by Jenn Bennett
“Ugh. Why is my father such an embarrassment? High as a kite on cough suppressant and whiskey . . . He’s lucky he’s not dead.”
“Bigger question is, how does he fall in a puddle of his own sick but everyone here still adores him?”
A conundrum for the ages. My poor mother would be humiliated if she were still alive. I could almost feel her rolling in her grave.
Huck sighed heavily, and we were lost in our own thoughts until we made it to our floor and unlocked the door to our hotel room.
Accommodations at Hotel Regina were perfectly fine: pristine white duvets, crown molding, fresh flowers on a desk, and a wingback chair for reading. A bit cramped for two people, though there were indeed two beds and a balcony to make it feel roomier. Better than the train compartment, at least.
I set down my satchel and tried to ignore the en suite bathroom, because all I could picture was Jean-Bernard locked inside while my lunatic of a father was running around in the nude downstairs. Jean-Bernard must have wanted to strangle him; he was the epitome of class and sophistication. Come to think of it, he was my father’s opposite, and I had no idea how they’d been able to keep their friendship going without one of them ending up strangled or threatening a lawsuit.
I pulled open the room’s terrace door and looked over a wrought-iron Juliet balcony. Sunshine peeked out of a raincloud and shone over the rain-slicked boulevard, where cars sped several floors beneath us. A thousand painted signs hung over the sidewalks, pointing the way to cinemas, restaurants, cheap hotels, and grand theaters—Bucharest’s version of Broadway. I wondered if Father had taken the time to see any of it when he was here, or if he’d just spent all his time researching Vlad Dracula’s ring and ruining the Fox family name.
I supposed I’d find out soon enough. After all, Father could show up any minute. Then he could explain everything to us, and we could tell him about Mr. Sarkany, and all of this mess would start to make sense.
But he didn’t show up.
Not that night, while I sat up in one of the hotel beds, reading his journal. And not the next morning, while Huck and I took breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant.
When the clock struck midnight on Friday night, I called down to the desk, to bother them for the umpteenth time, inquiring if he’d arrived. But he hadn’t, and as I worried myself sick, Friday night turned into Saturday, and I’d finished every Romanian crossword puzzle I could get my hands on, newspapers stacking up on the floor by my bed, trying desperately to keep myself distracted. . . . That’s when Huck said exactly the thing I already knew in my heart but didn’t want to hear.
Father wasn’t coming to meet us.
Something was very, very wrong.
JOURNAL OF RICHARD FOX
June 30, 1937
București, Kingdom of România
After I wasted several days in the archives, the only additional mentions of any kind of ring associated with Vlad the Impaler I uncovered were merely in passing and related to a militant organization called the Order of the Dragon. It was founded in the Kingdom of Hungary by the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund twenty years before Vlad was born and was, in fact, the reason his father was given the sobriquet of “Dracul” (“the Dragon”) and why the Impaler was called Vlad Dracula (“son of the Dragon”).
This dragon society was open to only a select few aristocrats, church officials, and politicians. It was modeled after the Order of Saint George, whose legendary defeat of a dragon was used as the order’s symbol. The order to which Dracul, the father, and Dracula, the son, both belonged had a purpose: to drive out the Turks from Eastern Europe and to protect the Catholic church from pagans.
Funny, that last part. Documents mention a special dragon ring being given in ceremony to Vlad’s father upon joining this aristocratic society—a ring that was rumored to have occult powers. After Vlad’s father died, the Impaler inherited the order membership.
Did he also inherit his father’s occult dragon ring?
10
I COULDN’T SIT IDLY BY AND do nothing. My father could be in danger. I mean, maybe he just couldn’t get here in time, or maybe he was hiding out somewhere until the coast was clear. Or perhaps he was in jail—there was always that. I mean, what girl hasn’t had to bail her father out of a foreign jail? Completely normal, our little family. Average in every way.
Thing was, my gut was telling me that it wasn’t jail.
My gut was telling me that he was in trouble.
Early Saturday morning I did what I could. I sent a telegram to Jean-Bernard in Paris, and I sent one to Mr. Rothwild—at his city address in Budapest, which Father had jotted down in his journal. A long shot, but I thought maybe Father had contacted him recently with an update on the search for the ring.
By noon I hadn’t heard anything back from Mr. Rothwild. Total silence. But an hour later I received a response from Paris—from Jean-Bernard’s personal butler. It was not what I’d hoped for. Things were far worse than I’d imagined:
MADEMOISELLE THEODORA FOX= HOTEL REGINA= BUCUREȘTI, ROMNIA=
REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT MSSR JEAN-BERNARD BISSET IS CRITICAL IN HOSPITAL STOP CONTRACTED UNKNOWN ILLNESS PERHAPS POISON SIX DAYS AGO STOP RECOVERY UNKNOWN STOP WHEN YOU FIND HIM PLEASE INFORM YOUR FATHER TO COME TO PARIS URGENTLY= MSSR DUJARDIN
Standing at the registration desk, I read and read again the tiny strips of type that had been pasted onto the telegram slip before Huck snatched the frail paper from my fingers to read it himself. “Poisoned? By what? Does he mean foul play?”
“Is poison ever not foul play?” I said, frantic.
“Could be accidental.”
Sure. Like the rest of this wretched mess in which we were embroiled. Though I didn’t know Jean-Bernard as more than a friend of the family and saw him only once in a blue moon, he always sent me pretty cards and gifts for my birthday and books for Christmas—every year, without fail. But it wasn’t even that. It was that my father would be so terribly upset to hear this if he were here.
Then something struck me.
“Huck,” I murmured. “The telegram says it happened six days ago. That’s when you were in Tokat with Father.”
“Six days ago would have been when we returned from the mountain,” he said, following my line of reasoning. “Fox left me the next day. After the mystery meeting.”
I scanned the telegram again. “Now I’m wondering if Father learned about Jean-Bernard being poisoned during that meeting. Maybe that’s why he left you. Because he was worried that whoever came for Jean-Bernard would come for us.”
Hazel eyes stared at me, blinking. Unsure.
“Look, this is what we know. Jean-Bernard traveled with Father in Romania this summer. He did research with Father. . . . He read books and advised. He’s very knowledgeable about medieval European history. And Father’s journal is filled with entries that mention Jean-Bernard helping him. If someone was following you in Tokat, who’s to say someone didn’t follow Jean-Bernard and Father when they were traveling through Romania last summer?”
“I wouldn’t doubt anything anymore, to be honest.”
“But let’s say someone was following them. The only reason to do that would be to get their hands on the ring, right? Because they wanted it?”
“Or wanted to prevent someone else from finding it.”
Oh. Huh. Right.
“Either way,” Huck said, “why would someone poison Jean-Bernard?”
“Maybe Jean-Bernard knew something. Maybe someone was trying to prevent him from warning Father.”
“About what?” Huck asked.
I didn’t know. But people didn’t just get poisoned out of the blue.
“Look,” Huck said. “We don’t know what Fox found out during his mystery meeting. But whatever it was, I can’t believe he would send us into danger. He said for me to take you home if he didn’t show up here. And he hasn’t. So I think we need to find a Wagons-Lits office and find out how we can use the rest of our train ticket credit a
nd book passage to a port. I have our ocean liner tickets for December. Surely we can exchange them for the next ship bound for home.”
I squinted at him. “New York, you mean?”
That was my home. Not his. Not anymore.
He blinked rapidly and scrubbed the back of his neck. “Your father told me to see you back to Foxwood. What happens after that, I don’t know. But I’ll not put you on a week-long journey across the ocean by yourself. I’ll escort you home.”
Home was the last place I wanted to go. It felt like giving up. Was I supposed to just get on an ocean liner while my Father was in God only knew what trouble?
“I wonder if this is why Father’s letter to you said for us to avoid Paris. Do you think he knows about Jean-Bernard?”
“Do I look like a crystal ball?” Huck stared up at the domed ceiling and groaned in frustration. I knew what he was thinking—that this was all a big mess, and he didn’t have any answers.
But I did.
They were right here in the red journal stuffed inside my handbag.
Father gave it to me for a reason. And if I wanted to uncover his secrets and find out where he could be right now, I needed to get serious about cracking his code.
“Give me one more day to study the journal,” I told Huck. “Maybe I’ll learn something that will help us. Or Father. Or Jean-Bernard. We have enough cash for another night in Bucharest, right? If I can’t decipher the code, then we’ll go home. What harm can it do? At least we’re safe here.”
“Now, sure,” Huck said sarcastically. “In ten minutes, who even knows? And your father told me—”
“My father is MIA! He could be dead for all we know. He’s abandoned us in the middle of Europe with dwindling resources and an instruction not to make our way to someone who is currently lying poisoned in a hospital bed—possibly as a result of a hunt for a cursed ring that is still out there unfound and the cause of all this chaos. Besides, Father may have given you an instruction, but he gave me this journal. And I say we stay here.”
Huck sighed heavily. He said nothing for several heartbeats. Then he came at me like Frankenstein’s monster, outstretched arms and feigned monstrous rage, pretending to strangle me. “You’re stubborn—you know that, right?”
“Better than docile and compliant. Are you staying here with me, or are you going to shirk your ‘me big man, me protect little woman’ duty?” I said.
He sighed dramatically, as though the world were ending and all he could do was give in and let it happen. “All right. I suppose another day won’t hurt. You know what they say. Nothing ventured, nothing strained.”
“Gained.”
“Are you sure?” he teased.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure of anything anymore, because at that moment I was utterly relieved that he’d agreed to stay. Not because I couldn’t have managed without him. I could have. I just . . . didn’t want to. Not right now. Not with everything going on. Besides, we were just getting to a place in our newly reconciled relationship where we could put aside our differences and pretend they didn’t exist. That was healthy, right?
After talking to Andrei about keeping the room one more night, we counted up the money we had left and headed across the street to the Grand Café, which looked like a good place to spend the afternoon working—better than our cramped hotel room, anyway. Scattered droplets fell from an overcast sky, so Huck found us a table under the café’s big striped canopy that was well out of the rain. He flagged down a waiter, and our small table was soon filled with dark coffee, some sort of sweet cheese pastry, and open-faced sandwiches topped with an eggplant spread. And while Huck ate, I cracked my knuckles and got to work on solving my father’s secret code.
I’d definitely decided that the particular code he’d used was a Vigenére cipher. That kind of cryptograph requires a Vigenére square, which is a grid of letters in neat rows and columns that looks a bit like an unsolved word-search puzzle. I’d made one on the Orient Express that night I stayed up trying to crack this code the first time, so I took it out now and opened Father’s journal, flipping to each of the pages that had a code, dog-earing them for easy access.
Cracking a cipher like this wasn’t a straightforward task. You could either spend hours (days, weeks, months) guessing the passphrase, or you could spend hours—days, weeks, years—trying to find patterns in the cipher and plugging code letters into the Vigenére square, hunting for the real letters. Either way, there were too many possibilities.
But since I’d already failed to guess the passphrase, I tried the pattern-searching method. I tried it through two plates of eggplant spread and three cups of coffee. I tried it while Huck read random journal entries out loud in my father’s voice in an attempt to make me laugh. And I continued to try it while Huck leaned back in his chair, providing commentary on the pedestrians strolling past the café under umbrellas.
To make things easier, I focused on one block of cipher from the next-to-last journal entry:
I need to retrace my steps back to my summer trip in Romania. Must talk to: XTTNMVGAFWVLWJQUIKLWLAUCJ. One of these three has the true ring, I’m certain.
If I could solve that, I could solve the rest. I was almost positive that Father had used a seven-letter passphrase. I could tell that much. Seven-letter words . . . There were, oh, I don’t know—ten thousand possibilities? Twenty?
Hoping the word was something common, I madly scribbled lists of seven-letter words—a task with which Huck happily aided me—but none of them fit. And by late afternoon, when the drizzle turned to a steady rain, I was completely frustrated and out of ideas. My brain felt as if it were about to explode from overuse.
“I’ll never crack it,” I moaned to Huck, who had kicked a leg up onto an empty chair and now awoke with a start.
“What?” he said, groggy. “What time is it? It’s night already?”
“It’s just the rain clouds making it look dark.” I checked my watch and gritted my teeth. “Oops. It’s half past six.” I hadn’t meant to work that long.
He stretched and stared at the table. “Christ. We ate lunch here, and now it’s time for dinner. I think we’ve outstayed our welcome.”
Maybe he was right. It was time to give in and pack it all up. I blew out a long, frustrated breath and stared at the café table. In front of our empty coffee cups stood three origami animals Huck had created with folded café napkins and twisted paper straws. I smiled at his handiwork and asked, “Cat and dog?”
He pretended to be outraged. “That’s you and me.”
“Us?” I said, a little embarrassed. “What’s on your head?”
“Pilot goggles,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Anyone could see that.”
“Naturally,” I said. “And that other napkin is me?”
“The pointy part is your crown, and the coffee stains are your big eyes, little empress.”
I groaned. “Don’t call me that. You sound like Father.”
“Empress this, empress that,” Huck mocked, reviving his Richard Fox impression. “So smart, so defiant, so beautiful . . . most amazing girl in the whole wide world, blah, blah, blah.”
My cheeks warmed. “He does not say that.”
“It’s all he says. I could never compare to his beloved Theodora, empress of his heart.”
I started to tell him to shut the hell up, because (a) Father never talked that way about me, and (b) all I ever heard was praise about Huck. But lightning struck, both in the dark sky above and inside my head.
Seven letters. Empress.
Ignoring Huck, I copied down the same section of my father’s code that I’d been focusing on, and using my Vigenére square, I found the row for E and followed it to the column for the first letter of the code, and then M, and on and on, writing each new letter beneath the cipher until I was finished. I set down my pencil as Huck looked over my shoulder.
XTTNMVGAFWVLWJQUIKLWLAUCJ
THEWIDOWTHEHERMITTHETWINS
We stared at the
letters in silence. Then Huck read it aloud. “The widow, the hermit, the twins. Don’t know what any of it means, but, banshee, I think you cracked it.”
My heart raced. I felt the same thrill I used to feel when I was a child, cracking Father’s silly cipher messages. And maybe I was feeling something else, too: a little ache of sentimentality because he had used my nickname as his passphrase. Maybe he’d used it only because it was convenient; just because you use your kid’s birthday for your safe code doesn’t mean you should win Parent of the Year.
But regardless, the code was cracked, and that was what mattered. It was all I could do not to jump on the café table with my arms in the air. But cracking a code was one thing. We still had to figure out what my father meant.
“Widows, hermits, and twins . . . ,” Huck mumbled. “These are people he talked to this summer, and he thinks one of them has the real Vlad Dracula ring, yeah?”
“Seems so, yes.”
“Well, who are they?”
I hadn’t read every journal entry yet. But now that the adrenaline of victory was wearing off, I realized I might know who one of them was. In fact, I was quite sure of it. I’d seen it in passing when I was flipping through the journal the first night, on the train.
I flipped through pages until I found the right entry. “Look,” I told Huck. “Father mentions her here. The widow is the first person Father interviewed this summer—the widow of the collector who first owned Rothwild’s ring. The collector was Cezar Anca. He died the day after Rothwild purchased his bone ring. His wife’s name is Natasha. Read,” I told him, sliding the journal his way.
JOURNAL OF RICHARD FOX
June 27, 1937
București, Kingdom of România
In taxicab. Jean-Bernard and I just paid a visit to Natasha Anca, the widow of a wealthy collector in Bucharest, one Cezar Anca. Rothwild purchased his bone ring from Mr. Anca last month before the man died. Hence, widow.
She tolerated my shoddy Romanian accent for several minutes, until I discovered she spoke English just fine. She was tall and leggy and blonder than blond. Jean-Bernard complained that my eyes were on things they shouldn’t be, but she was holding her sherry glass near the plunging neckline of her dress, and she kept tapping the glass with one red fingernail, click-click-click, like some kind of cannibalistic insect, luring a mate so that she could behead him.
