Straight No Chaser

Kade and Aunt Jade, or, Rendezvous

(to accompany spidey's entry, "rendezvous" .)

*****

"Aunt Jade?"

Jade Marble looked up from her eBay profile to watch her twenty-six-year-old great-nephew step into the den, his soft hands tightly clasped around a folded sheet of paper. She smiled and rose carefully to her thin, weak legs. "Kade! It's not even Sunday--what are you doing in the area?"

Kade smiled nervously and pushed the curls back from his damp forehead. "I drove over after work, Aunt Jade--I had something I wanted you to help me with." He glanced down and fumbled with the paper in his hands, a small piece of pink stationery carrying the faint scent of lavender.

Jade smiled knowingly. "Don't you always, nephew? Judging by the looks of that paper, I'm guessing it's something to do with Madrigal, no?" She took a step forward and reached for it.

Kade's eyes widened and he took a step backward, pulling the paper out of her reach. "No! I mean--it's--Madrigal's--" He paused, took a breath, and started again, tucking the paper carefully into the front pocket of his chinos. "You know I haven't spoken to Madrigal in months, Aunt Jade, not since what happened at the pokeno party...these are just--I'm just here with general questions about something, something, something else."

Jade raised a gray eyebrow and took a seat, unsurprised at her nephew's fierce secrecy. She'd lost count of the number of times she'd interpreted Madrigal's feminine cryptography for him, only to embarrass them both once they'd decoded the often explicit, intimate details of the couple's life together. In that time, Jade had inadvertantly learned the salacious Madrigal's many code words for various sexual locations and positions; there was the "Firehouse," the "Dog Pound," the "Hot Springs" (code for the public jacuzzi at their local YMCA), not to mention "Kyoto" (women's bathroom at Madrigal's favorite Japanese steakhouse) and "Berlin" (master bedroom at the home of Kade's German-born grandparents).

Sadly, after what Jade had termed "the pokeno incident" (and twittered about privately for the six months since), Madrigal hadn't appeared in person or through correspondence, and Kade seemed to have lost hope she'd ever returned. With ever-ebbing frequency, he'd brought the occasional Post-it or scrap of paper to his sharp-witted great-aunt, hoping it would hold some key to his love's whereabouts, only to be disappointed every time.

"Let's hear it, then," said Jade. She turned back to her computer, grabbed the mouse and guided the cursor across the screen--Kade preferred not to make eye contact when he spoke; it made him nervous.

Kade cleared his throat. "Well," he began. "Say for instance you had a--a correspondent who always punctuated her--his letters in the same way. Comma splices everywhere. Never a semicolon. Then, suddenly, a letter appears, and something's--different, about the punctuation. Could that mean something?"

Jade nodded. "Of course it could, nephew. You know that. An odd-placed piece of punctuation can be a signal of some sort; it's an intruder meant to grab the reader's attention. Does that help?"

"An intruder..." repeated Kade in a murmur. "Or a trespass..."

"Right. Was that all?"

"Well, no...Aunt Jade, tell me what you know about anagrams."

"That a word's anagram is another word composed of the same letters in a different order. The word melon is an anagram of the word lemon. It works just as well for a phrase--for instance, you mentioned the word 'trespass'...Phrases test is an anagram for the trespass."

Kade's eyes widened momentarily.

"Furthermore," continued Jade, a phrase's line breaks serve as a signal as to the reader, that the anagram ends there. If a phrase is broken into several lines, and anagrammed, it's likely that each line is an anagram on its own."

Kade slid a hand into his front pocket and nodded slowly. "And lastly, Aunt Jade--these signals, what do they mean? If a correspondent is trying to draw your attention to a specific word, what could be the reason? Why would she--why would someone want to do that?"

Jade thought for a moment. "If there's a word that stands out to you, and if that word doesn't hold significance to the letter itself, then it's probably a key of some sort--maybe the start key to a keyword cipher." Before he could ask, she plowed ahead: "A keyword cipher is a code by which one can make sense of seemingly nonsense letters--it assigns each letter of the alphabet to stand in for another letter."

"Oh, like by shifting each letter forward a few spaces, for instance?"

"Something like that. And where the start key comes in--if it's a short word, like dog, you place that word at the beginning of the alphabet--DOGABCEFHIJKL, et cetera--then finish it out through the end, never repeating the letters in the start word. Place that revised alphabet alongside a normal one--ABCDEFGHIJ, and so on--and you've got an alphabetic code."

Kade smiled suddenly and wrapped his arms around his aunt's thin shoulders. "Thanks so much, Aunt Jade; that should be all the help I need. How can I ever--"

She held up one small hand to silence him. "Just find the answers you seek, nephew, that's what you can do for me. Oh! And--"

"Yes?"

She waved a hand dismissively at her computer monitor, indicating the display of pictures and numbers on the screen. "Finish working this silly contraption for me--help me the way you did last week."

Kade laughed. "No problem, Aunt Jade, what are we bidding on this time?"

Blushing, she answered, "Knitting needles."