Ben and I looked at each other a moment, then we both dug into Dad’s piles, searching for all his books on Shakespeare. He’d filled them with notations and highlights, most of them surrounding the Dark Lady, but there wasn’t anything we could use, just a lot of asterisks, arrows, and underlinings.
“I keep seeing the words ‘see file,’” I told Ben.
“Me too.” He lifted his head to look at me. “Computer file?”
I raced back to the computer, and we scanned his folders until we saw one labeled “Shakespeare.” In that was a folder labeled “Dark Lady,” and in that was a Word document named “DLLXR.doc.”
“D ark L ady L- X- R … Dark Lady Elixir!” I cried.
“YES!” Ben cheered, and we took a second for a nerdy high five before we opened the file.
“‘This file is password protected,’” I read.
“Come on!” Ben groaned.
“Passwords … what are Dad’s passwords? He wrote down all his passwords, he couldn’t remember anything. Look around, and I’ll try some things.”
Ben knew the way Dad kept his passwords: printed on labels and stuck on the inside of drawers and cabinets. Ben opened everything and wrote them down, while I tried every kind of password I could imagine might have meaning to my father. I tried several combinations of my name, Mom’s name, Dad’s name, Rayna and Ben’s names, our birthdays, the word GloboReach, the date GloboReach was formed, Mom and Dad’s anniversary.…
“Nothing. I’m getting nothing,” I snapped, frustrated. “Now what?”
“Wait, wait, I’ve got some,” Ben said. He read out a list of over twenty passwords. None of them were right.
“This sucks! The one file on the whole computer that’s password protected!”
“Exactly,” Ben said. “Let’s think about this. Why would Grant password-protect this one file?”
“To frustrate his daughter and her best friend to no end?”
“Good guess, but probably not.”
“Because it’s important.”
“Right,” he said. “Your dad believes in the Elixir. It’s everything for him—he finds it and he changes the world. The wrong people find it and bad shit goes down. So if this file is the key to finding it, of course he password-protects it.”
“But we already looked through all his passwords.”
“We looked in his usual places,” Ben said. “Something this important, he’d want somewhere really safe—somewhere only he could get to it, and it would be with him all the time.”
“Like where?” I asked. “The only thing that’s with him all the time is …”
Ben and I both realized it at the same time, but I said it out loud.
“His watch!”
“His watch!”
Immediately I dug into my camera case and pulled out his watch. I studied it all over, searching for anything that could be a password. Mom’s inscription, maybe? I looked at it, then noticed the tiny scratches underneath the words.
“What do you think about this?” I asked, showing it to Ben. “Are they just scratches?”
“I’m not sure … it’s so small …”
“A loupe!” I remembered. “Dad has a loupe here to magnify pictures!”
Ben ransacked drawers until he shouted, “I got it!”
He tossed me the loupe, and I looked closely at the scratches. They read “faithvalorwisdom.” Faith, valor, and wisdom—the three petals of the iris. I grinned and entered it in the box on the computer.
“We’re in!” I cried.
Ben joined me and read over my shoulder as we scanned the file. There was a ton of material, but the gist of it was that while Dad was researching the Elixir of Life, he’d found an obscure reference book that tied the Elixir to Shakespeare. The book cited a lost play in Shakespeare’s canon: Love’s Labour’s Wonne. Only the title remained, and while many assumed from that title that the play was a sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost, Dad’s reference book said it was actually a story about a pair of lovers brought together and then ripped apart because of the Elixir of Life. Furthermore, the book said the story was inspired by a lover of Shakespeare’s—the Dark Lady.
From there, Dad did more research. He wanted to know who the Dark Lady was, to see if she might have some connection to the Elixir. Dad pored over volumes of analysis on the subject, as well as the sonnets themselves. After exhaustive study, he wound up rejecting all the mainstream theories about the Dark Lady’s identity. He believed the Dark Lady was a woman named Magda Alessandri, whom many thought to be a sorceress. Dad wondered if her reputation as a sorceress came from an entanglement with the Elixir of Life, and he tried to find out more about her. He even managed to track down her living descendants, and had been visiting and interviewing them during his trips to various GloboReach outposts around the world.
At the very bottom of the document, Dad had written “EUREKA CURRENT MAGDA ALESSANDRI CLEA’S ROOM 121.”
“You think he found the descendant of the Dark Lady he was looking for?” I asked Ben.
He nodded. “And her name is also Magda Alessandri. But what’s ‘Clea’s Room One-Twenty-One’?”
“Another code? Double protection for the woman’s location? Did he hide it somewhere in my room?”
We looked at each other and raced out of the studio and up the two flights of stairs to my room. Once we got there, I flipped on my computer. “Maybe he put a file on here.”
Ben nodded. “Look for any file you didn’t make. Maybe it’s password protected with ‘one-twenty-one.’” I agreed, but after a half hour of scouring my computer, I found nothing on the hard drive that I hadn’t put there.
“No!” I cried. “Come on … we’re so close!”
“Don’t get frustrated. It has to be something else. One-twenty-one … a date, maybe? January twenty-first? Or is it twelve-one—December first? Check iCal—maybe he put something there.”
“Nothing,” I shook my head. “Now what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we’re wrong about the computer.” Ben’s eyes darted desperately around the room for inspiration.
“Clea!” Mom’s voice rang out from downstairs. “Come on down! We’re breaking up, and I want to see you before we go!”
Ugh, we were doomed. The Secret Service was about to leave, and we still had no idea-“Cribbage!” Ben raced to the cribbage board and grabbed it. “What’s the final score in cribbage?”
“One-twenty-one,” I said, then my eyes widened as I realized, “One-twenty-one—that’s it!”
Ben looked all over the board, then turned it upside down and slid away the metal panel that closed the peg compartment. He dumped the pegs into his hand, looked inside, and closed his eyes … in defeat?
“Ben?” I asked nervously.
He grinned and held up the board so I could see it. Written very small inside the peg compartment were two numbers stacked on top of each other. The bottom one began with a minus sign, and both included decimal points. Below them was written, “Little Door.”