Total pages in book: 99
Estimated words: 93002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
My father hadn’t been a whimsical man. He’d been gruff. Loving, sure. I’d never had a doubt he loved me or my mom. But a scavenger hunt using codes? I wouldn’t have thought— Then it hit me, and wet heat coated my eyes. I’d lost him too young to know if this was like him. Maybe he’d been into codes and ciphers. Maybe he had been whimsical, but I hadn’t had the chance to see that side of him yet.
When we were at the bank, Mr. Webber had said that my father intended for us to solve the codes together. Twin waves of grief and anger hit me at once. Grief for the time I’d lost with my dad, and anger, a furious, pointless rage.
Why would my father have set something like this up and then left us? I couldn’t understand. Why give up? He’d lost his business and the Vitellius. But, surely, he hadn’t needed the statue to unravel the code. Losing the Vitellius wouldn’t have meant he lost everything.
Had he been so humiliated at losing the company that he hadn’t been able to see a way forward? Had there been more going on than I’d known?
I let out a bitter laugh. Of course, there’d been more going on than I’d known. I was thirteen. I hadn’t known jack shit about anything.
I couldn’t solve my father’s puzzles at his side as he’d planned. But maybe, as Mr. Webber had said, if I couldn’t do this with my dad, at least I could do it with someone I loved. And if I managed not to fuck things up again, maybe it would help me get back the person I wanted most. Sterling.
Chapter Nine
FORREST
She was at my door not long after the sun crested the mountains, this time looking far more like herself in skinny jeans and a fitted T-shirt, her hair loose and flowing over her shoulders, a travel mug of coffee in her hand.
We were on the road minutes later. “Did you bring the cipher wheel?” I asked as we passed through town.
“Yep. And this time, I remembered a notebook and a pen.”
If I’d hoped the car ride would give us a chance to talk, those hopes were dashed. Sterling sipped her coffee and stared out the window. At first, the silence between us felt odd, like a sweater that was too tight. Finding things to talk about had never been a problem when we’d been together. We could talk all night about everything and nothing. I’d told her more about myself than I’d ever told anyone.
We were past that now. I’d killed the ease between us with my lies, and I couldn’t bring it back with force. I couldn’t make Sterling talk to me. The only way I could rebuild trust was to show her she could trust me, and badgering her into conversation wouldn’t get us there. Patience had never been a problem for me until Sterling. And where she was concerned, patience was all I had. Patience and hope.
A few hours later, we pulled into a space beside the park in Willow Springs, the town bustling on this sunny summer morning. The park itself wasn’t deserted, but there were a few people lingering, everyone on their way somewhere, at least for the moment.
Sterling got out of the car ahead of me, following the sidewalk to the brick pathway that crisscrossed the park. In the center was a statue of the town’s founder. We went there first, Sterling examining every inch of the concrete base and the brass plaque affixed to the front.
“Nothing,” she said in disgust.
“It’s not here,” I said with absolute assurance, feeling off-balance but knowing I was right. Sterling was the expert in code-breaking. I was just along for the ride. But though the statue dominated the center of the park, it wasn’t what we were looking for. I must have walked by it a hundred times with my mom or dad when I was a kid, and I couldn’t remember either of them ever mentioning it. “It’s not here,” I repeated and walked around the statue to the brick path on the other side, following it to stop in front of a bench beneath an oak tree.
I stared down at the painted wooden slats, falling back in time to when I sat here and my feet swung, toes barely scraping the brick as I licked a strawberry ice cream cone. I could still hear my dad’s voice in my ear. “You’ve got a runner on the side, Buck,” and I’d turn the cone to lick up the drip of ice cream before it could hit my fingers.
“Why the bench?” Sterling asked.
I cleared my throat, my words coming out rough and low. “My dad used to take me to the library on Fridays after school. After, we’d get ice cream over there.” I pointed across the park to the ice cream shop that had been beside the library as long as I’d been alive. “We’d bring our cones over here and eat them on this bench. He always made me promise to eat every bite of my dinner so my mom wouldn’t know we’d had dessert first. I always thought she knew, though.”