Page 16 of Treasured by Them (Rose and Dagger #3)
Danica
I wish Troy and Edmund were here. I would pester them and pick fights until we ended up fucking. It would be great. I wouldn’t have to think about my frustrating memory blockage, or the way that Vorsong guy bruised my shoulder.
I thought I needed to escape Edmund, but really, I just needed to get away from the violence and the fear. Edmund is fine. Troy is fine. They do things I don’t love—threatening Caleb wasn’t cool.
But when we’re away from that kind of situation? If we could remove ourselves from all the criminal shit? I think we’d have a chance.
In the meantime, I’ll try to enjoy this peaceful cabin. Maybe not alone like I’d hoped, but Malcolm and Zora aren’t bad company.
Since I have this time, I may as well do something positive. If I could figure out what I know about Britney Gardner’s death, it would be a win for justice. No, it wouldn’t bring her back to life. The tragedy will still be a tragedy. She’s still gone. But I could right a very old wrong.
I glare down at my math journal. Why couldn’t I spell anything out for myself? Why is it all numbers?
Unless…I sit down hard. Unless I did spell it out. But with numbers.
Maybe it’s a code.
Devising a secret code is exactly the kind of thing my eight-year-old self would have done.
Especially because I had an inkling that my mom would snoop in my diary.
I love her to pieces, but she’s never been able to mind her own business.
If I didn’t want her to figure out what I was writing, I would have created a secret language or code.
And what better way to do that than with numbers?
I stare at the repeating lines of numbers again. This could be where I was trying to tell myself something.
6 1 1 1 4 1 1 3 1 9 4 1 6 1
6 1 1 1 4 1 1 3 1 9 4 1 6 1
6 1 1 1 4 1 1 3 1 9 4 1 6 1
But what? Each of the numbers can be found in the first few lines of Pascal’s triangle. I flip back to the previous page, with Pascal’s triangle and the first place I added superscript numbers.
Is this the key?
Come on, I was eight. I was slightly precocious, but I wasn’t a genius by any means. So it shouldn’t be too complicated for me, a grown-ass adult, to figure out.
Let’s say the top number of my superscript triangle, 1 1 , is A. The numbers in the next line, 1 2 and 1 3 , are B and C.
1 1 = A
1 2 =B 1 3 =C
1 4 =D 2 1 =E 1 5 =F
1 6 =G 3 1 =H 3 2 =I 1 7 =J
…and so on.
“Hey, Danica!” Malcolm waves from the shed. “I need some help with the canoe.”
“Be right there!” I flip forward to a blank page and write it all out again, adding the letters to each spot. Then I copy down the code I’d written beneath it.
6 1 is M.
1 1 is A.
4 1 is L.
1 3 is C.
Shit. I can already see where this is going. I had a crush on him, but something tells me I wasn’t writing the name of my crush. Because hell, I was eight. I also had a crush on Blaise Pascal. And if you look at pictures of him, well…my tastes were iffy at best.
Did Malcolm attend the camp? I mean, obviously not as a camper—he’s my dad’s age. But could he have been there as an adult?
Zora just told me he spent a lot of years around here. Which years?
An image flashes in my mind—Malcolm wearing one of those red camp t-shirts. He’s sitting at a picnic table with other camp counselors. It’s a memory.
He was there.
Why don’t I have any pictures of him, if he was there? This was right around the time I had my silly, little-kid crush on him. I probably would’ve taken more photos of him than the lake, in that case.
I stare at my “equation,” and the code I made with Pascal’s triangle. I don’t have to write it out to know the final three letters will be O, L, and M.
“Is that your old camp scrapbook?” Malcolm is suddenly standing over me.
His gaze is on my scrapbook, not my math journal, but I quickly slam the journal closed over my pen.
“Um. Yeah.” It’s hard to breathe. I have to get away from him until I know what I’m looking at with that code. Was I a besotted eight-year-old, writing my crush’s name down over and over again?
Or was I traumatized and leaving myself a message for later?
“Let’s take the canoe out.” Malcolm claps his hands twice. I get a sudden flashback of him encouraging a camp full of children forward, clapping in the same way.
Where the fuck is Zora? And why did I send Caleb away?
“Nah, I think I’ll stay here. It’ll be dark soon, anyway.” I look for my phone—my lifeline. It’s on the little table between Malcolm and me.
“Come on, it’ll be like old times.” He gives me a pleading grin, raising his eyebrows and clasping his hands together.
“You mean like when we were at camp?”
His smile freezes in place. “Well, yeah. We did canoes all the time, remember?”
“I’d forgotten most of it. The scrapbook reminded me.” A big, empty void grows in my gut. Blaise Pascal and a bunch of other old dead guys argued whether or not nature abhors a vacuum. But I have living proof of a vacuum in my stomach right now. It’s an emptiness so acute, it feels solid.
“So?” He claps his hands again. “Shall we?”
I force a smile of my own. “Sure. I’ll just toss my beer bottle. I don’t want to attract bees.”
I thought I’d grab my phone on the way, but he maneuvers himself over, blocking me. Casually, though. It could be an accident.
While he waits for me to toss my bottle in the recycling at the edge of the deck, he flips open the cover of my math journal.
I gasp. “Hey, that’s private?—”
“Numbers, huh?” He examines the last page I was writing on, which had been bookmarked by my pen. “What’s this?”
“I’m so embarrassed,” I choke out. “I, um, had a crush.”
His dark blue eyes narrow. That false smile is still in place. “No worries. It’s in the past, right?”
“Uh yeah. Of course.”
“Of course.” He laughs.
His laughter sounds off, but is it my imagination? A part of me hopes I’m just being paranoid, but a bigger part knows this whole exchange is bad news. I mentioned him being at camp with me. I shouldn’t have.
He goes on, “I had a crush on my sixth-grade teacher. Mrs. Bryant. Anyway, it’s getting late. We should get going.”
“I just need to check in with Edmund.”
When I reach for my phone, though, he darts out his hand and grabs it first.
My lungs seize. “I need to text Edmund?—”
“We ought to just go now.” He flips the phone over and over in his hand. “I wouldn’t want you to get so distracted that we lose our chance.”
“Sure! But if I don’t check in, Edmund and Troy will be up here, breaking the door down.” I laugh, high-pitched and shrill. “Also, Zora should be back soon. Maybe we should stick around and make dinner? She’ll probably be hungry when she gets here.”
“Don’t play games with me. Don’t be like her .”
He doesn’t mean Zora.
He means Britney.
“Malcolm…” I trail off. I don’t know what to say. “You’re scaring me a little. Can I have my phone, please?”
“Tell me.” He continues flipping my phone over in his hand. “What do you remember from camp?”
“Nothing. I was looking over my old journals the other day, completely forgot about it. You were a counselor there?”
“Supervisor of the counselors.” He stares intently at my face. “Right. We should text your fiancé. We don’t want him to worry. I’ll type it out for you. Unlock it for me.”
I shake my head. “That’s—that’s super weird. I can type out my own message.”
Before I’ve even finished talking, he gets behind me and wrenches my arm. He bends my fingers back.
I gasp as pain shoots up my forearm, hot and sharp. With my free hand, I reach back, trying to hit him, scratch him, anything. But he presses me over the chair, bending me in half and using his weight to hold me in place.
I open my mouth to scream.
“Scream, and I’ll kill you right here on this deck and leave your body for your family to find.”
“No,” I whisper. Tears fill my eyes—at the pain, at the thought of my mom or dad finding me here, dead.
“Unlock your phone, Danica.” Malcolm holds my phone up with his free hand.
“No.”
He bends my fingers further. “This will be so much worse for you if you disobey. Not only will your fingers break, but you will die, and I will be sure to find this beloved fiancé of yours and kill him, too.”
Good luck to him—he wouldn’t know what he got into if he went after Edmund. He would be unconscious before he even breathed in Edmund’s direction. Troy would make sure of it.
As I think of Edmund, a plan forms in my mind. I unlock the phone. It’s hard to see the keypad when my eyes are blurry with tears.
He takes the phone back and locks my other arm behind me, keeping me bent. His weight presses against me, hard and suffocating. An image flashes in my head—a man in a red shirt straddling Britney’s waist.
“Now,” he says, “tell me what you want to tell Edmund. How would you check in at the end of the day?”
I gasp against the pain. My fingers have gone numb in his tight grip, but the pain throbs throughout my wrist and the rest of my arm.
“Danica. Tell me. Now.”
“I’d um…I’d say good night. I’d ask him how his day went. I’d tell him about what I did.” I suck in a deep breath. “Please, Malcolm. I don’t know why you’re doing this.”
“Yes, you do. Although I hoped you’d forgotten.” He types into my phone while I watch. Hey, I’m going to bed. I hope your day was good. I did some reading and journaling. Goodnight.
“Good?” he asks.
“Almost.” I clear my throat. “I’d add ILY .”
“What’s ILY ?”
“Text shorthand. For I love you .”
He types it in and nods, satisfied. “There. Now he won’t worry. Don’t you feel better? Let’s take out the canoe, see the lake beneath the stars.”