“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.