Dead Past

by Beverly Connor

  “Archie Donahue smokes Dorals,” Diane said. “Those are probably his you picked up at tent city. There is nothing to connect his Dorals with the ones you found on the ridge.”

  “But . . . ,” said David.

  “But nothing . . . that’s it,” said Diane.

  “That’s not all of it,” said Neva, joining them. “I was talking to someone at the station. Archie Donahue left right after he checked in this morning. No one knows where he went.”

  “So it’s in the hands of the police,” said Diane. “Neva, call Garnett and tell him about the Dorals and leave it with him.”

  Neva left and made the call to Garnett. It was quick. Diane heard Neva say they didn’t know what it meant; it was just information. None of them wanted the murderer to be a policeman, and if it was, they all had the uncomfortable feeling of not wanting him caught. Not a good philosophy for criminalists.

  Neva sat back down at the table. “Garnett asked about you,” she said. “He said he’d drop by later today.”

  Diane saw a paper rolled up in Jin’s hands.

  “OK, Jin,” she said, “what do you have on the code?”

  Chapter 48

  Jin looked at the paper in his hand and turned red. Neva and David laughed.

  “You don’t have anything, do you?” said Neva.

  “It’s not a cryptogram,” said Jin. “It can’t be. I don’t think it’s anything.”

  “May I see it?” asked Frank.

  Jin handed him the paper, and Frank unrolled the page and examined the letters.

  “This is the code that was in the doll you were telling me about?” asked Frank.

  “Yes,” said Diane.

  “Have you tried other decoding techniques? If it’s not a simple cryptogram, it might be another kind of cipher.”

  “Do you think you can decode it?” said Diane.

  “Don’t know till I try,” said Frank.

  Jin looked more depressed than when the cigarette butts were stolen from him.

  “Jin,” said Neva, “you can’t know everything. Don’t look so glum.”

  “It’s just, I’m really good at codes,” he said. His entire face was turned down in a frown as he watched Frank studying the string of letters on the wrinkled paper.

  “Do you know anything about the guy who wrote it?” asked Frank.

  “A little,” said Diane. She related the story of Leo Parrish, the treasure train, and the Labor Day hurricane of 1935.

  “So,” said Frank, “this whole thing may be a hoax.”

  “That’s what I think,” said Jin. “It’s just a string of random letters.”

  “Could be,” said Frank. “You know it’s not a cryptogram because the frequency of occurrence of the letters didn’t lend itself to an answer, right?”

  “No,” said Jin. “Nor does looking at the two- and three-letter words or the endings or beginnings of words. Nothing makes sense.”

  “Then we need to look at another type of encryption method. You say Leo did his thing in the 1930s?”

  “Yes,” said Diane.

  “OK, so it’s not modern. No computer to help him with it. Maybe it’s something popular among coders of his time, like Vigenere’s method,” said Frank. “Where, for example, the cipher letter for e in one word isn’t necessarily the same cipher letter for an e in another word.”

  “Well, you’ve completely lost me,” said Neva.

  “Wow,” said Jin, leaning forward, his eyes now sparkling with interest. “No wonder I couldn’t decipher it. How do you know about this stuff, Frank?”

  “It’s only what he does for a living,” said David.

  “No kidding. I didn’t know that’s what you do,” said Jin.

  “It’s part of what I do,” said Frank. “A lot of cybercrime involves hiding things by use of encryption.”

  “Can you decipher it?” Diane asked.

  “Probably. It will be easier if I have the keyword,” he said.

  “Keyword?” they all said in unison.

  “Several of the early ciphers required a keyword. Even without the keyword, there are other ways it can be deciphered and a good computer program can work it out, but if I have the keyword, I can do it fairly quickly. Are there any possible keywords from this story of yours?”

  “How about a key sentence?” said Diane. “The making of palimpsests was possible even with papyri.”

  Frank raised his eyebrows and she explained about the amazing coincidence of hearing that phrase in the library, Juliet’s fear of the word palimpsest and her dramatic reaction to hearing the complete sentence.

  “Well that’s certainly odd,” said Frank.

  David, Neva, and Jin stared at her with their mouths open.

  “Wow,” said Jin again. “We hadn’t heard that story, Boss.”

  “There’s been so much going on lately,” Diane said. She turned back to Frank. “Do you think palimpsest could be the keyword?”

  “Could be. I’ll give it a try. Can I use a computer?” said Frank. “You do have word processing programs on your computers, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” said David.

  He led Frank to his computer and called up Word-Perfect. Frank sat down and started typing.

  David moved an empty chair next to Frank, and Diane sat down. She was feeling a little weak, and her headache was back, but she didn’t want to mention it. David probably guessed, she thought. Frank reached over and squeezed her hand. He probably senses my weakness too, damn it.

  Frank made a grid twenty-seven by twenty-six. On the top row he keyed in each letter of the alphabet in lowercase. Under the a in the first column, he repeated the alphabet starting with an uppercase B and putting the uppercase A on the bottom of the column after Z. He did the same thing in the next column—under the lowercase b he put an uppercase C and put the uppercase A and B at the bottom of the column after Z. Each successive uppercase alphabet was shifted one letter with respect to the previous column.

  “This is called a Vigenere square,” said Frank when he finished. “The lowercase letters across the top represent the plain text. The uppercase letters in the columns represent the cipher text.”

  Neva made a gesture with her hand going over her head. “This looks too much like math with letters,” said Neva.

  “Not far from wrong,” said Frank.

  “This is great,” said Jin. “Where have I been that I didn’t know this?”

  “I don’t know,” said Frank grinning. “This is Secret Code 101.”

  “How does it work?” said Diane.

  “Let’s say the keyword is DIANE. In the left column I will use only those letters.” He used the word processing program to highlight the letters of DIANE and continued the shading all across the row in the table for each letter.

  “Now, suppose we have the message, ‘The house that Jack built.’ So, we have to make another table . . . ,” began Frank.

  “OK,” said Neva. “You mentioned something about a computer program that would do this?”

  “Yes, but I don’t have it,” said Frank. “Let’s have a little patience. Think of this as fun. Jin does.”

  “You betcha,” said Jin. He pulled up a chair and leaned forward, staring at the screen. “You said you use a second table?”

  “Yes,” said Frank. “If the keyword is DIANE, on the header row of this table I write the word DIANE over and over again until I have used up all the letters in the message to be encoded.

  “Oh, I get it.” Jin jumped up and sat down again. “That’s brilliant. No wonder I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.”

  “Explain it to those of us who don’t get it,” said Neva.

  “To encrypt ‘The house that Jack built,’ ” said Frank, “I go to the new table and see that the first letter in the message is t and it is under the letter D in the keyword DIANE. I go to the Vigenere square and use it like the coordinates of a map to find the encryption letter I need. Go to D on the left most column and find where it inter
sects with t in the top row. The letter where the column and row intersect is W. Do the same thing for the second letter. The h is under I in the keyword Diane. Go to the square and we find that I and h intersect at P. Keep going and you can encrypt the whole sentence. You do the reverse process to decode the message.”

  “That is so cool,” said Jin. “You’ll have to show me how to decode it the other ways you were talking about.”

  “Sure. It’s more time-consuming. As you see, if you have the keyword, it’s a piece of cake.”

  “Yeah,” said David, “I’d like to see the computer program. That would be an interesting algorithm.”

  “How about our message?” said Diane.

  “OK, we’re hoping the keyword is palimpsest.” Frank took the first word in the doll code and tried it out with his square. KVQ = vvf. “Palimpsest isn’t the keyword,” he said.

  “Try papyri,” said Diane.

  “Won’t work,” said Frank. “Papyri and palimpsest start out with the same two letters. We’ll end up with vv again.”

  “So we’re nowhere,” said Neva.

  “Or an alternative method for decoding it,” said Jin.

  “Maybe the keyword is his name,” said Neva.

  “That would be too easy to decode,” said Jin. “If you are going to the trouble to have an elaborate code, you won’t have such an easy keyword.”

  The phone rang and Diane answered. She was expecting Garnett, but it was Beth, the museum’s librarian.

  “Beth,” said Diane. “You have something for me?”

  “Yes, I do. I can bring it to you. I thought you’d like to know that I did find some descendants of Leo Parrish that you might be able to contact. I don’t know where they are now, but I have info on the last-known locations of some of them.”

  “Great. Can you come to the crime lab?” Diane asked.

  “Yes. I’ll walk right over,” said Beth.

  Diane explained to the others that she’d enlisted the help of a genealogist to discover any relatives of Leo Parrish.

  “That was clever,” said Frank.

  “And fast,” said Diane. “Librarians are much speedier than private detectives.”

  It took only a couple of minutes for Beth to cross from the third-floor east wing to the west wing where the crime lab was. David was at the door to let her in. She entered, looking around at all the glass walls and high-tech equipment as though she’d just stepped onto another planet.

  “Well,” she said, “this is certainly different from the rest of the museum.” She was carrying a folder, which she held close to her. They all moved to the round table to learn about the family tree of Leo Parrish.

  “OK,” Beth said when they were all seated. “I’ll start with the Glendale-Marsh relatives. She pointed to each person on the chart as she named them, going from generation to generation. “Leo Parrish had an uncle, Luther Parrish, who lived in Glendale-Marsh in the thirties. He had two sons, Martin and Owen. Owen Parrish had a son. The son married and had a daughter—Oralia Lee Parrish. They all left Florida when Martin and Owen lost the family land. The daughter, Oralia Lee, married one Burke Rawson. They had no children that I can find a record of.”

  “We should be able to locate the Rawsons,” said David.

  “The last address I had for them was Ohio fifteen years ago,” said Beth. “Now, you mention that Leo Parrish wrote to someone when he was in the service. That was his sister, Leontine Parrish Richmond. She lived in Upstate New York.”

  “Were they twins?” asked Diane.

  Beth nodded. “Leontine had a daughter who was eleven years old in 1935.” She pointed to the chart with their names. “The daughter grew up, married, and had a son named Quinn Sebestyen,” said Beth. “He married a woman named Allie Shaw. And they had two children.”

  “Christian and Melissa,” said Jin.

  He was seated across the table from Beth and they all looked over at him, surprised.

  Jin looked as if he had seen a ghost.

  Chapter 49

  All of them stared at Jin who slid the family tree toward him and studied it. “This is amazing,” he said.

  “What?” said Neva. “You look like she just uncovered your relatives.”

  “Do you know these people?” asked David.

  Jin looked at Diane. “Do you remember when”—he snapped his fingers a couple of times—“when Dr. Webber asked me what I was interested in outside of work? It was in the morgue tent.”

  Diane thought back to the time in the morgue tent. It seemed so long ago now.

  “After Dr. Pilgrim took a break, after you found the fetal bones, and Dr. Rankin talked about how all we could do was pick up the pieces,” Jin said.

  Diane remembered. She wondered if that moment was the trigger for Archie Donahue, realizing as Rankin did that they could never make a dent in the drug trade because the money was too great. All they could do was pick up the broken bodies and mourn the broken lives. Was that the thing that pushed Archie to “try to make a difference,” as he had said—if he was indeed the murderer of Blake Stanton and Marcus McNair?

  “Yeah,” said Jin. “Remember, I was saying I was interested in strange disappearances. I was talking about that Court TV program about missing people—Judge Crater, Jimmy Hoffa, and some ordinary people who had disappeared mysteriously. Like that whole family that vanished. Their belongings were still in the house and even their car was still in the driveway.”

  “What are you saying?” asked Diane.

  “This was them—Quinn and Allie Sebestyen and their seven-year-old daughter, Melissa, and their ten-year-old son, Christian.”

  “Oh, my, this is getting strange,” said Beth. She looked uneasily around her as if that’s what happened here in the dark side—strange things.

  Diane needed a moment for the information to sink in.

  “When was this?” she asked.

  “About twenty years ago—1987, I think. Yeah, it was 1987,” said Jin. “Nothing was ever heard from them again.”

  They all fell silent.

  “Why don’t I leave this with you?” said Beth, rising from the table. “Shall I continue looking for information on these people?”

  “As long as it doesn’t keep you from your other work,” said Diane.

  “All of this was in records that I accessed via the Internet or by calling and asking some willing person to look up a marriage or death certificate,” she said.

  “This is excellent work, Beth. Thank you,” said Diane.

  David rose, escorted Beth out the door of the crime lab, and returned to the table.

  “Nineteen eighty-seven,” said Diane. “The year Juliet was kidnapped. And they had a seven-year-old daughter—the same age as Juliet. She and Juliet could have been playmates.”

  “I still feel like I’m missing something,” said David.

  “I thought it was just me,” said Neva. “I’ve had a hard time keeping up ever since I got here. First, the code, and now it feels as though I’m missing part of this story.”

  “I know,” said Diane. “I’ve been dribbling out information about Juliet—mainly because at first I didn’t know it was related to the Cipriano murder. It was just something I was doing to help one of my employees. Also, there’s some sensitive personal information on Juliet involved. But now it’s something we need to solve, because I think she is in danger.”

  Diane went over the whole story of Juliet with them. She told them about Juliet’s memories and how Diane thought the fear of new dolls sprang from another crime Juliet had witnessed, and that being a witness had led to her kidnapping.

  “Those are the crimes you had me look for in Arizona and Florida?” said David.

  “Yes,” said Diane.

  “You’ve been working on this mystery while you were working on the other crimes in Rosewood?” said Frank. “And running the museum?”

  “Yes, and I haven’t been doing a very good job of any of it, but that’s going to change. Jin, did the TV
program give any personal information on the Sebestyens?”

  “Some. Not a lot. As I recall, Quinn Sebestyen was a math professor at a community college. His wife was a schoolteacher. The kids were good students. Everyone liked them. They were, by all accounts, an ordinary couple, an ordinary family. No marital problems that anyone was aware of, no great debt, no vices. The police couldn’t find any reason they would disappear on their own or why anyone would do them harm. The best they could come up with was that someone kidnapped them or murdered them for some unknown reason.”

  “Did they ever vacation in Glendale-Marsh?” asked Diane.

  “I don’t remember that town being mentioned in the TV program,” said Jin.

  “Call the detective in charge of the case and ask him. See if he’ll send us more information,” said Diane.

  “You think the Sebestyens are the dead people Juliet saw?” said David.

  “Yes, I do,” said Diane. “How’s this for an hypothesis: Juliet was visiting her grandmother who lives at the beach in Glendale-Marsh, and she struck up a friendship with a little girl, one of the tourists. The little girl was Melissa Sebestyen. The genealogy chart Beth just provided to us shows that Melissa’s father, Quinn, was the grandnephew of Leo Parrish; Quinn’s grandmother was Leo’s twin sister. In the letters Leo sent home to his sister he probably sent the code and maybe even a book. It probably became a family heirloom. When Leo didn’t come home from the war, no one could crack his code. Quinn grew up with the story about Granduncle Leo and his hidden fortune in Florida. Quinn taught mathematics at a community college. Perhaps he inherited a family trait for being good with numbers and codes. He deciphered Uncle Leo’s code and went to Glendale-Marsh to find the treasure.”

  “Where does the doll come in?” asked Frank.

  “I’m not sure. Perhaps Quinn, being of a fanciful frame of mind, hid the code in his daughter’s doll for safekeeping, or perhaps the little girl hid it there.”

  “Why would a kid do a thing like that?” said Jin.

  Frank laughed.

  “I’m just hypothesizing,” said Diane. “Maybe she knew the code was important. Maybe the doll was a courier. Anyway, Melissa knew it was there because she told Juliet the doll had a secret. That’s something a kid tells another kid. None of the adults would have told Juliet that.”