by C J Murphy
Chapter Nine
NOEUL BEGAN HER DAY with her chores and a quick run with Kyo. She was determined to get some work done in the greenhouse. There were a few new experiments she wanted to try with a different soil. Sandy soil was always a difficult medium to grow in, as it lacked enough organic material to supply the plant with necessary nutrients. Weeds fascinated her; they could grow anywhere, under any conditions. She’d always marveled at the way a dandelion could grow up through a crack in a concrete sidewalk. Persistence pays off.
Rounding out of the trees, she reached the edge of the property and slowed to a fast walk to cool down. Kyo was busy sniffing at the base of a pine tree and came away with needles stuck to her nose. “Come here, girl.” She removed the sticky items from Kyo’s face and fur and led her over to get a drink. As she pumped the handle up and down, Kyo happily lapped up the clean, cold water from her bowl. Noeul put her hand in and let the stream pool in her palm. She caught a drink and splashed some on her face.
Noeul dried off with the bottom of her T-shirt and walked to the pen to let everyone out for the day. Thor and Athena lazily loped out into the pasture, while her goats and lambs followed happily behind them. This was the part of life she enjoyed most, being truly present in the world she’d built. There were so many things that fulfilled her life here and that included the research that sustained her scientist’s mind. She lacked almost nothing, and the one thing she did, seemed impossible to attain. Amazing how one missing element changes everything.
The greenhouse door creaked as it swung open and allowed the humid air to immediately wash over her in a wave of damp heat. Most of the plants she grew thrived in these conditions. Over in her test crop area, the grafted plants were doing well. It was time to take measurements on their size and condition. She also needed to evaluate the differences in the types of clamps she was using, based on stem size. Noeul wondered what she would do with all the information she gathered. Should I publish another paper? A book? Or should I pass the research on to Cornell to allow the agriculture program to run blind tests? Let them prove or refute my methods?
She thought of Professor Jordan Armstrong. Learning about her research was becoming more than a niggling feeling. It was more like a thirst, quenchable only by taking in more than a brief glance. A few hours later, Noeul placed her hands on the small of her back and stretched. Lost in the research, her eyes felt gritty from looking through the microscope and at the many spreadsheets that held her data. The growth she’d recorded was small yet significant. A rumble from her stomach told her it had to be near lunchtime.
“Kyo, where are you?” Noeul looked around and spotted Kyo lying in the sun on their resting rock. Rico, the one-eyed cat, was lying on the dog’s tail. They both looked her way as she called out. The cat rose and arched his back. Kyo sprang off the rock and fell in beside her, as they went into the house. The clock on the wall read two in the afternoon. It was later than she’d thought. Time had little meaning; Noeul followed her own senses. I eat when I’m hungry and sleep when I’m tired.
Noeul put some chicken and rice in Kyo’s bowl and fixed herself a small salad. Her laptop sat running a screensaver of a growing vine until she woke it and settled in on the couch to input her data. The growth tables and formulas played out from her fingers to the keys in a staccato rhythm while she chewed. The next time she looked up, it was dark and Kyo was scratching at the door.
“Damn. Sorry, Kyo.” She grabbed her light jacket and walked out to put the animals in their safe enclosure for the night, while the dog made her nightly reconnaissance near the property edges. Noeul mucked out the stalls and fed everyone. She added the straw and manure to the compost and checked that the gates were closed and the electric fence was on, before she gathered a few pieces of firewood and went inside to shower.
Dressed in a faded, black, New Orleans T-shirt and plaid pajama pants, Noeul grabbed one of the latest lesfic novels she’d ordered and sat on the couch with Kyo across her feet. She fell asleep right where she was, lost in a story of passion, while her own body longed to be held and her center longed to be touched in ways she hadn’t felt in many years.
***
Jordan woke to the delicious smells of bacon frying and coffee brewing. Knowing full well her mother would be puttering around in the kitchen, she sat up and swung her legs off the bed. She pulled on a Cornell hoodie and made her way to the bar. Her mother set a cup of coffee down in front of her and kissed her cheek.
“Good morning, Momma. Thanks.”
Dalia was mixing blueberries into the pancake batter. “Morning, honey. How’d you sleep?”
Jordan yawned, as she brought the cup to her lips. “It took me a while to let the tension from the drive make its way out of my system. That full belly you sent me to bed with helped tremendously.”
“About time you got up, sleepy head, it’s after five." Dava rounded the corner, her laptop open on a table attached to her motorized chair.
“I know precisely what time it is, Watson. I wake up at the same time every day and have since the day you were born. Makes me think of you first thing, you know.”
Dava’s cheeks flushed. “I love you, JJ.” After they’d finished breakfast, their thoughts immediately went to the task at hand.
“Okay, Sherlock, what’s first?” Dava put on her eye-tracking glasses that would allow her to use her laptop with her eyes instead of her hands.
Jordan smiled, knowing the glasses allowed Dava to overcome some of the manual dexterity issues that accompanied her spina bifida. “You’re such a high-tech geek, Watson. I’m guessing this first one is binary.”
Dava pulled up her converter and used her eyes to type in the binary code. “Nine circles of hell.”
“What?”
“Nine circles of hell. That’s what the binary translates to.”
Jordan shook her head. “Dante’s Divine Comedy?” After a few seconds, Jordan had her answer. “Ah well, I was right. The nine circles of hell are part of ‘The Inferno,’ the first section of the poem as he goes through hell.”
“What in the world would Dante’s poem have to do with a bucket list? Other than the heaven part, that doesn’t sound very fun. What’s next?”
Jordan screwed her mouth up and repeated a set of letters to Dava. “There are three words. I-l-u-v-w D-p h-u-l-f-d-q W-u-d-q-v-o-d-w-r-u. I hope you can work your magic on that.”
Less than twenty seconds later, Dava replied, “First American translator. Mean anything to you? “
Jordan shook her head in amazement. “How do you do that?”
Dava brushed her hands together. “Caesar cipher with a three shift.”
“You are such a smartass, Watson.”
Dava laughed and pushed at her sister. “A smartass whose services cost the government thousands of dollars per hour. Tick tock, Sherlock.”
Jordan typed both the phrases they’d identified into a simple Google search. It brought up a large amount of research that would need time to weed through and narrow down the possibilities. “Let’s see if the next clue gets us anything. It’s something like an algebraic formula f(x)=3+1”.
“That one seems to be an affine cipher. There’s a simple mathematical equation that’s used to do the conversion. The problem is in figuring out what the shift is that defines b in the equation ax+b. The answer to the cipher is fireside."
Jordan looked at her sister’s raised eyebrow and burst out into laughter. “You talk about codes the way Mom talks about recipes. You never cease to amaze me.”
Dava let her head fall back on the head rest of her wheelchair. “I’ll bet when you were hiding all my stuff as a kid, you never thought it would turn into this.”
Jordan reached out and clasped Dava’s hand. “Baby sister, I knew the world was in for quite a ride with you. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think back on our childhood with incredible fondness. Mom and Dad gave me the best present ever the day you were born. You’ve challenged me and inspired me b
eyond my wildest imagination. Being your sister is my favorite thing ever.”
Jordan admired the woman her sister had grown into. Jordan was sure Sarah felt that way too and could only hope that Dava would let the relationship grow into whatever its potential was.
“Ok, enough mush. We have a clue to decipher. What’s next?” Dava turned her eyes back to the keyboard, releasing Jordan’s hand.
“There is a series of dots in a grid-like pattern.” Pulling from her photographic memory, Jordan drew out the series of eleven small grids and put them in front of Dava.
Dava looked the dots over and turned to her computer. “Looks like braille to me, let’s check and see.” Jordan’s heart sang when the triumphant look spread across Dava’s face. “Ok as I call out the letter, you write it down. E, I, N, H, E, I, M, I, S, C, H.”
Jordan did as instructed and looked at the word in front of her. I think that’s German for native. Can you confirm?” She repeated the spelling back to Dava and waited for a confirmation.
“Brilliant, Sherlock. Ok, we have the word native in German, what’s next?
“The next was a series of little lines and dots.” Jordan drew them out for Dava.
“Wow, this woman really did some research. Unless I miss my guess, this is the Freemason’s cipher, known to Civil War confederates as a pigpen cipher. The first sets of letters are laid out in tic-tac-toe grids. S through V and W through Z are placed in X grids. You decipher by noting the sides of the grid that touch a letter. The first symbol you drew is an S, because it’s in the form of wide V. Our next letter is a box missing the right side with a dot close to the left upright. That’s an O. The last box is complete with a dot on the bottom line. That’s an N. Put them all together and you have the word son. Tada.”
Jordan’s mouth fell open before forming a wide smile accompanied with a laugh. “Now I know why you scored that point higher than me. You didn’t even look at your computer.”
“Two points, thank you, and I don’t really need the computer for most of the code. I use it to save time. The really simple code forms are stored in one of our shared gifts, our photographic memory. If I have enough of the code to determine what it is, I can almost see the letters below the code in my head.” Dava looked at Jordan, her eyes glassy.
“Hey, hey. Why are you about to cry?” Jordan reached up and cupped her sister’s cheek.
Dava covered Jordan’s with her own. “You gave this to me, Jordan. You set me on the course to be what I am today. My love of code and puzzles comes from you. You found something that I could do almost completely with my mind. You gave me something incredibly precious, your belief in me.”
Jordan pointed to Dava’s head. “I didn’t give you anything that didn’t already exist inside you. The only thing I did was find the code to unlock it.”
A sharp knock at the door drew them out of the emotional moment. Dalia answered the door, and they heard muffled voices. “It’s Sarah, Dava.”
Dava’s face turned several shades of red, with the entrance of a blonde in worn jeans, black boots, and a white T-shirt.
“Hi, honey. Jordan, good to see you again.”
Jordan stood and squeezed Sarah’s shoulder. “Good to see you too, Sarah. Although, you both are in deep shit with me and Momma that you two didn’t tell us about that Smithsonian award.”
Sarah Reynolds looked at Dava, and together they said, “Busted.”
Jordan took her seat back, as Dalia brought in a tray of glasses she placed on the small coffee table. She handed one to each of them and took a seat on the couch.
“My girls have been at it for a while. I thought they might enjoy a glass of their jida’s lime-mint juice. I seem to remember you falling in love with it too, Sarah.” Dalia pulled her feet up beside her.
Jordan marveled at her mother’s timeless beauty. She could easily pass for the girls’ older sister. Her hair was still long and as jet black as Jordan’s.
“That I do, Dalia. I wish I could have met her. From everything I’ve heard from Dava about her grandmother, she was an incredible woman.” Sarah reached out and placed a hand behind Dava’s neck, stroking with her thumb.
Jordan watched the love and affection pass between the two women. Seeing someone she cared so deeply for being shown true adoration made Jordan happy on an elemental level. Still, she couldn’t help herself from turning into the bratty older sister. “Want me and Mom to find something we need to do outside the apartment so you two can, uh, visit?”
Dava squinted at her and gave her the best one-fingered salute she could manage.
“Dava Grace!” Dalia scolded her youngest child and directed a withering glare at her oldest. Both girls apologized while Sarah laughed.
Dava rolled her eyes at her sister. “Can we get back to business? I thought we were deciphering some clues, if I remember correctly. Maybe you can help, Sarah.”
“I’m always up for a challenge. What are we doing?”
“Jordan’s trying to decipher that bucket list I was telling you about.”
Sarah’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, your search for Professor Scott.”
“Correctamundo. We’ve been deciphering the latest clue Jordan found in New Orleans.” Dava reset some of the programs on her computer.
“Dava told me some about your trip to the Big Easy. Very cool, Jordan. I’d love to help any way I can. What are you working on now?”
Jordan recited the clues they had to Sarah.
Sarah leaned in to look at the parts Dava had assembled in an Excel document. “Wow, they sure didn’t make it easy, did they?”
Jordan shook her head at the understatement. “No fun if it isn’t challenging, I know. In my case, the easier it is, the faster I find Professor Scott. That’s why I came to the expert. If you want to know how to make it grow, I’m your girl. If it’s in code, there’s nobody better than your girlfriend, who also happens to be my favorite sister.”
“I’m your only sister, genius. Now what’s the next clue?” Dava was laughing at the two women sitting to the right and left of her.
“There’s a series of circles and lines, some look like the Venus symbol for female.” Jordan drew them out and handed them to Dava.
Dava went to work, her eyes shifting quickly right and left, up and down, moving through different tabs. “I give you the Giovani Fontana cipher. Giovani created this to encode Latin in the fifteenth century. Your clue reads official flower is not a flower."
Sarah’s brows drew together. “Official flower of what?”
“That’s part of the fifty-thousand-dollar question. Each little piece leads to the whole puzzle. The puzzle being, where I have to go to find the memorial Noeul left for Aggie.” Jordan pulled her hair in frustration.
The smell of her mother’s homemade pizza wafted through the room, causing Jordan’s stomach to grumble. She looked into the small dining room in time to see her mother placing the large pan in the center of the table. Jordan loved her mother’s need to nurture. Dalia had slipped out to cook, while they had been deciphering clues.
“Girls! Lunch. Come to the table.” Dalia set down a bowl of salad and waved everyone over to the table. Sarah reached across the table and grabbed a plate for Dava, loaded it up with pizza and served her. Dalia made no comment, and Jordan tried to act as if she didn’t notice. What amazed Jordan was the love in Dava’s eyes as she looked at Sarah. Jordan was sure her sister had fallen harder for Sarah than she wanted to admit. She had a sneaking suspicion Sarah had no intention of letting Dava keep it a secret for long.
For the next hour, Jordan filled them all in on her adventures from Havasu Falls to New Orleans, while they devoured a second pizza and some of the salad.
Dava rolled away from the table. “Momma, I’m about to bust. I’m so full.”
“I’m right with her.” Sarah got up and started clearing the table. Jordan started to help when they were all shooed into the living room by Dalia.
“You all go on, figure those clues out. I
’m happy to stay in my wheelhouse and do the things I’m best at, taking care of everyone. Go, go.” Dalia used her hands to usher everyone out of the way.
Jordan kissed her mother. “You’re a pushy broad, you know?”
“One more comment like that and I’ll put you over my knee, smartass.”
“Yes, Momma.”
The three women went back to the living room and settled in. Sarah again sank into a seat on the black, leather couch next to Dava, and Jordan sat in the chair across from them.
“Now, where were we? Oh yeah, we decoded official flower that isn’t a flower.” Jordan pulled up the next code from her memory. “It’s a series of dots similar to braille. It did look a little different.” Jordan recreated the code and passed it over. She smiled as she watched Sarah lean in and put her arm around Dava. The blush she watched pass over her sister’s face made Jordan warm inside. Sarah pointed to something on Dava’s screen, and Dava shook her head up and down. They bumped knuckles, as Dava decoded the dots for Jordan. “One syllable. Bordered by one. Its number is twenty-three."
Jordan typed the variables into her laptop. “Maine!”
Sarah leaned over to see her screen. “What brought that combination together?”
“Maine is the only one syllable state. It borders only one other state, New Hampshire and—”
“It was the twenty-third state in the union.” Sarah was almost bubbling over with excitement. “This is fun.”
“Well done, Sherlock. You know we’re going to need a name for her.”
Sarah rubbed her hands together and looked like a little kid. “Oh, oh! Can I be Scully? I’ve had a crush on her for years!”
Jordan nearly doubled over laughing. “Scully it is, although you don’t have the red hair.”
“True, that. I’m sexy like Dana, right honey?” Sarah nuzzled in close to Dava’s neck.
Dava kissed her and shook her head. “Sit down so we can finish this, Scully.”
Sarah’s arms shot up in triumph. “Ok, what’s next?”
“While you two have been sucking face, I did a search with the clues we have. The common denominator is, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Born in Maine, he was the first American to translate Dante’s Divine Comedy.”
