As his mother stepped forward, Finn used her as a shield and shook his head violently at Philby, who had just taken things way too far. What Philby didn’t understand—had no way of knowing—was that Finn’s mother had, until five years earlier, worked at NASA on the Space Shuttle program. After the birth of his sister, she’d tried mostly working from home, but had finally given up her job amid a budget cut.
The thing was: his mother was a rocket scientist. The real thing. She could do advanced calculus in her head.
“Well, I could take a look, I suppose,” she said.
Finn squinted and hung his head and knew it was too late: there was no way they would be getting rid of her now.
Philby got one chance to look Finn’s way as Mrs. Whitman sat down onto the couch beside him. His expression said, Who knew? But Finn’s heart sank because he knew.
Philby unfolded the piece of paper and placed it in front of her.
Mrs. Whitman studied the page for less than a minute as the three looked on.
“Your assumptions are clever,” she said.
“With cryptograms,” Philby said, “we were told the whole thing is repetition. So the two words that are the closest are the VKPFP—”
“—and the MKPFP,” said Willa, who wanted in on this.
Finn looked on, a bit bewildered.
“The apostrophe,” said Philby, “tells us M is an S or a T. A possessive or a contraction. And that means that W—”
“Could be an N,” said Mrs. Whitman, “if it’s part of a contraction. Very good. Let’s play with that for a moment.” She focused on the page and reached over, accepting a pencil from Philby as if she’d asked for it, which she had not.
“So P has to be E,” she said, erasing and adding to Philby’s chart.
“Because?” Philby asked.
“Because probability favors R, in TDIEPR, as the plural, S. And if R is S, then—”
“P is a vowel, and it’s an E!” Willa nearly shouted. “And if R is S, then W can’t be S. It has to be T, making the apostrophe a contraction, just as you said, Mrs. Whitman. I get it.”
Mrs. Whitman showed the others her work.
The chart was beginning to take shape. Finn could even understand the substitution of letters.
Not wanting to be left out, he said, “So M and V have to be consonants in words like there and where…and…what other five-letter words end in here?”
“There aren’t any,” his mother said with complete authority. “There are a couple six-letter words, like adhere, but no five-letter words. So, you’re right, Finn. M and V are either T or W.”
“And we already know that M is T,” Philby proclaimed, pointing to the chart.
“So V is W,” stated Willa.
“V is W,” said Mrs. Whitman, adding this to the chart. “I love this kind of puzzle!”
Indeed, Finn’s mom was leaning over the table, writing and erasing. She turned and presented the page to the others.
MKPFP IFP TDIEPR VKPFP RMIFR CQW’M JFQV HT 2736/2730
THERE —E ——ES WHERE ST—S —’ T
“Whoa!” Finn gasped. “We have all that already?”
“Finn,” his mother said, “Google four-letter contractions. That’s the next piece of the puzzle. I’m going to get us all cookies.”
Finn felt as if he’d entered a parallel universe where an alternate life-form had taken over his mother. There was a good deal of evidence to support his theory: first, his mother was asking him to get on the computer, not off it; second, she was offering cookies before dinner.
He knew his mother to have a nearly uncontrollable addiction to chocolate, an addiction that especially revealed itself when she was nervous or anxious. That in turn told him something about her current condition.
“I’m on it,” he said.
By the time he returned, there was a plate of chocolate chip cookies on the coffee table, along with three glasses of milk and a glass of water.
Another piece of evidence: his mother spoke with her mouth full of food. Unthinkable.
“So…what’d you find?”
“There are four: isn’t, won’t, don’t, and can’t,” Finn reported.
“Two with Os, one with an I, and one with an A,” his mother said, licking chocolate off her front teeth.
She adjusted the chart accordingly.
She had shaded the letters that they felt certain about.
“You missed a couple Fs,” Philby said, pointing to her chart and, more importantly, to her line of deciphering:
MKPFP IFP TDIEPR VKPFP RMIFR CQW’M JFQV HT 2736/2730
THERE —E ——ES WHERE ST—S —’T
He changed it to: