Forgive Me(76)

Why did Nadine touch her so deeply? Angie wondered if it had something to do with timing. After all, Nadine’s case coincided with her mother’s death and with the appearance of a mysterious picture of a sad little girl. Maybe, in a way, Nadine had come to represent the girl in that photograph—a lost child in need of saving. But Nadine was real, not a mysterious photograph Angie kept in her purse at all times. Unlike the girl with the misshapen ear, Nadine was someone Angie could help.

The skate park, a concrete plaza enclosed in chain link fencing, featured a variety of well maintained (and graffiti free) ramps and rails. People of Bao’s ilk, those who lacked a gene for fear, traversed the obstacles at a startling rate of speed, turning their boards in midair, defying gravity and in some instances logic when they nailed a perfect landing.

Angie had questioned Bao’s insistence on meeting there and not at the office. His reply, “We should meet where my inspiration struck.”

He wouldn’t say more.

Of all the people hanging around the skate park, Mike Webb, dressed in his signature plaid and khakis, was perhaps the least hip of the bunch. Drinking coffee from a thermos didn’t elevate his hipster status any. Angie wore her most comfortable attire—Converse sneakers, black drawstring pants, and a long-sleeve white jersey. She fit in more than Mike, but not by much.

Bao, wearing a baseball shirt with THRASHER emblazoned on the front and knee length shorts, waved to Angie from the top of a high ramp. He descended like a missile, then used the back tail of the skateboard to bring it to a full stop five feet before taking Angie and Mike down like bowling pins.

“Yo, Ange, Mikey, so stoked you’re here. This is gonna blow your minds.” Bao looked like a kid with a Toys R Us gift card from Grandma.

“Happy to trek to you. What do you got?” Mike asked.

“The answer,” Bao said with a gleam in his eyes. “Meet me over at the picnic tables. Gotta grab my backpack.”

Moments later, he rolled over to one of several redwood tables outside the enclosure. He sat down across from Mike and Angie and powered up his computer. Mike showed his growing impatience by making “hurry up” gestures. Angie could relate; the anticipation was hard for her to take.

Bao turned his laptop screen to face them. The screen showed a website open to a page displaying a string of alphanumeric characters in the center and nothing else. Angie recognized the sequence immediately; she had it memorized, in fact.





IC12843488





“It’s obvious once you know it,” Bao said.

“Yeah, I’m not really loving the cryptic stuff, Bao,” Mike said. “

Bao grinned and returned several nods, all in quick succession. “Right on. So here’s the thing. We’ve been looking for the key to this code, right? The primer. Something we can use to decrypt its meaning. I mean, without the key we got nothing. Right?”

“Right,” Angie agreed.

“Then you found it.” Bao was looking at Angie.

“What did I find?”

“The key, the primer. The meaning!” Bao stood up from the table.

“If you leave now, I’m going to tackle you.”

“No worries, bro,” Bao said to Mike as he rolled his skateboard over to the fence. “I’m gonna dish it. But it was right there where it happened.” Bao pointed through the fence to a ramp inside the skate park. “I was working on smoothing out my 360 Ollie Heelflip.” He got a little momentum going on the blacktop and somehow launched his board into the air, spun three hundred sixty degrees, and landed back on his board.

“Bao, are we here to watch you do tricks?” Mike looked ready to make that tackle.

“No, bro, it’s the number. Three sixty. Three. Six. Zero. I kept thinking about the number because I was pounding the trick and zero got stuck in my head. And I got thinking about the check register Angie found in the attic of her parents’ house.” Bao wheeled back over. “A gift made to that ear place on March fourth of every year.”

Mike pretended to be awestruck. “Bao, if I had a clue what you were talking about, I would be so super impressed right now.”

Bao looked to Angie, expecting her to put it together.

Angie shook her head, but then her expression changed. “Zero,” she said. “Oh-three, oh-four. It’s a date!” She smiled.

“Two dates, to be exact,” Bao said, hitting some keys on his computer to force a webpage refresh. Angie gasped. The webpage now displayed two strings of numbers: the original code written on the back of the photograph, and a second string containing some dashes and few newly placed zeros.




12843488

01-02-84/03-04-88




Angie’s body hummed with an electric vibration. Her wide eyes were fixated to the screen. “Bao, you know what this means? IC. You know what it is?”

“I’m right there with you, Ange,” Bao answered.

Mike ran his hands through his hair. “Yeah, well, I’m a little in the dark here.”

“IC is someone’s initials,” Angie told him.

Bao hit the spacebar and the webpage refreshed again. The original code was up top and the modified version down below.




IC12843488

I.C. 01-02-84/03-04-88