Penny,
I’m so sorry I haven’t been able to reach you these past few days. I really meant to be there to pick you up from the airport, but this story I’m chasing in Saskatchewan turned out to be bigger than I expected, and I had to stay for longer than I meant to. Like an idiot, I forgot my phone charger, and my cell died on day two. I’ve been out in the backwoods, far away from civilization. But I finally drove forty miles just to find internet to send this to you. I’ll be in touch soon to let you know when I’m coming back.
Love,
Dad
“Well . . . that’s a relief, at least,” Dex said, rubbing his eyes and leaning back on the living room couch, which was covered in sheets and blankets. He smiled up at me, where I was perched on the cushion next to him. It was still dark out, but I hadn’t been able to wait to show him the email.
“This is great news, Penny. Ike’s okay.”
My eyes ran over the first line of the email again.
“I don’t know where my dad is, Dex. But he is most definitely not okay.”
Dex sat up, blinking. “What do you mean? He says right there—”
“Read it again. Really read it.” I thrust the warm phone into his hands and watched as his eyes skimmed the screen.
“Does that sound like my dad to you?”
Dex just scratched his neck as he read the email. I sighed in frustration.
“First of all, my dad would never start out an email like that with an apology. If he knew he’d let me down, he’d find some way to frame it like it couldn’t be helped. And he wouldn’t get angry at himself for forgetting his phone charger; he’d get angry at his phone for dying in the first place.”
“Yeah . . . that’s probably true. . . .”
“And look at this,” I said, pointing out the first line in the email. “Penny. He said he named me Penelope for a reason, and he hated Penny, remember? He and my mom used to argue about it sometimes.”
“I remember. . . .”
My eyes locked on to Dex’s, which were filling up with confusion and fear.
“Oh my God,” Dex said, jumping off the couch. He started to pace back and forth in front of the coffee table. “So what does this mean? Maybe . . . maybe the email is in code, and he’s trying to warn you of something? Or maybe someone broke into his email account so you’d stop looking for him. Or maybe . . .”
The more Dex spoke, the more uneasy I felt. It should have been easy to dismiss his half-baked theories, but when I’d opened the email, I’d wondered the same things myself. I’d had the same thoughts as Dex, someone who had five—five—different books on Area 51 on his bookshelf.
But there was something wrong with that email. And it wasn’t a hunch—it was a fact. Dad would never call me Penny, not ever.
Dex was still pacing in front of me. His blue-and-red Spider-Man pajamas passed by in a blur. I reached out one hand to stop him, and he came to a halt right in front of me, his knee hitting the palm of my hand.
“Dex,” I said. “Let’s think horses, remember? Not zebras.”
Dex looked like he was going to argue for a second, but then changed his mind. “Okay. So where do we find the horses? Or . . . the facts? I’m kind of losing hold of your metaphor here.”
“The horses are the truth,” I said, taking the phone from Dex’s hand and scanning over the email again. “And I have no idea how to find them. I have no idea what’s going on, or where my dad really is.” I looked up and caught Dex’s eye. “But I bet you a million Canadian dollars he’s not in Saskatchewan.”
I twisted the dial of the lock for the fortieth time, listening to the click-click-click noise it made under my hand. My dad’s safe was about half my size and pushed into the corner of his tiny office.
Dex riffled through my dad’s desk, which was covered in folders, old copies of Strange World, case notes, and bills. They were mixed in with snapshots of me at various ages, which had been handled with various degrees of care.
“Anything?” I asked.
“No. Not yet,” Dex said.
I leaned my head against the cool metal of the safe and sighed. “There’s got to be something in here. Something worth locking up, at least. But I have no idea what the combination is. It’s not my dad’s birthday, or my birthday, or either of my grandparents’ birthdays.”
Dex bit his lip, staring at the combination lock. “Let me try something.”
He came over the safe, and I made space for him. He crouched down low and used his long fingers to spin the combination lock this way, then that. He pulled on the lock, but nothing happened.
“What did you try?”
Dex shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. It was a long shot, anyway. Do you think your dad wrote the combination down somewhere?”
“Hard to say. Maybe? I mean, did my dad ever mention being paranoid about his work, or thinking someone was after it?”
Dex shook his head. “No. He mostly thought no one believed him. Even his editor was a skeptic when it came to Ike’s investigation into the Visitors.”
I sighed, and my eyes skimmed upward to my dad’s corkboard. The top right corner was devoted to pictures of aliens and UFO landings. In one faded photo, a white creature with a bulbous head and round, coal-black eyes stared blankly into the middle distance. The photo had been there for as long as I could remember, longer than almost anything else in the room.
Was it possible my dad really did believe in the Visitors? Even if he didn’t actually believe in any of the other stuff he sold to Strange World for a little bit of cash . . . aliens were the one thing he kept coming back to, again and again.
For the hundredth time that morning, my mind drifted to what I’d seen in the woods the night before. The remains of Bryan and Cassidy, twisted and charred. But the ground beneath them had been untouched. There were no other signs of a fire. . . . What could have done something like that?
I stood up quickly. “I’m going to check his bedroom, see if maybe he wrote the combination down on something in there.”
Dex nodded absently from his position at the desk chair.
My dad’s room looked exactly as it had the last time I’d checked in on it. I stepped in carefully and looked around at his half-opened closet, the socks spilling out of one drawer, the dirty plate on the nightstand. I felt like I was trespassing, like at any second, my dad would come in and ask me what I was doing in there.
But I just took a deep breath, walked over to the nightstand, and opened the top drawer. I moved through some of the items inside—a crossword puzzle book, various pens, an old glasses case, movie ticket stubs. I moved aside a packet of Kleenex and underneath found—
Condoms.
I slammed the drawer shut quickly, catching my pinkie finger in the process. Without thinking, I yelled out.
“You okay?” Dex came running into the room to find me standing by the nightstand, my pinkie finger half in my mouth.
“No. I mean, yeah. I just slammed my finger in the drawer, that’s all.”
“Anything good in there?” Dex moved toward the nightstand.
“No!”
Dex stopped abruptly and gave me an odd look before reaching for my hand. “Let me see.”
He took my hand before I could do or say anything and turned it over carefully. He ran one of his fingers gently over the newly reddish skin on my pinkie, examining it. As his skin moved slowly against mine, the hairs on my arm began to rise.
“Just a bruise, I think,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said, pulling my hand back quickly. Dex blinked, and for a moment he looked like I’d just thrown cold water on his face. Then he shoved his hands into his pockets.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I said. “I don’t think we’re going to find anything in here, though.”
“Yeah, it’s weird,” Dex said, taking one hand out of his pocket and running it through his hair so it stood up on end. “Your dad kept files on every story he was working on, but I can’t find many for this latest one. They have to be in that safe.”
“Well, unless you’re an expert at safecracking . . .”
Dex shook his head.
“Yeah, me neither. But we don’t just stop because we hit one dead end. If you’re trying to uncover a story and one path turns up nothing, you just start again with another.”
Dex leaned up against the doorjamb, watching intently as I started to pace around the room, thinking.
“So what’s the other path?” he asked.
“We ask for help.”
Dex raised an eyebrow, and I sighed. “I can’t think of any other option right now. We know that my dad’s out there somewhere, and that he didn’t send me that email. Which means he could be in trouble. But since we have no idea where to start looking for him, and just the two of us could never comb the whole woods alone . . . we need to get the help of someone who can.”
“Someone like . . .”
“The sheriff.”
Dex screwed his mouth up to the side. “You think he’ll believe you? About the email?”
“I think I have to make him.”