Mom shook me awake, the overhead light glaring. My back faced her, but I could tell I had slept in. The morning was already churning with light and movement. Who had done my paper route?
“Kazu.” She placed a cool palm on my forehead. “Are you sick?” I rolled over to face her and shook my head, realizing as I did that it throbbed. Her eyes widened at the sight of me.
“What?” My voice croaked as I spoke, like my throat was giving out.
“Your eyes,” she said. “They’re swollen.”
My early morning mission with the gang came rushing back at me, and I remembered that Crowley still had Genki. The memory of him threatening to hurt my dog, while Genki bravely stood guard in the front of the dognapping van, made my stomach turn. Tears pooled in my eyes, and I pushed my fists against my face to hide it. My eyelids were puffy and tender, and I realized I must have been crying in my sleep.
“It’s been a hard week, and you’re sick,” she said. “No school today.”
At first I wanted to resist, but there was no reason to go to school. March, CindeeRae, and Madeleine would be upset about the mission, and without any more clues, we would be unable to plan another one.
I nodded at Mom. Right now I just wanted to bury myself under the covers and forget what had happened. I was done with detective work. Every mission we planned failed, and now Genki’s safety might depend on me quitting forever.
Mom bent toward me and kissed my forehead. The gesture made me want to crawl into her lap and cry.
“Would you like some mugicha with your breakfast?” she asked. “It’ll chase away the fever.”
I nodded. Mugicha was a roasted barley tea popular in Japan. In the winter Mom served it warm, and she prepared some every time I was sick.
“Well,” she said. “You get some rest, and I’ll put a pot of mugicha on.”
After taking my temperature—99.9—Mom went to the kitchen to make tea, and I got up to grab a lighter blanket from the floor. A manila folder dropped from my hoodie, and I bent to pick up the single sheet of paper that had slipped out.
It was a list, numbered one to eleven. Scratchy sentences written in what looked like another language matched the handwriting on the folder’s label: Processes and Procedures. In my frightened flight home hours earlier, I had forgotten about the folder, which was bent in the middle from me sleeping on it.
Shoving the folder under the bed, I wrapped myself in the thin flannel throw and curled into a ball, the familiar smell of Genki stinging my eyes.
Mom knocked on my door before opening it enough to poke her head inside my room. “Are you awake?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Your friends are here to check on you.” Usually Mom was strict about sick days, not allowing anyone to visit in case I was either faking or contagious. It seemed all rules were disregarded once a lousy dognapper swiped your puppy.
“They’re here now?” I didn’t have anything to say to them. The mission had failed, and our dogs were still gone.
“All three of them.”
I almost wished Mom’s sick rule still applied. “Okay,” I said, my voice low and hoarse.
They marched in with their arms to their sides and shoulders slumped. Mom eyed us cautiously as she backed out of my room, shutting the door softly behind her.
“Hey, Kazu,” March said. “I brought your homework.” He set a folder on the edge of my bed.
“Thanks?” Did he not know me? The last thing I wanted on a sick day was my homework.
CindeeRae’s hands were clasped in front of her. “I’m sorry it didn’t go well last night.”
“Okay, okay,” Madeleine interrupted, taking a step forward in her black-and-red soccer socks. “We feel bad that you’re sick, or whatever. But we still need to figure out where the dogs are.”
The envelope rested beneath my bed, with information that was probably related to the case. It would be a lie to say we didn’t have any more clues, nowhere to look for the holding location. But risking another mission could put Genki in danger, and so far none of our missions had been successful. It seemed the only thing we were good at was getting into more trouble.
I shrugged. “What can we do? We don’t know where they’re keeping the dogs, and the police already don’t believe us about Crowley, so what’s the use?”
Madeleine’s lips tightened into a thin line and her eyes narrowed. “We can’t give up.”
“Look.” CindeeRae stepped forward in an attempt to referee the situation. “We just thought you should know that my aunt said they’re zeroing in on some guy. She couldn’t really give me details, but she said he’d been reported for suspicious behavior already. Maybe they’re onto Crowley?”
Before last night, that information would have been exciting. But now that Crowley had threatened Genki, I couldn’t put his life in any more danger by helping the police or participating in another klutzy mission.
“We should just let the police do their jobs.” I couldn’t meet any of their eyes. “It’s what they do, right? Find the bad guys.”
“But what if our dogs are long gone by then?” CindeeRae’s stage voice was back, but this time she definitely wasn’t acting.
I pulled the covers closer to my neck. “I should probably get some sleep. I’ll see you guys tomorrow?”
CindeeRae and Madeleine held fisted hands at their sides. What did they expect from me? I had done everything we could so far to save the dogs. It wasn’t my fault it hadn’t worked. There was nothing left to do.
My cheeks flushed as I remembered the envelope under my bed. Well, they didn’t have to know about that.
The girls stomped from my room, and March stayed back in the clutter, looking down at my floor. “I understand, Kazu,” he said without looking up. “It’ll be okay. You’ll all get your dogs back.”
Once March left, I pulled the envelope from its hiding spot and rolled onto my side, curling around our only clue like it was a floatie and my bed the rocky ocean.
Last summer, when we were ten, March and I sent secret messages to each other using a Caesar Shift, which is a code where you line two streams of the alphabet together. To help me decode his messages and code my own, March made a cipher wheel with two paper plates, one smaller than the other, and fastened together in the center with a paper fastener. Each circle had a line of the alphabet around the rim and by lining them up, we could create our own cipher.
Ours had been cipher 5, which meant the inner alphabet moved five places to the left: A became V, B became W, and C became X. When I delivered papers in the morning, I would drop off my message and pick up March’s. And because only juicy messages were sent with a Caesar Shift, I learned that March’s dad had gambled away part of their tax refund playing internet poker, Maggie had a boyfriend and March had caught them kissing on the lips, and Max and Miles had flushed all their fish down the toilet in an experiment to see if they would end up in the irrigation ditch that ran through their backyard.
Using the cipher wheel March had made, I halfheartedly studied the code used in the clue I had found in Crowley’s garage, mostly because it was more interesting than the homework March had brought over. I had tried ciphers one through thirteen before my pencil lead wore down to a nub.
The endless combinations probably extended way beyond the Caesar Shift. Crowley could have used a kazillion ciphers, shifts, and codes, and by the time we figured it all out I would be eating DineWise while paying someone to rake my leaves and push my garbage to the curb. It didn’t matter; nothing we did ever changed anything. I threw the pencil across the room, and it landed perfectly in the slot from last year’s valentines box sitting atop my dresser.