“Simon’s account?” I ask. “How come the card is still working, then? He’s been gone for weeks and if he’s not here to make the payments, then where is the money coming from?”
Haden shrugs. I wonder if I need to add paying bills along with grocery shopping to Haden’s How to Human lessons.
“He’s probably got all of his bills set up as automatic payments from his bank account,” Joe says. “Marta set the same system up for me—speaking of which, I should probably change my passwords, considering I just canned that evil minioness. Simon’s money will run out eventually, but knowing him, it’ll be a while before you have to worry about that.” He looks at his phone again. “Pizza guy is getting impatient. I’ll be right back.”
He jogs down the stage steps and out the auditorium doors. As he goes, I turn to the others. “So if Simon is the one who bought Rowan’s motorcycle, don’t you think that probably means he was bankrolling Rowan?” I ask. “He’s probably got one of those cards, too.”
“I bet you’re right,” Dax says.
“Which means you can track his movements through his purchases,” Lexie says excitedly.
“You can do that?” Haden asks.
“Yep,” Lexie says. My dad does that to me whenever he gets in a parental mood—doesn’t happen very often, but it’s a real pain in the ass when it does. It’s like spending an afternoon on Rodeo Drive is a crime or something.”
“Can we access Simon’s accounts?” Haden asks Dax.
“I found his laptop while we were looking for the talisman. If we could hack his passwords, we’d probably be in business.”
“I might be able to help with that,” Tobin says, turning toward the group, even though I had assumed he wasn’t paying attention. “I know a few tricks.”
I remember now that he’d mentioned something once about wanting to hack the school’s computer system to look for information about the Lord family.
“I’ll bring the laptop to rehearsal on Monday,” Haden says, the notes of his excitement filling the room as an actual possibility starts to take shape.
chapter twenty-seven
TOBIN
There’s a reason my mother is perturbed that I’d rather apply to Juilliard than MIT. It’s because if I put my mind to it, I could be a genius like my brother, Sage.
I just happen to enjoy singing and dancing more than solving math equations and writing code. That and not wanting to give my mother the satisfaction of being able to plan my life out for me. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know my way around a computer. Sage taught me a few tricks when he still lived at home, and I’d honed my skills over the last few years of searching for information about Abbie and the other girls who’d gone missing from Olympus Hills. I even hacked into the school’s computer system a couple of times before they updated their firewall.
I’ve had Simon’s laptop for almost a week, but with Mom in tiger hyperdrive since I managed to score my first-ever B on a chem quiz (“Oshiro-Winters do not settle for grades lower than A!”), I haven’t had a chance to take a look at it until tonight. My parents are out late at some hoity-toity dinner or something, giving the house staff the night off, so I set up shop at the dining room table with my computer, Simon’s laptop, a bottle of Mountain Dew Code Red, a bowl of Swedish Fish, and Abbie’s diary for reading during my downtime. We don’t know much about who Simon was, other than being a health freak, a possible satyr, and an emissary for the Underrealm, so it’s going to take more than punching in his birth date or the model year of his first car in order to figure out his various passwords.
Unfortunately, I find, when I plug his computer in and turn it on, that it’s password protected from the get-go. However, fortunately, the laptop runs on Windows and it takes only a minute for me to force a reset of the administrative password to give me full access to his laptop. Getting his credit account password is going to be trickier, though. Too bad Haden and Dax’s search of his house hadn’t turned up any bank statements or paperwork that could help me out. Either Simon had managed everything online, or Marta had handled all of that for him.
But also lucky for me, I have a few connections. Or one, really.
I open my email on my own laptop and pull up the latest message from Sage.
Here’s that software you requested. Should I be worried about what you’re going to do with it, little bro?
I send a reply: It’s for purely educational purposes. And then download the software onto a stick.
My brother makes a small fortune freelancing out his services to companies who want someone to try to crack their security. If I can’t figure it out on my own, I’ll have to use Sage’s “brute force” program to try to decrypt the password. But that could take anywhere from an hour to several weeks (or even years), depending on how strong Simon’s password is.
When it’s ready, I plug the stick into Simon’s laptop and let the software start doing its thing. As I wait, I start poking around in Simon’s files, hoping there might be some sort of lead there. My heart starts racing when I see a file marked Abbie in a documents folder. I’d been wondering for the past few weeks if Simon knew what had happened to my sister. And since Marta hadn’t returned to Olympus Hills since Joe fired her—causing my only viable lead to go cold—I am overwhelmed by the possibility that the information I’ve been looking for might be stored right in front of me. I double-click on the file so fast that it doesn’t register, so I have to try again. The file seems to take an eternity to open—probably because of all the memory Sage’s software is using—and I find myself holding my breath until it does.
Only to let it out in a discouraged huff. The file is nothing but a resume for a woman named Abbie St. James, who appeared to be applying for a role as a backup vocalist for Joe Vince’s band. The more files I open, the more I realize that they are mostly all band related (Simon was Joe’s manager, after all), and I start to realize this computer must have been used purely for his day job. It’s not like he would be getting emails all the way from the Underrealm. That’s why Rowan needed his communications talisman.
It’s been several hours and Simon’s computer is running almost too hot to touch because of the brute force software and I am about to call it a night, when I notice a file named PWs. It reminds me of how Great-grandpa Oshiro writes down all of his passwords on a sticky note just in case he forgets them.
Old people do the weirdest things.…
Then it strikes me that, for all we know, Simon had been a very old man in a very young-looking man’s body. Which is probably why he was so obsessed with his health.
I open the file and find a list of words written in a language that looks Greek to me.… Because it probably is Greek.
The first one in the list looks like two words combined by an underscore. I type them into Google Translate, and it comes back with the words kale chips.
Either this is a shopping list, or …
I open up the bookmark for Simon’s credit card company. I type in his name and then kale_chips in the password field.
The computer is still running slow, but after a moment of thinking, a page opens, unfolding Simon’s account information right in front of me.
“Seriously, his password was kale chips?” I say aloud, swinging my arms out in disbelief. My hand hits my half-empty bottle of Code Red. It spills right on top of Abbie’s open diary.
I swear loudly and snatch the diary up. Which starts dripping on Simon’s laptop. I swear some more and run for the paper towels in the kitchen with the diary in hand, leaving a trail of red drops on the white carpet in the dining room as I go.
“Tobin? What’s wrong?” I hear my mother’s voice echoing through the house from the mudroom. She must have opened the door from the garage just in time to hear my tirade. I cover the diary in paper towels—both to sop up the mess and to conceal the green leather book in case my mother might recognize it as Abbie’s—and then scoop up both computers, juggling them frantically, and dash up the stairs before my
mother has time to remove her jacket and shoes (a must before entering the house) and discover what I’ve been up to.
“Nothing, Mom,” I shout down the stairs. “Just had an accident … with some soda. I’ll clean it up in a minute.”
“You’ll clean it up right now!” she shouts from the dining room.
“Be right there!”
I wipe off the diary pages the best I can, and then toss it and the computers on top of my bed. I can hear my mother headed up the stairs, ready to give me a lecture about cleaning up after myself, so I grab my bath towel off the back of my desk chair and bound out of the room, closing the door behind me.
“I’m on it,” I call as I jog past her on my way to the dining room. I throw the towel down on top of the table, soaking up the red soda.
“You should watch your language, young man. Even when you think you’re alone. ‘The true test of a man’s character is how he behaves when no one is watching,’ ” she says, repeating one of her favorite mom proverbs.
I don’t respond. The only thing I can think of is the list of names under which Simon had credit accounts that I had gotten the briefest of glances at before running the computer upstairs. Rosemary Winters, my mother, had been at the top of it.
Any inkling of a doubt that I could have entertained that my mother wasn’t in the pocket of the Underrealm has been completely destroyed.
The next day, I sit alone backstage before rehearsal is supposed to start, with Abbie’s journal and Simon’s laptop in front of me. I know I should be running lines for the scene Joe suddenly decided to add to the play this morning, but instead, I can’t pull myself away from Abbie’s journal. I’d spent a good part of an hour last night carefully wiping Code Red soda from between the pages, feeling like an archeologist cleaning a precious artifact, and discovered an entry that I hadn’t seen before.
Even though I’d read the diary through more times than I care to admit, I’d missed this page because it had been stuck to the one in front of it by what appears to be a couple of drops of clear nail polish.
What’s so interesting about this entry is the drawing that (presumably) Abbie had made in a corner of the page. It’s of a segmented circle with different symbols sketched in each block. One looks like a lyre; another resembles a trident. I know where I’ve seen something like this before.…
“Tobin?” I hear Daphne say, but from the sound of her voice, I can tell it’s not the first time she’s called my name. I hadn’t even noticed her entering backstage.
“Hey,” I say, tracing my finger over the drawing.
“How long have you been here?” she asks, pointing at the remnants of my lunch that sit beside me.
“Not long,” I lie. Truth is, I skipped my last three classes today.
Daphne gives me this look like I’m not fooling her. I forget that she can read people’s tones. Mine probably sounds as jittery as the three Mountain Dews I’ve downed so far this afternoon. I didn’t sleep much last night.
Daphne sits next to me. She bites her lip as if thinking hard, and I worry she’s trying to come up with the best words in which to stage some sort of intervention with me over the diary. Like I need another lecture.…
“I’ve missed you,” Daphne says.
“Huh?”
She shrugs. “I just realized this is the first time we’ve been alone together since Las Vegas. I’ve missed my friend.”
She gives a small smile, and it strikes me all over again what a beautiful person she is. It’s not like I’m in love with her or anything. I knew there was no chance for anything to happen between us the second she gave me that speech about how she doesn’t have time for boys because of her music and all that. And, really, I’m cool with being her friend, but I can still appreciate that she’s a beautiful person—both inside and out.
“I’ve missed you, too,” I say.
“How is everything?” she asks.
I know she means emotionally, but instead, I pick up the diary. “I think I found something,” I say, my voice coming out much squeakier than I expected. I should probably cut down on the caffeine. “What do you make of this drawing?” I say, with a concentrated effort to make my voice lower.
“That looks like the symbols that are on the Compass,” Daphne says excitedly. “And the tree.”
“That’s what I thought, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them somewhere else, too. I didn’t realize it until now.” I point at the paragraph at the bottom of the page. “Read this passage.”
Daphne reads out loud: “ ‘Mom got a new artifact for her collection today. It came in a wooden crate like something out of an Indiana Jones movie. She wasn’t home when the courier service delivered it, so I thought I’d have a look inside. It was some sort of old scroll. Kinda lame for the $50,000 receipt that accompanied it. Extra, extra lame, considering Mom just told me she’s cancelling my acting lessons because they’re too expensive. Anyway, Mom freaked when she came home and saw the open crate. It’s not like I touched anything inside of it. She acts like I’d be dumb enough to try to unroll some scroll that’s been lying around in a cave somewhere for a few thousand years. She locked it away as soon as she got home. I don’t know why she’d pay so much for something if she’s not even going to put it on display like everything else. From what I could see, the only thing cool about it is this circle with all these weird symbols on the outside of the scroll. I keep finding myself drawing them when I’m not even thinking about it. Strange, huh?’ ”
“Definitely,” I say.
Daphne stops and looks up at me. For a moment there, I had forgotten that she was reading and that Abbie wasn’t speaking to me from the past.
“Look at the date of this passage,” I say, tapping the page. “She wrote this shortly after we moved to Olympus. This would have been before she knew anything about Skylords and the Underrealm and all that.”
“Have you seen this scroll she’s talking about?” Daphne asks. “The fact that it has the same symbols as the Compass can’t be a coincidence. Maybe it holds a clue as to how we’re supposed to use it.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” I say. “And, yeah, I’ve seen it. My mom keeps her more precious artifacts locked in her wall safe, rather than on display. I’ve seen a scroll in there once or twice.”
“What, like you’ve broken into your mother’s safe as well as her files?” Daphne punches me in the arm. “Hacking computers, cracking safes, why didn’t you tell me that you’re a regular James Bond?”
“Q,” I say. “Q does the cool tech stuff; Bond just runs around looking good in a tux and drinking martinis. And I’m not really the Q in my family. I told you my brother is a mechanical genius. He made a combination cracker when he was fifteen.”
“Wow, no wonder your mom treats you like you’re the dumb one,” she says, with a playful smile.
“Tell me about it.” I roll my eyes. “But the point is, my mom has a scroll that might tell us something about the Compass. Maybe even how to use it.”
“But why would she have it?” she asks.
“If I know my mother, she was probably looking for collateral. She’s been collecting artifacts for the last few years. I’m guessing she’s been looking for something she might be able to use for more bargaining power if the Underrealm ever decides she outlived her usefulness. I wonder if she even knows what the scroll is for.”
“You still remember the combination to the safe?” Daphne says, starting to stand. “Let’s go get this scroll.”
“I didn’t think you were too keen on breaking and entering,” I say teasingly. She’d scolded me big-time the last time we snooped around my mom’s office.
“I’m not, but I’m hoping this scroll will tell us how to use the Compass without me having to cut out my heart or something not so pleasant like that.” She’s making a joke, but I sense the emotion she’s trying to hide with it. The closer we get, this Compass, Key, and Cypher stuff is starting to freak her out.
“Unfortunately, it??
?s going to be more complicated than that.” I close the diary. “After I stole that file of maps from my mom’s office back in January, my mom thought we’d had a break-in, and she moved her entire collection to her office in town hall. The security there isn’t exactly as easy to bypass as stealing my mom’s office key out of a hollow book and punching Sage’s PSAT scores into her safe. Just getting into the building after hours would be impossible.”
Daphne sinks back down to the floor next me. “Too bad you really aren’t Bond,” she says, and falls silent, as if lost in thought.
“What’s with all the despair, you two? Did somebody die?” Lexie asks sarcastically as she comes backstage, carrying a box that seems to be loaded with poster paint and … glitter.
I look up at her.
She lowers the box. “Oh no, did somebody really die? I heard they were going to try to take Pear off her respirator today. Did you hear something—”
“Nothing like that,” I say, because I see the terror in her eyes. She and Pear might have been rivals, but they had still been best friends since freshman year. Lexie was kind of complicated like that. “Just a problematic lead.”
“No luck with cracking the password, then?” Dax asks as he and Haden enter the room after Lexie.
“Quite the contrary,” I say, picking up the laptop. I’m glad to focus on something that doesn’t seem so difficult for a moment. I pull up Simon’s information and turn the computer around so they can see my handiwork.
“Impressive,” Haden says.
“Only problem is, I don’t see a Rowan Lord on this list of account holders,” I say. “There is an R. King, though.”
“That sounds about right,” Haden says. “Rowan would choose King over Lord.”
I click on the statements for that card. “The timing seems right. There are only statements dating back to September for this account. But, ugh …” I shake my head in frustration.
“What is it?” Haden asks.
“If this is your brother, he’s a smart SOB. Look at this—he’s been taking out large cash advances every few weeks and that’s it. We can’t track him by his spending because he’s doing it all in cash—and every time he takes out an advance, he does it at a different location. His latest withdrawal was yesterday at a bank in Riverside. He’s too damn smart.”