Before leaving, I poked my head in and asked how things were going. I received a dismissive grunt, from which I took that things weren’t going well at all. I left for work and to check on Trusty.
Leah showed me the kennel where Trusty was recuperating. She was weak and obviously in pain, yet she wiggled when she saw me, struggling against her restraints to get up before finally giving up and licking my hand in fervent greeting. I cooed and stroked her and reassured myself that she was still my loveable mutt before I turned to Leah for the prognosis.
“She’s broken a rib,” she said, her lips tight with concern. “I want to keep her in here for a few days, keep an eye on her. I don’t know what kind of prowlers you’ve got wandering around on your farm, but, if they’re willing to do this to a dog, I don’t know what they’d do to you or to the horses.”
“We’ve called the police,” I said, as we walked back into the receptionist area. Che Che was tapping away on her keyboard, carefully keeping her eyes on the screen. “They’re looking into it. Anyway, they’re too cowardly to even go into the barns, let alone get close to one of us.”
“That’s not what Darlene Winters told me,” Leah said, and Che Che couldn’t help but perk up at the name of our local celebrity. “She said that someone was hurt last night.”
“The police are on it,” I insisted. “What else do you want me to do? Call the FBI?”
Leah’s lips grew tighter, but a client happened to come in with a whimpering Cocker Spaniel, and Leah had to tend to her.
I sat at my desk and resisted the urge to call home and see if Greg had cracked the code yet. It was annoying to be so far away from the scene of the action, yet I knew that it was probably best to let Gregory have his time alone to study it.
Over the next few days, we devoted every spare minute to cracking the code. Lindsay, Aunt Susanna, and Jacob spent their days teaching the camps, and their nights around the dinner table with Gregory, Darlene, and me. We poured over the cipher and the letter, looking for clues, and trying every conceivable combination of words from the two hymns and the Psalm mentioned in the letter.
Once Jacob grasped the cipher, he became fascinated and started encoding his own messages. He was proud of his new talent and sticky notes covered in his heavy scrawled began to appear on the fridge or in the barn, for Lindsay’s eyes only. We all found this amusing, even Gregory, but I knew he was growing frustrated. Nearly a week had gone by and we weren’t any closer to an answer.
However, we had learned one thing. Using deductive reasoning, Gregory had decided that the ‘D’ in Dear, wasn’t part of the code. It wasn’t stressed – it was just ordinary. That left us with Y-A-A-P-S-B-L-O-J-T-N-F-M-D-J-Y.
This deduction put us back at the beginning, double-checking each of the word combinations that we’d tried before, back when we thought ‘Dear’ was part of the cipher. But it was no good. The cipher held just as strong.
One night, Gregory and I were sitting morosely in the kitchen, a copy of the letter at hand and notebooks full of rejected key phrases tossed on top of it. It was late and we were tired, but our awkward silence wasn’t simply from exhaustion and defeat.
Ever since the night of the attack, a sort of uneasy peace had settled over our relationship. Something had changed, making our old conversation style inappropriate and the new one impossible, at least for me. I’d been growing more aware of him as time went by and this new sight was as unnerving as it was unconscious. I felt as though we were going someplace that I wasn’t ready for.
What he felt was impossible to determine. His whole focus seemed to be on cracking the cipher and, to everyone else, it seemed as though nothing had changed between us, at least on his end. Even I wondered if I had imagined it - it was only when we were alone that I knew he, too, was struggling with this change.
Of course, talking about it was out of the question, so we sat side by side, drank coffee, and stared at the opposite wall.
Gregory grunted and shifted in his chair. “It’s just as well that I have to run to Charleston tomorrow,” he said suddenly. “This thing is liable to drive me crazy.”
“You’re going to Charleston?” I asked. I tried not to sound too interested, but I don’t know how well I succeeded. I felt massive relief that there would be at least a day where I didn’t have to deal with my houseguest and his distractingly dark eyes.
This was tempered by the thought that time would be lost in the treasure hunt, time that would be used by our rivals. Not that they’d been particularly active lately. Actually, since the attack, neither I nor Gregory found a single hole or sign of their presence. Gregory took full credit for this, of course.
“Only took one encounter with me to make them stay away,” he quipped earlier that morning as he was putting his bicycle away. “The so-called unstoppable force meeting the immovable object.”
“By which you mean your face?” I’d asked, grinning.
The more logical reason was, of course, that they reckoned on our calling the police and decided that it was prudent to keep their distance.
But they would be back. If I knew anything, I knew that, and it kept me returning to the code and to long hours working with the professor, when every other warning sign told me I ought to keep my distance.
He was nodding in response to my question.
“We’re finished with the book,” he said. “Well, not finished. The first draft is finished, and now we’re on to editing. My editor and my agent called me in to have a conversation about it and a new project next year. I figured, since I’d be down there anyway, I’d check in on Charlie’s progress. You know how the academics are. Unless you sit hard on them, they’ll never finish a project.”
He smiled, but I wasn’t able to enjoy the joke. I made a half-hearted attempt at a laugh, looked at my toes, and tried to clear my head. If I was so glad he was going, why did my heart feel like it had sunk to the floor?
Not now, Maddie.
“How far are we from a solution to that code?” I asked.
He sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes.
“Bloody thing,” he muttered. “We could be days away, or weeks, or hours. I don’t know. Today, Jacob and I ransacked the first hymn again, using every combination of words we could think of, but nothing even comes close to working. So we’re going to start on the next one when I get back. I may send this out to a friend of mine, who cracks ciphers for fun and profit.” He looked at me. “That would mean bringing someone else in on the project. I wasn’t sure if you’d be comfortable with that.”
“Not very,” I admitted. “But we have to crack this quickly. Charlie White just published his story about the intruders, and we’re bound to have curiosity seekers start trooping in.”
Charlie White’s story had, indeed, hit the online stands that afternoon. I’d been watching for it, checking his site every day, praying that he would overlook this one little story.
Of course, he didn’t. The story came with the prerequisite sensational headline. His writing hadn’t improved in the year or so since the farm had been featured; further, his information was superficial and weak, forcing him to pad it - adding more sensationalism than it needed.
Thankfully, Greg was reported simply as a “farm hand” and the story was creating only minor ripples. But I assumed it was the calm before the storm, and I was bracing myself.
Gregory was looking at me in that curious way of his, his dark eyes taking me in and studying me. I felt enveloped, as though I was being held without being touched.
“Easy, Warwick,” he said gently. “Rome wasn’t built in a day. We’ll get there, don’t worry about that. Anyway,” he broke off eye contact and straightened, as though readying himself for something. “Anyway, if I can’t crack it, it’s a cinch that our rivals can’t. I’m the best in the business. They are mere amateurs. You can hardly even call it a contest.”
Relieved that he’d broken the moment, I couldn’t help but laugh at this return to his egotistical self, whic
h I think was his intention. He went back to business then, telling me that he was sending Jacob to look at the town land records the next day, after his chores were finished.
“Why do that?” I asked.
“He’s getting underfoot. The classes are running smoothly, and Susanna couldn’t come up with any farm work for him to do,” he said. “But it’s not a total loss. I’m sending him to determine that no land changed Chase hands during the war. It occurred to me that perhaps we haven’t found it because the boundary lines have changed. It’s a long shot, but I want to eliminate it.”
I sighed. “Fine by me.”
I checked my watch and found myself reluctantly taking note that it was late, and I had to go check on the stables. I think he might have volunteered to go out with me, except Aunt Susanna wandered into the kitchen, wrapped in her bathroom and moving carefully without her cane.
She invited Gregory to share a cup of coffee with her. He agreed, and I was allowed to escape into the safety of the lonely night.
Chapter 26:
Gregory left early the next morning, before I got up. There was a note from him on the counter, telling me that he’d asked Jacob to check the trails in the mornings and warning me against any more “nighttime theatrics”.
“Wait for me before you go dashing out into the woods again,” he said. “No need for both of us to have bloody noses.”
I was a little annoyed by this: I was certainly old enough to run things myself, and I was smart enough to know not to go into the woods at night without a fully-healed Trusty at my side. But I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to mind the store entirely by myself and I realized that he was worried I would try to chase the nighttime raiders off on my own – judging from my earlier actions, it was not a far-out assumption.
As I was ready to leave for work, Jacob showed up and cheerfully took off on the bicycle, whistling in the clean morning air - the picture of health and good spirits.
The days passed slowly. I thought I should have been relieved by Randall’s absence, but I wasn’t. I was restless and irritable. With Randall down south tending to other business, Aunt Susanna and the others busy with the classes, and me at the vet’s office visiting Trusty and filing forms, the code work ceased just when it was at its most interesting. The nightly meetings ceased, too, as Lindsay and Jacob claimed that they were too tired to work and went off to hang out together.
Trusty was kept in the hospital - for observation, the vet said, but we both knew that she wasn’t comfortable letting the wounded dog go home to a house under siege. That left me roaming alone around the house and the office, moodily sifting through the old books, trying to occupy myself so that I wouldn’t have to admit how empty the house seemed.
I even brought a copy of the letter to work on during slow hours at work. Che Che found this amusing, and tried to help, but neither of us got very far.
Randall texted every once in a while, but I didn’t want to encourage communication, so I was slow to answer. But he called me at work on the second day, I grabbed my cell phone, told Che Che I’d be right back, and dashed outside to take the call.
It was a gorgeous but sweltering summer day, almost too hot for pacing in front of the office while we talked. Randall was rushed, prefacing the conversation by telling me he had only a few minutes before he and his Charleston connection went to some library.
“Library?” I asked.
“More like a historical house with lots of unstudied journals, letters, and the like. Charlie has turned up something interesting down here, Warwick,” he said, excitement infusing his tone. “It seems the McInnis family was remotely tied to the Lee family, and one of them wrote about Mary Anna’s funeral in her diary.”
“Oh, really?” I said, swatting at a hornet. “Anything important about it?”
Randall hesitated.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably not. It’s just a brief mention in a gossipy journal, and the only reason Charlie found out is because she is friends with the curator of the collection that owns the diary, which has never been published. Charlie doesn’t think there’s much in it – just some speculation about a necklace Mary Anna McInnis was wearing when she died.”
“A necklace?” I asked. “Was it one of the ones reported stolen?”
“No. According to the journalist, Mary Anna died wearing a simple ring on a leather cord around her neck.”
“A ring? Like, an engagement ring?”
“We don’t know. We’re going to take a look at the journal now. I’m going to scan and forward the passage to you later. Like I said, it’s not much, but it is interesting - a spinster dying with a leather cord around her neck.”
“There was more to Mary Anna than we first supposed.”
“Yes… And the date of her death struck me. It’s almost dead center between the time Alexander wrote the letter from his training camp and the last one he wrote with the clue. Curious, isn’t it?”
I frowned. “You think he found out about her death and that’s what made him depressed? That Mary Anna and Alexander Chase were a couple?”
“I don’t know,” Randall said again. “It seems unlikely, but look at the evidence. Chase leaves, and stuff disappears from the carefully curated McInnis household. But Mary Anna, the sharp-eyed mistress, says nothing. It’s not discovered until after she goes visiting. That makes me ask a few questions: Why didn’t she notice the loss? If she did, why didn’t she say anything? And why did she choose then to go visiting her relatives? Was it really to get out of a besieged city? Or is it that she had, let’s say, personal reasons to stay out of the way?”
“That’s a lot of leaps in logic, isn’t it?” I asked.
“I’m only asking the questions. Let’s say they were a couple. Maybe Alexander is in love with her, maybe he’s just interested in her wealth. He convinces her to marry him. It probably wasn’t hard to do – she’s a spinster after all, and past her prime.”
“Watch it,” I laughed. “It’s not polite for a gentleman to point out a lady is not as young as she used to be.”
He laughed, then plunged back in. “But let’s say McInnis found out about it and that’s what lead to the argument in the warehouse. McInnis wasn’t about to let a Yankee wanderer come in, marry his daughter, and walk off with the wealth. And by his actions, it’s pretty obvious that Chase wasn’t interested in marrying her without the money. So he steals the goods, and hightails it for New England, leaving poor Mary Anna with nothing but wounded pride.”
“If that was the case,” I countered, “then she would have called the police right away.”
“Not if she was too embarrassed to,” he said. “The man who claimed he loved her went ahead and proved that her father was right. Some women would rather part with their money than admit they’d been played for a fool.”
I sighed and rubbed my eyes. I didn’t like it. It meant that Alexander was worse than a mere thief: he was a philanderer, too. I could almost see Uncle Michael’s disappointed face. He’d worked so hard to prove that Alexander had been misunderstood, to clear the family name. Were we about to prove that he was even worse than was previously thought?
“If he did betray her,” I said, “she’d never keep the ring. The man broke her heart and stole from her father. She’d have gotten rid of it.”
“Hell hath no fury, and all of that. Yes, you’re probably right. We have another clue, but we’re not really any further, are we?”
Deflated, I went back into the office. Che Che beamed at me from over her computer screen.
“Was that your young man?” she asked as I sat down.
I was confused for a moment, before I realized that she meant Joe. As I assured her that it was not him, it occurred to me that he hadn’t called in several days and that his text messages weren’t as frequent as they had been. He was busy, of course, but he’d been so attentive that first week he’d been away.
Just as well, I thought. It isn’t as though I haven’t enough on my pla
te.
Che Che’s daughter, Melanie, came in the next day with her cat. Seeing her was a welcome break. We’d gone to the same high school and college, though at different grade levels, and she’d been among the group of students who worked the dig at my farm. Melanie was practically the spitting image of her mom, down to the same style clothing and French features, only she was two inches taller than her mother, just tall enough to lean on the counter while she chatted with the two of us.
We were still talking when Darlene and Aunt Susanna unexpectedly showed up at the office.
I was glad to see them and they were happy and noisy - bringing iced coffee for Che Che and me, and biscuits for the recuperating Trusty. Aunt Susanna was so lively that her cane hardly touched the floor as she moved about.
“What happened to the camp?” I asked, gratefully accepting my coffee.
“They’re having lunch with Lindsay and Jacob,” Aunt Susanna said.
Darlene chimed in. “We decided to sneak out and bring poor Trusty a snack.”
She shook the bag of biscuits and the two dachshunds that were waiting in their crates for their owners began to whine pitifully.
Che Che hopped up. “She’s in the back. I’ll show you.”
“Don’t let the boss catch you feeding her,” I warned as they followed Che Che, chattering happily.
I turned back to Melanie and found her shaking her head.
“Darlene Winters,” she said softly, so the others in the waiting room wouldn’t hear. “Now seeing her brings back a lot of memories. Allison and I went to school together. We weren’t really close, but we hung out every once and a while. I couldn’t believe it when she disappeared.”
“Tragic,” I said. The unfinished nature of Allison’s disappearance always made me uncomfortable, and I looked for something else to talk about. Fortunately, the vet was ready for Melanie’s cat so the conversation concluded naturally.
But as I was turning back to the computer screen, Melanie stopped and leaned over it.
“Do you know, the last time I saw Allison Winters alive was that night at your place?” she whispered, her eyes aglow. When I looked up, she nodded eagerly, shifting her hold on the cat’s carrier. “I’ll never forget the look on her face. She was coming up to ride that big bay horse, the one that was terrifying, and she looked as though she was going to her execution.”
Necessary Evil Page 24
