Call Me Twice

Chapter 8: Hello/Goodbye

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I go back to my grandparent's house without any real fan fare. The police are gone, but my nerves are shot from revealing myself and thinking I was so close to being captured. I trust Lia, mostly. But I can't really trust anyone although her word isn't exactly good and it's not like she can dial 911 and say she found a clone.
My grandparents apparently don't eat dinner or eat super late? Or something? They make no mention of dinner so I get snacks from the pantry and go on up to the guest room.
I have a paper to work on and a couple of assignments I could look at, but see above where my nerves are fried. In the end all I can bring myself to do is to work on my project for world history. It's supposed to be comparing and contrasting any aspect of historical figures and so I chose how hot I think they are. Not how hot they actually are. How hot me, a gay teen, thinks they are. Nothing to do with their accomplishments just if I think they are hot or not based solely on appearance. I work on that for a while then grow restless.
I want to look around my dad's room. Without prying eyes.
I cross the hall quietly, and go in, locking the door. For the most part everything is undisturbed, and it's all fairly neutral. However.
I lie down on the floor, sliding under the bed. Come on, we had some secrets down here, didn't we?
Sure enough, between the slats of the bed and the mattress, are a couple of rolled up magazines. Not like dirty magazines, what a repressed high schooler would think were dirty magazines. A women's health and then a men's health one. Like, plenty of scantily clad people but nothing scandalous.
"Score," I mutter, tugging them out. That is a-plus parenting right there. Way to be a wingman.
I slip back to my room, magazines under my shirt and then I flop down on my bed, leafing through the male magazine. It's pretty tame stuff, but still its a forty year old magazine so pretty funny.
"What—is this?" I ask, tracing down on the page. There's a mark made, in black sharpie, over one of the articles. It's a sigil?
I flip to another page. Hidden in the top corner. There's another one. And another.
"No, no, no we were bonding, Sebastian, do not make this some weird mystery—damn it," sure enough there are more on other pages.
I sort for my notebook and flip to a blank page. Starting at the beginning I copy down the sigils. There's a pattern here what do i want to bet it's a code? Yep, they're in different parts of the page, and so I copy them down on the corresponding parts of the blank page to reveal—they form a border which is no doubt the order in which I'm supposed to read it.
I go through the women's magazine same thing. Then I hide both magazines in my backpack.
"Okay, okay where's your notes on what this is?" I mutter, searching through another notebook of my own. My dad was an archeologist, he had all sorts of notes about runes, sigils, all the time he'd sometimes write messages in them in his notes. So I should have a translation guide.
I do. I find it and set to work. The men's magazine code is easiest so I decode that:
"Under —third—-stair," I frown, "You hide something in the house?"
I slip out of the room, by now it's dark out and I should be getting ready to go. Armed with two flashlights, I head down the creaky stairs. At the third one I kneel, feeling along the wood for a pocket or a lever or something. Nothing like that but on my second pass I feel a loose board. I pry it up.
"And treasure—no a map that's cool, why'd you bother to hide all this in the house?" I mutter to myself. I tug out the map. Looks like just a map of Washington? Well, I suppose he was trying to escape. I fold up the map and put it in my pocket. Probably more code on that. But for now I have Lia to meet.
My grandparents aren't observant people and I get out of the house without a problem. I almost pull out the map before I remember the way back to Lia's house, without using the back forest trails like I did before.
Lia is waiting, flashlight in hand, in the road.
"Did they see you leave?" She asks.
"No, also they've never technically said I can't go out at night so I can just act confused," I shrug, putting my extra flashlight in my coat pocket. "Did you talk to Harper's mom?"
"Yeah, and Josie. Josie, like me, is sure he was sober and just fine when he left. I know it sounds weird given—how he is, but, like, Harper didn't lie to us. If he told Josie he was coming back he was, or he meant to," she says.
"I believe you, and if we're assuming foul play, then we need suspects," I say, "I mean obviously prime suspect is the last person to see him alive, his father."
"But it's a far cry to just murder your kid, and if he was going to do that wouldn't he cover it up better than letting Harper call us not an hour before he went missing?"
"Maybe, unless it was spur of the moment," I say, "But let's think outside the box. Did he have any other, enemies? Who was he getting drugs from?"
"Anyone, he'd steal whatever he could from anyone, then OD, it wasn't—he didn't have a dealer," she sighs, "I'm sorry. None of it makes sense."