As Simple as Snow (23 page)

That’s the part I sift through. Those are the words I roll over and try to examine again and again. Like so much of what Anna said, or what I remember, there are a number of perspectives and aspects. She was rarely definite. Things were never black and white. She was opinionated about everything, but she could also argue both sides of almost any subject with seemingly equal conviction. “Convince me,” she would say. I couldn’t even convince myself.

She was a mystery. Did she want it spoiled?

Mr. Devon’s head jerked forward and he looked at me, his eyes wide open. “Do you think she’ll call me?”

“Who?”

“That girl,” he said. He rubbed his palms up and down his face and looked around the train. “I mean about my photographs.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Did you take any pictures today?”

He reached down and held his camera as if noticing it for the first time. “No,” he said. “I wear it to try and remember to take more pictures, but I never seem to take them.” He slipped the strap over his head and handed the camera to me. “Here,” he said, “take my picture.” I held it to my eye and he suddenly shouted, “No.” I still had it to my eye when he rose unsteadily from his seat and grabbed it from me. “I said no.”

He sat back down and held the camera to his own eye and took my picture. There was no flash. “That should be all right,” he said. “I think it’s bright enough in here.” He then carefully placed the strap over his head and let the camera again rest in front of him. “I should have had you be the team photographer this year. That was dumb of me. And next year you’ll be playing. You will be playing, right?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I could help the team more taking pictures.”

“We’ll see. A year can make a big difference.” He leaned his head back against the seat, and in a few minutes his mouth slackened and dropped open.

Mr. Devon didn’t awaken until we were pulling into the station. He was back to his old self. We walked out to his truck. “Let’s hope it starts,” he said. It started all right, but the heat still didn’t work. We both shivered as he drove, laughing at the sound of our teeth chattering and the white clouds of breath filling the cab. “If you have a match, use it,” he told me. “Light something on fire, anything—a book, the seat, my coat, anything. Have you ever been this cold?”

“Maybe you should try math,” I said. He didn’t seem to think that was funny. We drove the rest of the way to my house in silence.

“It probably wasn’t worth it, was it?” Mr. Devon said.

“No, it was. I had a good time. Thanks for inviting me and everything.”

“I thought there would be some other people from school there. People you’d know. I guess it’s a long ways to go.”

“It’s really not that far,” I said.

“The exhibit’s going on for another week.”

“I’ll spread the word,” I said.

“Just leave out the part about the bar,” he said. “It was a good time, though, right?”

“It was.”

 

 

 

That night I couldn’t sleep. I turned on the shortwave for the first time since Anna had been gone, and listened to the same strange voices sending the same incomprehensible messages to someone or no one that Anna and I used to listen to. When a broadcast would end or fade, I would move up or down to another frequency, just killing time.

I stumbled across a weak broadcast of a woman’s voice reciting a long list of numbers. The voice was almost buried in static, sounding distant and faint, but I recognized it. She might as well have been shouting in my ear. It was Anna’s voice. It sounded just like her. I sat up in bed and moved the radio around, holding it to one side, over my head, out in front of me, trying to get better reception, a clearer signal. It improved only slightly. I could make out only some of the numbers. “One, nineteen . . . nineteen, fourteen, fifteen, twenty-three.” And then it was done. There was nothing more, only static. It was about twenty minutes after eleven. I frantically got out of bed and turned on the light. I wrote down the time and the frequency and the numbers I could remember. I didn’t even know whether I had gotten the order right, but I scribbled everything down as fast as I could, as close as I could remember.

The next day I received an e-mail identifying the frequency I had listened to the night before and “2310 est.” It was from a Yahoo! account. I sent a reply, “Who are you? What are you trying to tell me?” but received nothing in return.

I started listening that night at nine, but there was nothing on the radio at that frequency except static. At eleven-ten, I heard the same person, sounding just like Anna, reciting the following message: “Count. Nineteen, fifteen, thirteen, five, twenty, eight, nine, fourteen, seven.” Pause. “One, nineteen.” Pause. “Nineteen, nine, thirteen, sixteen, twelve, five.” Pause. “One, nineteen.” Pause. “Nineteen, fourteen, fifteen, twenty-three.” The message repeated a few times and then stopped.

An e-mail from the same Yahoo! account was in my mailbox the next day. “What does it mean?”

“That’s what I want to know,” I replied. “Who is sending this?”

I listened to the same numbers the next two nights, and became even more certain that it was Anna’s voice. The broadcasts were exactly the same, as if they were a recording. I received no other e-mails.

I began to think less about the broadcasts and more about the numbers. What did they mean? I wrote them down on a piece of paper and studied them. Nothing. I studied them again. Nothing. Then I wrote them down in five groups, separating the numbers where there were pauses in the broadcast. The first group contained nine numbers, the second two, the third six, the fourth two, and the final group had four numbers. The second and fourth groups were identical, one and nineteen. Nineteen was in every group. What did nineteen mean? What did it represent? I looked at the numbers again, and then at my transcript of the broadcast. It had started with the word “count.” I wrote the alphabet on a separate piece of paper and put a numeral 1 under A, 2 under B, and so on. The nineteenth letter was S. The second and fourth groups spelled “as.” The rest came easily. The numbers worked out. “Something as simple as snow,” was the message. Anna had sent the code.

I had to find out where the broadcast was coming from. I went online and researched how to track down a shortwave broadcast but there wasn’t much information, and what I could find was too technical for me. I needed help—the only person I could think of to ask for help was Mr. Cayne. I didn’t want to, but I didn’t have another option. I called him and asked if I could come over for help with a problem.

“I’ve been listening to a strange message on the shortwave,” I told him when I went over. “This might seem crazy, but it sounds like Anna.”

“What’s the message?”

“A string of numbers.”

“Anastasia saying a string of numbers?”

“I know it doesn’t make sense,” I said. “But it sounds like Anna. I mean, I’m almost positive it’s her. I want you to help me find out where the broadcast is coming from.”

He looked at me straight in the eye. It always frightened me a little when he did this, looked at me dead-on with those bald eyes of his. “What do you think the numbers mean?”

“I don’t know. But if we can find out where the message is coming from and who is broadcasting it, we might be able to figure it out.”

“I don’t think that will help.”

“How can you say that?”

He was silent for a long moment, then said, “Because I’ve been broadcasting that message.”

“You?”

“Yes. I was hoping that someone could help me figure it out. I found it on Anastasia’s computer. She had recorded it a few days before she . . . before she left,” he said. “I listened to it and thought I could get some help with it.”

“So you sent the e-mails too?”

“I sent it to all her friends. Everyone on her contacts list, everyone I could think of, everyone she might have known. I thought people might help more readily if they didn’t know that it was me behind it.”

“Did anyone help?”

“No. I have to find out what it means.”

“I know what it means,” I said.

“You said you didn’t.”

“I know. But I think I do. The message was for me.”

“What is it?”

“I can’t tell you, Mr. Cayne.”

“You have to.”

“I can’t. It wasn’t really a message. It’s just the beginning, a signal. It was a phrase we agreed on to start a message, a secret that only the two of us would know. In case we ever got separated. I can’t tell anyone what it means.”

“What do you mean, in case you ever got separated?”

I told him about how Anna wanted to make the code, the way Houdini had done with his wife. “It was just a contingency,” I said, “but then there’s this.” I handed him Anna’s obituary, the one I had received in the mail. He read it and then read it again. “Did you write this?” he said.

“Someone sent it to me.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. I thought maybe Anna.”

“No,” he said, very sharply. “She didn’t send this.”

“How can you be sure?”

He studied me for a moment, then replied carefully. “There are things in here that Anna wouldn’t know.”

“What things?” Mr. Cayne didn’t answer; he just looked at the paper. “Did you have another daughter who ran away?” I said.

“One has nothing to do with the other,” he said.

“I thought she was an only child.”

“Is that what she told you?”

“I thought so, but now I’m not so sure. What else is true in there?”

He handed the sheet of paper back to me. “This won’t help anyone. You should just forget about it.”

“Maybe we should take it to the police.”

“You could do that,” he said, in a way that suggested that he knew I wouldn’t. I folded the paper and put it back in my pocket. He had answered nothing, really; he spoke almost exactly like Anna—saying only what he wanted to say and ignoring everything else. A worried sadness suddenly came over him, and I thought that he might cry. He didn’t look at me, but dropped his gaze to some indefinite spot on the floor between us. “She’s not coming back,” he said.

I couldn’t believe that he would say it. Out loud. We had all been thinking it—it was the thought we tried to avoid, had to constantly push aside—but no one had said it out loud. You’d never think that the first person to say it would be one of the parents. I stared at him in disbelief; I didn’t know what he wanted from me, agreement or denial. I had come to him for help. I stood there, afraid to say anything. I was afraid that the next thing he might say was that she was dead.

 

 

 

Mr. Cayne’s attempt to reach out, to make contact, made me want to do the same. I called a telephone psychic. I was embarrassed and didn’t expect anything, but the woman on the phone was friendly and something about the way she spoke made me feel better. She was calm and comforting and positive. She told me that good things were going to happen. For a few minutes out of the day she could almost convince me that I wasn’t depressed and desperate, or at least wouldn’t be that way forever.

“I see things changing for you real soon,” she said. “You’re not staying in one place for long. It’s bigger and better things. It’s someplace sunny and warm, where people love you and will take care of you. It’s going to be good. I’m telling you, it’s going to be good very soon.”

“Where will I be?” I said.

“It’s a place marked in red. There are tigers. And it’s warm. You’re going from a place of water to a place of water. There’s a connection there somehow.”

“That’s vague.”

“It’s all I know about it,” she said. “I can try to get more, but you’ll have to stay on the line.” I didn’t.

“What’s your name?” I asked when I called again the next night.

“Cassandra. What’s yours?”

“Carl,” I said. “What’s your real name?”

“It’s still Cassandra,” she said.

“Good-bye, Cassandra.”

I called the next night too. When Cassandra came on the phone I could tell at once that it wasn’t the same person. I called back a few times before I recognized the voice from before. She gave me the same story, and I thought that maybe she described the same vague sunny scene to everyone. Then she startled me.

“You called before,” she said.

I didn’t say anything.

“I don’t know what city it is, but it all looks the same,” she said. “You don’t have to worry, Carl, things are going to be okay.”

We talked for a while, not even about psychic stuff. We just talked. For five or six nights I lay on my bed in the dark and listened to her. It was a kind of infatuation, I guess; I was infatuated with the world Cassandra was describing. I liked it when she described all the good things that were coming my way. Actually, they were coming Carl’s way. That I could believe.

“I’ll call again tomorrow,” I said.

“Okay.”

“But I want to talk to you. You have to tell me your real name.”

“I can’t do that,” she said.

“I won’t call, then,” I said.

She was silent for a moment. “I can’t give you my name, but how about if we use a code?”

“What kind of code?”

“When you call and ask for Cassandra, also ask for extension thirteen.”

“That’s not a code,” I said.

“I know, but it sounds better that way.” She laughed. She thought it was funny. My heart was racing.

I talked to her for a few more days and then finally told her. “My name’s not Carl,” I said.

“I know.”

“I’m trying to find somebody. I’m waiting for a message.”

“I can’t help you with that,” she said.

“I want to find out what happened to a friend of mine,” I said.

“I can’t help you.”

“That’s not what you’re supposed to say.”

“I know. But it’s the truth.”