Alien in the House

please, kitten.”
    Went to the kitchen and retrieved another cocoa from Elf Delivery. Came back to find Dad looking at the blank piece of paper.
    “What’s this?” he asked as I put his cocoa down.
    “No idea. I found that in something of Santiago’s. I thought it was going to be a note from a student or something, because I don’t know why else he’d have folded it up and shoved it into the head of a stuffed hand puppet. But there’s nothing there.”
    “Hmmm.” Dad stood up. “Give me a moment.” He headed for the kitchen. I followed him. He turned on the oven and put the paper into it.
    “Really? We’re going all
National Treasure
?”
    “We lose nothing by trying it, kitten,” Dad said. He turned the oven light on. “And, I see that it was worth the effort.” Dad opened the oven and pulled out the paper. It had writing all over it.
    We took it back into the living room. “What’s it say?”
    “It’s written in Spanish,” Dad said. “I don’t read Spanish very well. But I can guarantee this wasn’t written by a child. The handwriting is an adult’s, and so are the words that I can translate.”
    Took the paper from him and turned it over. “Wow, invisible-no-longer writing on both sides. There’s a lot here. And I’m just betting we need to know what this says.” Contemplated all my options. Decided that the easiest answer was in the Embassy.
    Went to the com switch. “Walter, are you up?”
    “Yes, Chief,” he said. He sounded drowsy, but as near as I could tell, the Security team functioned on almost no sleep. “Are you alright?”
    “Yes. I need you to calmly wake up Tito and Magdalena. Please ask them to come up here quickly and quietly. This is not a medical emergency. I need people who can read and translate Spanish.”
    “Yes, Chief.” The com turned off.
    “Why wake up both of them?” Dad asked.
    “Because all language is regional. Magdalena is from Paraguay. Her slang will be different from Santiago’s. But Nevada and New Mexico aren’t that far apart, so Tito should be able to translate the slang.”
    “Makes sense. What about the rest of these things?” Dad indicated the bills.
    “I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, and why we have so many representatives dead.” Dad cocked his head at me, and I remembered we hadn’t really told him what was going on. Did a fast recap and was done by the time Tito and Nurse Carter arrived.
    Explained the situation as they examined the paper. “This is going to take a little while,” Nurse Carter said. “The handwriting is cramped—I think the writer was trying to get a lot on the page. Also, since he was writing with invisible ink, some of the lines are running together.”
    “He didn’t write this all at one time,” Tito said. “You can tell by where some lines start, and the older ‘ink’ is lighter.”
    “Do you need to translate in the infirmary?”
    “No,” Nurse Carter said. “Richard is with Mister Buchanan while we’re up here.” She looked a little guilty. “Oh, and Kitty? Richard filled me and Tito in on everything that was going on. He said to tell you that he made the executive decision because he felt the team needed our perspectives and he wanted to be sure we both had all the information.”
    “Wise man chooses his allies carefully. I’m okay with it.”
    She looked relieved. “He said you’d appreciate him saving you the time.”
    “True enough.” Would have liked to have pulled White up here, but if Tito didn’t want Buchanan left alone, then Buchanan would not be left alone.
    Tito and Nurse Carter went into the kitchen to do their translations. Dad picked up one of the bills. “Let’s get these read while they’re working. So, you want to log the offering committee, the general gist of the bill, and anything that stands out as wrong or something being snuck in, right?”
    “Right.”
    Dad and I didn’t read as fast as the A-Cs or even Chuckie could, but we were both pretty fast in our own rights. After the first couple, though, we both started skimming. Because we’d both found a similar sentence in all the bills and were now just looking for it and other lines like it.
    Dad finished his half of the stack before I did. “Kitty, I found the same line, sometimes worded a little differently, but with the legal gist and thrust intact, in every one of these bills.”
    “I did, too.”
    The bedroom door opened and Jeff came out, yawning. “You want to tell me what’s