; usually when a cop is killed, they turn the world upside down to see justice done.
Maybe it was obvious to them that it hadn’t been a murder, and the newspaper had just played up the ambiguity. They hadn’t found the car that hit him, which was weird, too. Or possibly they had found it, and it just hadn’t been thought newsworthy? I wished there was someone I could ask about it, but I wouldn’t have known where to begin. The reporters who wrote the articles? Hmm. I would also have given quite a lot to know what he had been working on when the “accident” happened. I’m sure that played a role in the investigation, but if it had ever been mentioned publicly, I had missed 112
it. I even dared to try to ask my mom once, but all she did was cry. And what was Fiona doing tonight? And what the hell was up with Sam Hellerman anyway?
But what this all had to do with tits, back rubs, and dry cleaning, I hadn’t the barest clue.
I’m a bad detective, though, really. I let my emotions and prejudices dictate what I choose to investigate, rather than trying to look at the whole picture with an objective eye. I hadn’t looked at A Separate Peace and Lord of the Flies very carefully because they hadn’t been obviously marked up and pummeled like Catcher, CEH 1960, but mostly because I had something personal against them. And because of that I had missed something pretty important.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers had ended, and Rosemary’s Baby had begun. I put on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and turned to look at my dad’s books on my desk. I was reaching for The Journal of Albion Moonlight, CEH 1966, which I had decided would be next on the agenda of my one-man book club, when I accidentally knocked the stack of books to the floor.
A Separate Peace, CEH 1962, fell in such a way that it was open under the bed, and when I went to retrieve it, I noticed a slip of paper that had fallen out. It was half a sheet of graph paper that had itself been folded in half. On the inside of the folded paper was this weird clump of letters, neatly written in the graph paper’s squares in dark blue ink: q
f f q g a r f q q f a s u
x q d f q j g u q y e u m d
q y u m V e q x x u m d q z
g r j g m g f e m H q d h u
g e m e x u m f q P o q e q
q z a y m d u m x q v f q d
u a e d q u t F Y g h u m V
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And on the other side, in black, and hardly less weird: Mon cher monsieur,
The bastard is dead. Thrown into the
fire. Long live Justice and the
American Way.
Regards,
Tit
So Tit was a person? “Tit lib friday”—an appointment at the library with Tit? And someone was dead? And it had something to do with Superman?
The note was dated 6/31, but the six was heavily and awkwardly inked and clearly had originally been a five.
My first thought, influenced no doubt by having been watching Rosemary’s Baby with a Black Sabbath sound track, was that the little parallelogram of letters might be a magic charm or spell of some sort. And maybe “thrown into the fire” alluded to the burning of witches or something like that?
Or perhaps the charm was an element of some kind of death spell, a spell that had apparently worked, if the reference to the “dead bastard” was any indication. You send this magic parallelogram to someone, innocently disguised as an ordinary note, and soon after seeing it, the person dies. Except that that would mean that my dad would have been the one who died. But of course he had died, only not for thirty years or so. Maybe he’d received the note as a kid but hadn’t actually looked at the evil parallelogram till six years ago. Or the death spell had a built-in delay, a kind of long fuse.
And now I had seen it, too. I started to calculate, wondering how long I had. . . .
I got a little creeped out. Then I realized that was nuts.
Getting a grip, I looked at it again. Perhaps it was the 114
kind of puzzle where you search for words and circle them.
But all I could find were things like “fux” and “yum,” and none of them were even in a straight line like they’re supposed to be. There was “mmmmm” running diagonally from the upper left to the lower right. All that stuff reminded me of Fiona somehow. But that was the only intelligible thing about it.
It didn’t take me too long, though, to realize that it was probably a code. Then it took about twenty minutes of staring at the note and thinking about the CEH library to develop what I thought was a pretty good theory about what sort of code it was, and how it might work. But several solid hours of scribbling yielded only gibberish. Either I was totally on the wrong track or I was missing something. I even swallowed a bit of my pride and phoned Sam Hellerman to see if he had any ideas. But there was no answer at Hellerman Manor.
I eventually had to admit defeat. I closed my notebook and settled into an uneasy, half-asleep night of fretting about Tit, the dead bastard, zombies, pod-hippies, Halloween, witchcraft, my dad, my mom, murder, Sam Hellerman, Mia Farrow, Little Big Tom, Amanda, Black Sabbath, Paul Krebs, Roman Polanski, Anton and Zena LaVey, Matt Lynch, Nostradamus, Mrs. Teneb, Superman, Dr. Dee, Elvish, Klingon, Brighton Rock, Fiona, and Jane Gallagher. It was exhausting. When I finally dropped off, I had a dream that I solved the code and that the revealed message suddenly made it clear how it all fit together perfectly as part of a single story that explained everything. But when I woke up, I couldn’t remember what it was.
Ordinarily, I’d have immediately run, not walked, to Sam Hellerman with Tit’s mysterious note. He hadn’t been too in-115
terested in my dad’s teen library when I’d told him about it.
He only liked science fiction and fantasy. Basically, if a book didn’t have a map of somewhere other than earth in it, he couldn’t see the use. He had a point, but then, he didn’t have a mysteriously deceased dad to investigate. I had tried to tell him how great Brighton Rock was, but he had just rolled his eyes.
Tit’s note would have been right up his alley, though, and I’m sure he would have been able to help. He’s a clever guy.
However, things were a bit strained between us because of the Fiona situation, and because of—well, something was going on with Sam Hellerman, something hidden from me. It wasn’t just that he was being a dick about Fiona and hanging out with hippies. He was also acting weird toward me in general, kind of distant and secretive.