The Cipher by John C. Ford

it.
    Melanie searched her Gmail account for messages from Rose. She quickly found two messages from [email protected] about a surprise party for Smiles they’d planned together. Melanie had never had the heart to delete them.
    Now that she had Rose’s email address, she went to Yahoo—the screen distressingly joyful and tidy, advertising a movie called
Pants on Fire
—and plugged “roseyrose65” into the Yahoo ID box. For the password, Melanie typed in “rsjr” and pursed her lips.
    A red message:
Invalid ID or password.
    Maybe the password had to be at least six characters long. She tried “robbiejr.”
    Same error message.
    She tried “robertjunior,” “robbiesmiles,” “robertsmyliejr,” and “littlerob,” but none of them worked, either, and Melanie started wondering if Yahoo was tracking all her failed attempts to break in to the account. She was probably raising suspicion deep within Yahoo’s security programs in Silicon Valley, or Bangladesh, or wherever. Yeah, Melanie probably shouldn’t have been doing this from her own computer, but it was too late now.
    She had signed up for things on the Internet that required you to use both letters and numbers in your password. Melanie looked at her cell phone and found the numbers corresponding to
JR
.
    And then she typed “robbie57.”
    And then it worked.

    The email page freaked her out.
    Good Evening, Rose!
it said, as if she had just stepped out of the grave to update her pals on how the afterlife was going. Melanie shuddered away the feeling that she was doing something blasphemous.
    Just find the email Rose sent
.
    Smiles’s birth mother’s first name was Alice, that much Melanie knew. His dad had started his company back when they were still together, and he’d named it after her in a cutesy kind of way. Alyce Systems.
    Melanie brought up the “Sent Mail” folder and clicked on the “To” bar, which put the recipients in alphabetical order.
    Amongst the
A
’s, Melanie found it. A single message, sent to Alice:
    Rose Carlisle
    To: Alice T
    Thursday, April 3 11:53:04 AM
    Subject: Alyce
    Â 
    I have your info on Andrei. We need to talk. Please respond—I’m not into head games here.
    Rose
    Melanie smiled wide. It sounded so much like her.
    Rose was so much fun, but there was something wild about her, too, something half-unhinged, and she had a ballbuster at her core.
    Her immediate thought about the message was a guilty one: Maybe Rose and this “Andrei” had been having an affair. It might explain the “head games” comment and the antagonistic tone. Maybe Alice had found out Rose was cheating on Mr. Smylie and was trying to exploit her knowledge somehow. But why? And what did it have to do with Smiles? Melanie had no clue, and she shouldn’t be speculating like this anyway.
    She was ready to close the account when she re-sorted the emails by date and saw that Rose had sent a second email immediately after the one she’d sent to Alice—to Melanie’s own father. A worried hum escaped Melanie’s lips. The email read:
Marshall, I know you’re in Saint-Tropez for the week, but if you get this give me a jingle. If you can drag yourself from the topless beaches, that is
J.
    Was it just a coincidence? The email was friendly enough, but she obviously wanted to talk to him right away—she wouldn’t have bothered him in Saint-Tropez otherwise. Could there be a connection between her dad, Alice, and whoever this Andrei person was? How could her own father possibly be mixed up in all this? Certainly he couldn’t have anything to do with an affair. Just the thought of him on a topless beach was enough to turn Melanie’s stomach. It was silly to even venture a guess—
    Headlights flashed on the street below. The car swept past—it wasn’t her parents—but it broke