The Games Kids Play

74631283

Too many digits for a local phone number, not enough to include the area code. Not enough for a bank account or a credit card. One digit shy of being a social security number. Too long to be a house number, too short for a Zip code +4.

Laurel tapped her finger against the desk. For nearly 25 years, these numbers had stared detectives in the face, taunting them. Now they were leaving her sleepless and scrolling the internet.

It was only a fluke that she even knew them. The secretary at the station had forgotten to redact the final line on a page of AIM instant messages. The last known communication from Angie Stanton.

The phone on Laurel’s desk chimed, alerting her of the incoming text message. She jumped, scared free from the spiral of thought she was falling into. She reached for it he device flipping it screen-side up reveal the notification.

Sara: See you in 30 minutes, right?

Laurel flicked her eyes to the corner of the computer screen. The time, 4:32, shone back at her. She sighed, turned her attention back to the phone, and typed out a response: Leaving in 10. Then, she let the phone slid back across her desk strewn with open file folders of glossy photographs of footprints and empty construction sites half covered by the aged pages of yellow of legal pads scrawled with notes. She cupped her face with both hands, let her head fall backward over the headrest of her chair, and groaned.

It was precisely 34 minutes later when she swung open the door of her sister’s house. From somewhere inside, the family’s golden retriever barked, setting off a chain reaction: the squeal of her niece, the pounding footsteps of her nephew charging down the stairs, the yell of her older sister bouncing off the walls: “Laurel? Is that you?”

“Just a burglar!” Laurel called back as she lifted her tote bag onto the kitchen’s island. She rolled her shoulder, willing away the memory of its weight. Her fingers reached up to kneed the divot the straps had left behind. 

“You’re not a burglar!” He nephew laughed as he peered around the corner, into the kitchen. 

“You caught me.” Laurel threw her hands up in a gesture of innocence. The boy rounded the corner and strode over to his aunt, wrapping her lower half in a hug. Laurel reached down to stroke his auburn hair. As she did, she asked, “Have you and Gwen eaten dinner yet?” 

He released her and took a step back. “Mom said we could order pizza.” His eyes were wide with hope as he looked up at her, flashing a smile, a blend of adult and baby teeth that reminded her how much he’d grown in just the last few months. Ten years old: Hard to believe she’d been an aunt for that long already.

“I said no such thing!” Sara said, striding into the kitchen. She clasped a gold hoop earring in one hand, sliding its rod through her ear lobe and fastening its clip. “You’ve already had a hot dog and Mac and cheese.” 

“What if we get one with vegetables on top?” The boy grinned at his mother, testing the potential new loophole. 

“Nice try.” She shook her head, tossing her fresh-from-the-curling-iron hairstyle. “You would just pick them off like the last time.”

“Would not.” He crossed his arms in protest. Sara chose to ignore him, turning instead to her sister and then letting her eyes fall to the tote bag atop her counter spilling its contents of paper, charging cords, and pens marred by teeth marks. “Henry, go play with your sister. I’m going to tell Aunt Laurel the rules for tonight.”

Henry groaned, but obeyed his mother. Sara waited until he was out of ear shot, confirmed by the murmured conversation between the two children wafting up the basement stairs. Laurel slid a notebook and a pen out from the tote bag and hoisted herself onto one of the bar stools that lined the kitchen island. 

“Do you really need to take notes on this?” Sara rolled her eyes as she scraped the remaining few bites of Kraft Mac and Cheese from the faded Paw Patrol plate and into the countertop compost bin. 

“You going on the record with these rules?” Laurel teased. Sara set the plate in the kitchen sink, turned on the kitchen sink and ran her freshly manicured hands through the water. As she did, Sara her cast a glance to her sister just in time for Laurel to catch the eye roll. Laurel continued, “Something tells me Henry is going to insist on breaking a few of these tonight, and what kind of reporter would I be if I didn’t get the quotes right from the source.” She laughed. “So, consider me your kitchen stenographer.”

Sara cracked a grin and laughed. “God, could that be your permanent position? I swear that child would need to have the transcript read back to him daily.” She turned off the kitchen faucet and dried her hands on the tea towel that hung through one of the cabinets’ handles. “Okay, here are the rules for the kids,” Sara held out finger, as she said, “One, bed by 8:30.” She whispered the next part, “This is off the record, but you can be the cool Aunt and actually let them stay up until 9:00.”

Laurel laughed, “noted.” 

Sara continued, now holding up a second finger, “Two: no ice cream. They can each have a cookie, if they ask for dessert, but I’m so tired of half melted bowls of ice cream and cleaning up drips of chocolate that I’m banning ice cream for the next two weeks.”

“Fair,” Laurel nodded as she wrote, No ice cream, only cookies, next to the number two on the list.

“Three,” Sara continued counting with her fingers, as if she might forget what number she was on otherwise. “They both have to brush their teeth before bed. Gwen, has been fighting that lately, so you may have to strike some kind of deal with her to get it done.”

“What are my bargaining chips?” Laurel asked.

Sara sighed, “So far, a dollar has worked. So has pancakes for breakfast the next day and the right to pick the movie for movie night.” She shook her head, “but maybe leave the pancakes off the table for tomorrow. I have a feeling Jeff and I will not be in the mood to make anything.”

Laurel laughed, remembering the last time her sister had had more than a single glass of wine and complained about the headache for days. “Is he meeting you at the restaurant?”

“Actually,” Sara glanced through the window that hung over the kitchen sink, looking out to the driveway. “He should be here to pick me up any minute.”

“Hard to believe it’s been 11 years already. Seems like just yesterday I was giving the best maid of honor speech in history.” Laurel teased. 

Sara ignored her sister’s brag and flicked her eyes to the tote bag, still laid across the counter. “Oh, I’m not done with the rules yet.” Laurel sat up straighter, the image of an ideal student hanging on her teacher’s every word. Sara looked her sister in the eye, “And these rules are for you.” Laurel raised her eye brows as Sara continued speaking, “No case files out until the kids are in bed AND asleep. No discussing the case on the phone while they’re in ear shot. Any crime scene photos in this bag, need to go back out to your car now.”

Laurel sighed, “I didn’t bring any photos, Sara. Not that this case has anything more than PG rated in them. I do know what snoops kids can be.”

Sara nodded, “Good.” She cast a quick glance at the clock that hung on the wall and then to the window. The driveway remained empty. She turned her attention back to her sister. “So what case is it?” 

Laurel smiled, “Do you remember the disappearance of Angie Stanton?”

Sara’s eyes grew wide. “No way! Is there news? Are you working with the detectives on a new theory? Did they get a break in the case?”

Laurel shook her head, “No, unfortunately nothing like that.” Sara frowned as Laurel spoke, “Next month is the 25th anniversary of her disappearance, so I’m working on an article that’s half memorial and half deep dive into the investigation.”

Sara looked up to the ceiling recalling a different time, “I can’t believe it’s been that long. I remember when she went missing. It was all my friends and I talked about in school for months.” She looked to her little sister. “Do you remember much about it?” 

“No really,” Laurel shrugged. “I was only seven. I mostly remember that mom wouldn’t let me walk down the block to my friend’s house for a while and that we had a police officer come in to ask if anyone of us had seen Angie lately. No one had and the boys in my class just wanted to ask him about sirens and car chases.” She paused for a moment, then let the words that were swimming around her brain tumble out of her mouth, “You never talked to her on AIM, back then, did you?”

“AIM? No, I didn’t.” Sara shook her head and narrowed her eyes at her sister. “I was thirteen, when she went missing, we didn’t even have a home computer back then, even though I begged Mom for one every day.” She rolled her eyes, remembering the plight of her teenage self before continuing, “Angie was two grades above me. The rumor was always that since she’d gone to meet someone in the woods behind the school and something happened there, but it wouldn’t surprise me if AIM was a part of it somehow. It was very cool at the time.”

Sara stared her sister down, waiting for Laurel’s face to reveal more than she was willing to say so far. The sisters were interrupted by the sound of a car horn coming from the driveway. “Sounds like your ride is here.” Laurel tilted her head to look out the window. 

“Right!” Sara stood up straight, rising from her lean on the kitchen island, and grabbed the purse from its hook near the door frame. “8:30, no ice cream, no crime investigating while the kids are still up.” She reminded her sister as she slung the purse’s strap onto her shoulder. 

“Roger that,” Laurel gave her sister a mock salute, but Sara was already closing the door behind her. As soon as the coast was clear, Laurel cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled to her niece and nephew, “Who wants a cookie?”

* * *

“I want to play the telephone game.” Henry pleaded. Laurel looked down at him, at the hint of toothpaste that clung to the corner of her mouth. His little body pressed against the family’s golden retriever as they laid together on the living room rug. The princess on the television screen sang a song behind him.

“We can’t play telephone,” she whispered, trying not to disturb Gwen, who lay curled up on the couch cushion next to her, fast asleep. “We only have two people.”

Henry’s brow knit together, “No, you only need two people. You just have to make up the code, and then I figure out the answer.”

“But you’re just going to know what the code is when I whisper it to you.” Now it was Laurel’s turn to look confused.

Henry shook his head, “Aunt Laurel, you do it on paper. Then, I figure out what the numbers mean.”

“The numbers?” She swallowed. “What numbers?” Her brain was already reciting them again: 74631283. Eight digits: the possible key to 25 years, the first new information the police had released, albeit accidentally, to a journalist in at least ten years. They had known there was instant messages from back then. That had come out in the very beginning. But the screen names and the message contents had always been a tightly guarded secret. Now she knew why: it was undeciphered. No one had come forward to say they sent it. No one had a clue what it meant. That was more than clear from the call she’d made to the retired detective, the one who had first been assigned to the case.

“The secret’s in the damn numbers.” He’d told her when she called this afternoon to ask what he thought about the AIM messages. “Only God knows what they mean though. Just a whole slew of ‘em we could never crack.”

She turned over the phrase, “a whole slew” in her head again. She had only one piece of the puzzle, one chance to crack the code. Her eyes had glazed over as she found herself falling back into the investigation spiral, a pit she would have certainly tumbled into, were it not for Henry dropped a notebook and a brain teaser handout in her lap. 

“See Aunt Laurel,” he said. “You make up a code, and I figure it out. That’s how we play.” He jammed his finger onto the page. The illustration showed a key pad of an old, landline phone. Each button had a number and the corresponding letters underneath. The example to the right showed how the code was done. H = 4, O=6, M=6, E=3, so the code 4663 spelled HOME.

“Henry,” Laurel’s voice was barely a whisper, as if she was closer to holding her breath than talking. “Where did you learn this game?” 

Henry smiled, “Mom taught me! She plays with me all the time.”

Laurel nodded. Her sister’s voice sounded in her head: No investigating while the kids are still up. She looked at the page again. “Do you always figure the puzzle out?” 

Henry pursed his lips, “Sometimes they are really hard, and mom helps me a little bit.”

Laurel flicked her wrist, turning the screen of her watch toward her. It read 9:02. “I’ll make you a deal, Henry.” The boy sat up, ramrod straight, fingers laced together in front of him, as if ready to beg. She went on, “I’m going to give you one puzzle, and you have ten minutes to solve it while I carry Gwen to bed.” Henry looked to his sleeping sister and then back to his aunt. “Make it 15,” he said.

Laurel stuck her hand out, “Deal!” She smiled as Henry took it and gave it two giant pumps up and down, like someone who’d learned to shake hands from a Loony Tunes episode. When he released her hand, she pointed toward the notebook and pencil Henry had set on the coffee table. “Can you hand me that so I can write the code?”

“You know it already?” He asked, passing the requested materials to her. “Mom takes forever to make them up.” 

With the pencil, Laurel wrote out the numbers big and bold, taking up two lines of the page’s rule for each, like a kindergarten teacher determined to show every nuance of the way the number is formed: 74631283.

Henry sat cross-legged on the floor with the notebook on the coffee table and the pencil poised his hand as Laurel lifted the sleeping six year old from her spot on the couch and carried her down the hall to her room.

Laurel sat with her laptop open to a Word document, typing ferociously on the keys when she sister and brother-in-law giggled their way through the kitchen and into the living room two and a half hours later. 

“What happened in here?” Jeff asked, arm slung around his wife’s waist. He stared down at the family’s couch strewn with pages of police reports and scrawled notes. 

Laurel looked up at the couple and, ignoring Jeff’s question, asked her sister, “Where did you learn the game telephone?”

Sara rolled her eyes, “Henry’s been obsessed with secret codes and spies lately. I take it he made you play?’

Laurel looked to her sister, “Sara,” her voice was pleading. “Where did you learn how to play telephone?”

“In school,” she shrugged. “Mrs. Hempstead taught us all in language arts. We used to use it to send messages in code when we passed notes to each other.” A look of confusion passed over Sara’s features. “Don’t you remember playing it?”

“Mrs. Hempstead retired the year before I had her.” Laurel shook her head. “What do the ones mean in telephone?” 

Sara sighed, “They’re spaces.” She lifted a stack of papers from the cushion next to her sister and took a seat. “Why does this matter right now?” Laurel passed her sister the paper with the numbers and the message decoded: 74631283 = PINE AVE.

“Does Pine Avenue mean anything to you?” Laurel asked, and then corrected herself. “Would it have meant anything to Angie back then?”

Sara propped her feet up on the coffee table and leaned back into the embrace of the couch. She let a long slow breath escape her lips. “I think that’s what we called the strip of pine trees between the football field and the new subdivision they were building back then. It was quite the make-out spot, but the trees were all cut down before i was ever old enough to go there myself.” Sara sighed.

Laurel felt the threat of tears at the corner of her eyes. Sara glanced at her sister, “What?” She asked. “What did I say?”

“Exactly the right thing.” Laurel shook her head and pulled her sister into a hug, letting her laptop slide off of her thighs and onto the couch beside her. 

Two weeks later, the front cover of every major newspaper in the country read, Body of Angie Stanton Found: Suspect in Custody.