Free The Dead Drop by Jennifer Allison

move to stop her. I suppose I’ve been invited, she thought.
    As Gilda opened the front door and entered the house, she sensed time slowing, the surrounding cars and trees receding, the afternoon light changing and becoming more subtle and beautiful.
    But once inside, she realized she had actually entered the Spy Museum. She found herself in a model of an old-fashioned library—an exhibit about writers who were also spies. I guess I’m here to do my work, she thought.
    Gilda took a seat behind an antique writer’s desk stacked with leather-bound books, wax stamps for letters, a quill pen, and a bottle of ink. She was vaguely aware of tourists who moved around her like phantoms, blind to her presence.
    Then Gilda heard a voice—a deep sigh filled with pain. It seemed as if the very walls in the room groaned. She slowly turned her head to look behind, and she saw the silhouette of a tall, lean man who wore a long overcoat and a top hat. He exuded melancholy, weariness, and something dusty and still that made her think of an old coffin. He moved closer and in the dim light of a candle she saw a somber, familiar face. How strange , Gilda thought. It’s Abraham Lincoln. What is he doing in the Spy Museum?
    “It hurts,” he said.
    “What hurts?” she asked.
    Lincoln pointed to a gun sitting on the writer’s desk—the lipstick gun the museum had acquired. The gun, in turn, seemed to point toward an object hanging on the wall. The shadowy man in the top hat extended a long arm, pointing in the same direction.
    There, displayed on the wall next to the antique desk was the Jefferson cipher wheel—a wooden cylinder covered with small, carved letters.
    Gilda watched as the letters rearranged themselves into a single word:
    OAKHILL
    “What does it mean?” Gilda turned back to Lincoln’s ghost, thinking he might be able to explain the significance of the word. But when she turned around, she found herself staring into the barrel of a gun—the lipstick gun. The face behind the gun was featureless—a dark shadow.

10

    The Message in the Cipher
    Gilda awoke with a feeling of panic and sorrow, as if she had just learned that a friend had been fatally wounded. Her skin felt clammy. She grabbed the notebook she kept next to her bed so she could record her dream before it slipped back into her unconscious mind. She wrote the first word that popped into her mind—a word with a cryptic meaning:
    OAKHILL
    Why is that important? What does it mean?
    TO: Gilda Joyce
FROM: Gilda Joyce
RE: PSYCHIC DREAM REPORT--POSSIBLE GHOST CONTACT
     
     
    3:00 A.M.: I just woke from a dream that may contain a psychic message! I was in the Spy Museum, and I spoke to the ghost of Abraham Lincoln! He didn’t say much, but he told me that something “hurts.”
    What does the ghost of President Lincoln have to do with the Spy Museum and a lipstick gun?
    Gilda sat back in her chair and rested her chin on her knee. Had the dream merely been her brain processing little pieces of information—a collage of images and thoughts from the past few days? Or did the dream contain a genuine message?
    Gilda pulled her Master Psychic’s Handbook from a side pocket in her suitcase. The book, written by Gilda’s idol—famed psychic Balthazar Frobenius—was battered from years of being carried in Gilda’s backpack, stuffed in the back of her school locker, wedged into suitcases, and basically accompanying Gilda just about everywhere. Even though she had read the book more times than she could count, she always found a new nugget of wisdom when she searched the book for insight into a problem. She turned to a chapter on dreams and read:
    ON PSYCHIC DREAMS
    Some people receive psychic messages best through dreams—when the mind is completely relaxed. Even people who do not aspire to psychic skills often perceive information during sleep that is normally concealed during their waking hours. This may be because relaxing the mind clears away the sensory clutter that