Dead Man's Switch Page 4

  “Tomorrow?” King asked without looking back at his father. He’d only see what never changed. A broad shouldered man with a dark beard filled with wood dust. Square face. Square head. Eyes that could focus like lasers. Except now they seemed dull because of what had happened to Ella.

  Mack knew what King was asking about—a chance to go off the island and visit Ella at the hospital.

  “Won’t work,” Mack said. “Maybe a few days from now.”

  King had only been off the island once since the coma. He’d spent three hours at the hospital, holding Ella’s soft hands, whispering to her as he begged her to wake up. After that, Mack had kept both of them prisoners on the island, relying on doctor’s reports to see if anything had changed.

  “This is unfair, Mack,” King said. “I should be able to see her. What if...”

  King couldn’t finish the sentence. What if she dies?

  King didn’t get a response. He heard his father’s footsteps leave the kitchen and knew that, like every other night since Ella had entered the coma, Mack was escaping back to the construction of pieces of furniture.

  Until the email from Blake Watt, King had believed that Ella was the entire reason for Mack’s withdrawal from family life and any real conversation with King. Now King had no choice but to wonder if it was something different.

  “Trust no authorities. They will hunt you too.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “I got nothing,” Johnson said. “I thought about it all night. Well, except when I was asleep. But I was thinking about it when I fell asleep. And it was the first thing I thought of when I woke up. And I thought about it all morning. Still nothing. He did not give me the password. Any password.”

  King and Johnson sat on reclining chairs on the front porch of King’s house. The view might have given them a sweep of the open farmland that had been cut into the trees on the island. Except for the drizzle.

  The overhang protected them from the moisture, and the breeze wasn’t strong enough to blow the drizzle across their faces. The beads of water were so light that it seemed more like fog than light rain, but the gurgling of drain pipes gave proof that the water did not remain suspended in the air.

  An empty rocking chair was farther down the porch. This was where Ella would sit on days like this, wrapped in a blanket, hands curled around a tea mug, smile on her face. She loved the coziness and tranquility of this kind of afternoon.

  King used to love them too. Until The Coma. Now he hated anything like this that reminded him she was gone. He hated the island.

  So he was glad to be frustrated. It took his mind off the empty rocking chair.

  “That’s impossible,” King told Johnson. “Somehow, Watt gave you the password to the iPhone.”

  “I don’t have it,” Johnson said.

  “He went to a lot of work to set everything up so far. He found a way to beat the infrared sensors in the forbidden zone so he could hide the iPhone and mark the tree. Set up a way to get me a message after he drowned. Made sure the sensors wouldn’t detect me either. No way after all of that would he be wrong about you and the password.”

  “Nothing,” Johnson said. “Absolutely, flat-out nothing.”

  King hit the power button at the top of the iPhone. The home screen lit up, showing the four empty boxes. There were 10,000 possible passwords between 0000 and 9999—except for the two wrong guesses King had put into the phone the day before. Only two chances left. Two more possible passwords to enter before all the data was wiped.

  Maybe he should just get it over with. Try two more random passwords. Ensure the data was wiped. Then this whole situation would be out of his hands. He wouldn’t be able to do a thing after that to learn whether something crazy and insane bad was happening at night.

  But the clock was ticking. All of yesterday, last night, and this morning had passed since he’d found the iPhone. Easily half of the 72-hour deadline that Watt’s email had threatened until a new set of emails went out into the world to show that King’s father was a horrible criminal involved in a crazy and insane bad thing that was supposedly happening at night.

  King wanted to think the key word was “supposedly.” However, the argument that he’d just used on Johnson was too powerful. No way Watt would have set all of this up if something wasn’t happening. For crying out loud, there was the simple fact that Watt had been worried enough to put in a dead man’s switch. And then the horrible truth that Watt’s worries had come true when he drowned.

  Something was happening. And King needed Johnson to come up with more than just “I got nothing.”

  “He must have given you some kind of clue,” King said. “Maybe he didn’t come out and say, ‘Hey, buddy, remember this password in case I die.’ But can’t you remember anything that seemed unusual enough to point to a password?”

  “I got nothing,” Johnson said.

  “Getting a little tired of hearing that,” King said. “Did he ever give you anything? Anything at all?”

  Johnson shrugged. “A flashlight that didn’t work.”

  King stood. He walked to one of the support beams of the porch and pretended to bang his head against it a few times. He sat.

  “What?” Johnson said.

  “Here’s how it works,” King said. “Something out of the ordinary like that. The first thing you do when I ask you about Blake is go, ‘A flashlight that doesn’t work.’ Maybe it means something.”

  “Give me a break. I just remembered it now. When you asked. Just now. Before, you were just talking about passwords.”

  “A flashlight that doesn’t work. That doesn’t seem significant?”

  “Not when you ask about passwords.”

  “He didn’t say anything else when he gave it to you?”

  Johnson’s eyes began to widen.

  “Yeah,” King said. “He did say something.”

  “I don’t want to tell you,” Johnson said. “You’ll get mad at me because now that I think about it...”

  “I won’t get mad. I promise.”

  “He gave it to me and told me to hang on to it. He said he wanted me to hide it for him and if I didn’t tell anyone about it, he’d give me a hundred bucks someday to give it back to him.”

  King took a deep breath. “I won’t get mad…if you tell me that you still have it.”

  “Of course I do,” Johnson said. “I forgot about it until now.”

  King took another deep breath. “And?”

  “I put it between my mattress and box spring.”

  CHAPTER 10

  In the hallway, Johnson told King, “Don’t say anything about my bedroom, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Seriously, not a word.”

  King could have walked blindfolded through Johnson’s house and led them to every room. The layout of the small farmhouse was identical to King’s house, which was identical to half of the houses that had been built for employee families decades earlier.

  It wasn’t decorated the same, of course. Especially Johnson’s room.

  “Um...” King said. “Elvis?”

  “You said you wouldn’t say a word,” Johnson said.

  “That was until I saw Elvis. How can you not say something at a poster like that?”

  Elvis was on a huge poster. He wore a white jumpsuit, looking as if he was screaming as he held a microphone close. Psychedelic colors filled the background.

  “Star Wars,” King said, looking at another poster. “That makes a little more sense. Not much more, but a little more.” He turned to another poster. “And—”

  “Enough,” Johnson cut him off before King could say “dragon.”

  “But—”

  “Enough! Shut the door and hit the light switch.”

  King followed instructions. The room went dark. That’s when he realized that Johnson had dark towels across the windows to keep out daylight. What was weird was how the posters glowed in the dark.

  Johnson was wearing a black shirt, and dust specks
seemed to glow on the shirt.

  “Black light,” Johnson said. “My bulbs are black light. They give out ultraviolet light. Those are vintage posters. Specially made to glow in the black light. I collect some and buy and sell others on eBay.”

  “You never told me about this.”

  “So that you could mock me about Elvis? I wonder why not. Collectors get serious about this kind of stuff. I knew you wouldn’t understand. You’re too cool. You’re the Lyon King.”

  King opened the door and light flooded in, diminishing the glow on the posters. He snapped off the lights and the glow faded completely.

  “So you make money buying and selling this,” King said. “That’s impressive.”

  “Nice try. I know when you’re trying to be nice. I’ve watched you do it to others for years.”

  Johnson went to his bed. Neatly made. The bed covers were so tight that King understood what it meant to talk about bouncing quarters off a bed. Everything about Johnson’s room was neat.

  Johnson reached under and pulled out the flashlight. He flicked it on. “See, nothing.”

  King had a flash of intuition. “Did Blake know about these posters?”

  “Yeah,” Johnson said. “He was a geek too. A different kind of geek. But I knew he wouldn’t laugh. And he didn’t.”

  “So maybe it’s a black-light flashlight,” King said. He closed the door and did not snap on the bedroom lights. “Try it now.”

  In the darkness, nothing happened.

  “Try it now,” King repeated.

  “I did,” Johnson said. “Obviously nothing is happening.”

  King opened the bedroom door again. “Can I see the flashlight?”

  Johnson handed it to him. King unscrewed it. “Maybe the batteries are dead.”

  He pulled out the batteries. There was a small wad of paper between them. “Interesting,” King said. “This would have prevented a connection.”

  He noticed writing on the paper. All it said was “The Room.”

  “The Room,” King repeated. “Remember, that was one of the hints for you.”

  “And remember I said I didn’t know what room Blake was talking about?” Johnson answered.

  King put the batteries back in and screwed the flashlight back together. He flicked on the switch and closed the bedroom door. The posters began to glow.

  “Bingo,” King said. “A flashlight with an ultraviolet bulb.”

  “You can get them easy on the Internet,” Johnson said. “Just like I ordered the special bulbs for my bedroom.”

  King open the door again so he could look at the flashlight in the daylight. Maybe it had some other clues.

  “Um...” Johnson said.

  “Um?”

  “The Room. I’m kind of remembering something.”

  King fought the impulse to sigh. Johnson could drive him nuts sometimes. But on the other hand, just yesterday Johnson had stood beside King in the classroom fight against Raimer, and for Johnson, that had taken a lot of courage. You take the good with the bad, King thought.

  “The Room,” Johnson repeated. “Both words capitalized. It’s a cool game app. In the game, there’s a special light you use to shine on objects to see if there are invisible words hidden on them. Invisible words that give clues. Maybe on the iPhone…”

  King shut the bedroom door again. He could hear Johnson’s breath close beside him in the near-total dark. King pulled Blake’s iPhone out of his own pocket. He flicked on the flashlight again. The front of the iPhone was glass. There would be little chance of anything on the glass.

  King shone the ultraviolet light on the black metal backing of the iPhone.

  Four numbers glowed at them: 2855.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Wow,” Johnson said, squinting at the screen of the iPhone. “All those folders. You said over 3500 games and apps. Can you count that high?”

  They weren’t near Johnson’s house anymore. Holding Blake Watt’s iPhone felt like holding a used radioactive core. King had insisted they find some privacy before entering the password. Last thing he wanted was Johnson’s mom catching them with it.

  So despite the urgency he felt as the hours counted down until the threatened release of whatever secret Blake Watt had felt important enough to hide with a dead man’s switch, King and Johnson had strolled—yes, strolled so that anyone watching would think they were wandering around the way kids do—back to the shoreline that gave them a view across the sound. The same place where King had asked Johnson the day before about the chances of swimming off the island.

  They found shade beneath some spruce near the water, and the quiet slap of small waves on the pebbled shore concealed their whispered conversation.

  King had put in the password: 2855.

  And the screen had given them access. The home page had a grid of 20 folders. Five vertical and four horizontal. Blake had filled each folder with 16 apps.

  King had thumbed through the pages. Eleven home pages, each filled with 20 folders.

  “Don’t need to count,” King said. “There’s this amazing invention called math. Eleven times 20 times 16.”

  “Hate math,” Johnson said. “Math is like from the Middle Ages. The more amazing invention is called a calculator.”

  “Which the iPhone has, right?”

  King brought up a search bar. He typed “calc,” which brought up Calculator. King tapped on the app, and when it opened, he plugged in the numbers. Eleven times 20 times 16. The total was 3520. That’s how many games or apps were on the black iPhone 5. King knew that Blake had jailbroken the iPhone, but he didn’t know if that was the limit set by Apple or if Blake had tweaked it. Either way, that was a crazy amount of apps and games.

  “He was a serious geek,” Johnson said.

  “I don’t think he did anything by accident,” King answered. “That should be obvious by now. So that means we need to ask ourselves if there is a reason for so many apps.”

  “Distraction?” Johnson said. “I mean, isn’t this about an email? Or emails?”

  In answer, King tapped the mail icon at the bottom of the iPhone. The mail opened and showed zero emails in the inbox.

  “Wait for it...” King said, watching the spinning gray tics that showed the mail program was searching for emails. “Wait for it...”

  The signal strength bars at the top of the iPhone showed excellent coverage. ATT.

  The phone gave a pleasant sound. Email received and downloaded.

  With Johnson watching, King tapped on the email.

  It opened. And...

  ...nothing.

  “Huh?” Johnson said.

  “Huh is right,” King said. “It’s a blank message. And look at the header. The From and To.”

  The headers matched. From: blakewatt2855@gmail.com. To: blakewatt2855@gmail.com.

  “Blake sending something to Blake?” Johnson said.

  King didn’t answer. He was thinking.

  “No,” Johnson said. “It could be a message from Blake. He told us he wasn’t going to send you anything anymore in case it could be traced from his account. So he set up a different account. Used numbers instead of a name.”

  “But why send a blank message?” King tapped his front tooth. Maybe all of this was a sick joke. After all, Mack really couldn’t be behind anything crazy and insane and bad happening at night.

  “I got it,” Johnson said. “Invisible ink.”

  “Sure,” King answered. “Like on the back of the phone. You’re saying we just use the magic flashlight, and it will show up on here?”

  “Yeah. Er, no. You can’t use a marker on an email. I need to stop getting so excited and use my brain before I talk.”

  King was tapping his tooth again.

  “Actually,” King said. “You may be right. Blake once played a trick on me. I think he did it again. Come on. We need to go back to your house and make sure the coast is clear.”

  CHAPTER 12

  “Doily?” King snorted. A wide circular
hand-knitted flower sat beneath the computer monitor. “A doily?”

  They were back at Johnson’s house. In a nook just off the kitchen, a computer workstation had been built into a corner. On the wall behind it was a bulletin board with coupons pinned on one side and family photos on the other.

  The nook smelled of fresh lemon. Artificial fresh lemon. Johnson’s mom was a freak about using furniture polish. Dust was instantly eliminated from the Johnson home. It made King sad, worrying about whether Ella would ever return to their own house. To wind the cuckoo clocks. To stand at the stove, stirring macaroni as the water boiled, fresh clay stuck to the cuticles of her nails from her time at the spinning wheel.

  “Think of it as an ornamental mat,” Johnson sighed. “Meant to protect the desktop.” He sighed again. “And if it matters, the name comes from Doiley, a draper in London who popularized them in the 1600s.”

  “And you know this how?” King forced away his sadness.

  “You know it’s called a doily. Most kids wouldn’t.”

  “But this draper stuff...”

  “I told my mom that whatever she had knitted to put under the monitor probably wouldn’t be a hot accessory at the Apple store. That’s when she forced me to Google it with her and learn the history. I think she was trying to teach me not to mock her sense of fashion. It worked.”

  “Doily,” King said again. “We’re using a monitor on a doily to bust a set of mysteries from a computer geek.”

  “That’s perfect,” Johnson said. “After all, who would think to go to this computer?”

  “Only if my theory is right,” King answered.

  Johnson looked around, obviously nervous about getting caught. “Let’s be fast, okay? I don’t know how long we have until Mom gets back. She’s not in good shape, and when she goes for a run, it’s never that far.”

  “I locked the door as we came in,” King said.

  Johnson groaned. “And if I don’t see her in time, I would explain that how? We don’t have to lock doors on the island.”

  Maybe now, King thought. “Trust no authorities. They will hunt you too.” He didn’t say it though. “Your mother. Your problem.”