(Elsewhere...)
 

Dear Diary,

How are you?  I am fine.

Ha-hah!  My evil plan is in motion!  The dummy fell for my dummy.  He'll never guess that I am the one who left the coded message for him.  Well, wait, that's not entirely true; he'll figure it out soon enough, as he will all the other clues I leave for him (even if I have to whack him upside the head with a few of them before it's all over), but not in time to discern my true intent until it's too late.  Too late!  Ha-ha-hah!

Note to self: Keep an eye on his wife and kids.  They're smart... maybe too smart.  They could ruin everything if I'm not vigilant.  Vigilant!

I must close now.  Say hello to our friend the bookend.

Until my next entry, I remain your humble servant...
 
 

10

"Mom?  Dad?  What're you talking about?" a sleepy voice asked.

Michael and Bev looked up from the computer screen to see their son Michael standing in the doorway of their bedroom, leaning tiredly against the door frame.  It was a little after six in the morning, and both he and his brother Jeff needed to get up and get ready for school.

"Oh, hey, honey," Bev said to him, "Daddy and I were talking about that strange message we found on the stage last night."

"Did y'all find out anything about it?" their son asked, his question ending in a wide-mouthed yawn.

"Well, we--" Bev started.

"Not yet," her husband interjected.  "At least, nothing that yet makes any sense.  Go tell Jeff to get up and hop in the shower."

"Okay," the younger Michael mumbled as he started back down the hallway toward his brother's room.

Bev leaned over to her husband after their son was out of earshot.  "Why didn't you want to tell him what we'd found out?" she whispered.

"I'm still not sure what we've found out," he replied.  "Besides, the kids have enough on their minds with the end of the school year coming up and the Standards of Learning tests they have to take.  Michael has a science SOL this morning, and I think Graham and Katherine have tests early next week."

"Hmm, you're right," Bev agreed, sipping her coffee.

The next couple of hours were a blur of activity in the Brooks household as the kids started getting ready for school and their parents for work.  As happens in large families, one child's question about the previous night's events would have to be answered several times over as each other child would then ask the same question without having paid any attention to what had been said to the previous child who had just asked the same question because they're just young kids and their brains haven't fully developed and it doesn't occur to them that if they'd just listen to what's already being said they wouldn't have to ask the same question over and over in succession because their parents have already answered the question for a previous child and why don't they just listen to their parents the first time so that they'd know what was going on and their parents wouldn't have to repeat themselves over and over and over and...

Sorry.

Anyway, as the younger kids were finishing getting ready for school and the older ones were heading out to catch their bus, Michael called his brood into the family room where he and his wife were sipping their coffee (she her second cup, he his third) and said to them, "Guys, listen up.  We don't really know what that message we found last night means or if we were even meant to find it.  For now at least, don't say anything about it to anyone at school.  Okay?"

"Okay," they all replied.

"Can we go on now, Dad?" Jeff asked.  "We're gonna miss the bus."

"Yes, go," their mother said, giving them goodbye kisses as they headed for the door.  "Have a good day in school."

"Good luck on your science SOL, Michael," his father called out.

After they had left Michael said to his younger kids, "Okay, guys, finish getting ready.  I'll take you."

As Graham, Katherine and Emily dutifully trotted off to finish brushing their teeth and their hair and gathering their school books, Bev leaned over to her husband and said, "So you think it's best not to tell anyone about the message just yet."

"Right," he replied, "at least not until we have some idea of what's going on."

"All right," she answered.

"Not only that," he added, "but as I told the kids, we still don't know who left this message or why, or if we were in fact the ones who were supposed to find it.  If we start talking about it at our jobs, and the kids start talking about it at school, whoever left that message could find out and--"

"Honey!" Bev whispered with sudden fear in her voice.  "You don't think we're in any danger, do you?"

"Well, no, but--"

"Should we call the police?" she asked.

"And tell them what?" her husband replied.  "That we found a mysterious coded message written in black-light ink on the floor of a stage next to where a John Brown dummy fell from the light rack during a Kansas concert?  That sounds like the setup for a really tedious movie.  What's next?  A religiously misguided albino assassin monk?"

"Then what should we do?"

"We go about our lives as we always do, you at work and the kids at school.  I've got some computers to work on here, and while they're running their processes and virus scans I'll do some more Web research to try to figure out the rest of the message."

"Okay," she said a little uncertainly.  "Oh, you'd better hurry.  The tardy bell rings in just a few minutes."

"You're right," he replied.  "Come on, kids, the bell's gonna ring.  Into the van, everyone."

The kids each gave their mother a goodbye kiss as they headed out the door to the van.

"Bye, honey," Bev said as her husband headed out also.  "I'm leaving now, too, so I'll be gone when you get back."

"Okay," he said, giving her a kiss.  "I'll talk to you later on.  Love you."

The half-mile trip to the school in their blue Ford Windstar van took all of a minute-and-a-half, and as the kids prepared to get out of the van their father reminded them, "Remember, guys, don't say anything to anyone about the message.  Okay?"

"Okay," they replied, closing the doors and heading toward the school entrance.  Suddenly Graham turned back to the car.  "Oh, I almost forgot," he said.  "We have a gifted student meeting after school and Blake's mom is going to bring us home, so you don't have to come get us."

"Oh, okay,"  Michael said.  "Have a good day."  Graham trotted off toward the door of the building.

As he pulled out of the parking lot, Michael found himself facing some troubling thoughts.

Shoot, he thought to himself as he drove back home.  The excitement that had accompanied their finding the message and the thrill of making headway in figuring it out had completely drained from his heart at his wife's suggestion that the family could somehow be in danger.  Up until now the mysterious message had been fun; his and his wife's apparent success at deciphering part of it had injected an unexpected dose of romance and adventure into their happy but otherwise ordinary, everyday life together.  Now for the first time since they had found it he felt himself overshadowed by confusion and not a little uncertainty.

Well, he mused, an adventure without some danger isn't much of an adventure.

But his attempt at humor still left him feeling uneasy.  The mystery of the message and his excitement at finding it had blinded him to the obvious meaning of the very first part of it, the string of numbers.  03-00-07-24-19-79.  A bank account?  Come on.  Combination to a safe?  Right. Hexadecimal code?  Get a grip.

Three o'clock a.m., July 24th, 1979.  The time and date of Kerry Livgren's conversion.  Any Kansas or Kerry Livgren fan with the slightest bit of awareness of the band's history knew the significance of that moment.  Michael himself had known of it for well more than twenty years, and yet the meaning of the numbers had completely escaped him until the Google search engine had politely asked him if he meant 1979 and his wife had prodded him to remember the year's events.

And then he'd thought that the postscript "Find Kerry Livgren" was an anagram for "Fry Kern Driveling."  Boy, he thought to himself, if the people on the Kansas and Kerry Livgren mailing lists knew that I'd missed those clues they'd never let me live it down.  The only thing that would be even less believable would be if I tried writing a story like this and positing that string of numbers and the postscript as some kind of "secret code."

Michael laughed bitterly to himself even as his self-deprecation still left him worried.  If he'd missed the most obvious of clues, what other clues might he have missed?  And might his missing them have endangered his family?

Well, he said to himself as he pulled into the driveway, let's find out if pop is a climbed rogue after all...