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)
Chapter Twenty-Two
FORREST
“Coffee?” I asked, holding out a steaming mug. As I’d hoped, she couldn’t resist. “I’m making breakfast sandwiches. You want one?”
Sterling sat at the kitchen table and shrugged her shoulder. “Sure. Why not?” Then, giving in, she took a long sip of coffee. “You always made the best coffee,” she said, going for a second, longer sip.
I slid a plate in front of her a few minutes later. She picked up half the sandwich, biting into it with a moan that reminded me of naked Sterling far more than the fully dressed woman sitting at my kitchen table. I already knew not only did she love her coffee, but she was also a sucker for breakfast sandwiches. Melting cheddar. Toasted sourdough. Fried eggs. I could gain a lot of ground if I could get her to stay long enough to feed her breakfast. So far, so good.
“How’s it going with the cipher?” I asked, taking a bite of my own sandwich.
She swallowed, shaking her head, and sighed. “I can’t figure out what I’m missing. But I know it has to be something because it doesn’t make any sense,” she said.
“Can I look at it?” I asked. It crossed my mind that I didn’t have to ask. I could have demanded she give it to me. That might be a move I would have made a year ago. But now? In this new iteration of us? Sterling had been the one solving these clues, so that made it hers, too.
She reached for her purse and handed me the tin. I set the tin on the table and wiped my hands on a napkin before opening it. As before, it held only the card with my father’s writing on it. The markings of the cipher didn’t make any sense to me. This one wasn’t alphanumeric, and I didn’t recognize the pattern at all.
“Why is this one so much harder?” I asked.
Sterling chewed furiously on her last bite of breakfast sandwich and swallowed it, chased by a gulp of hot coffee. After another quick swallow, she blotted her mouth with a napkin and said, “It’s the key. There has to be something, but it wasn’t there. Or am I just supposed to know what the key is? Because so far, I don’t.”
So, we were missing a key. Okay. Carefully, I moved my empty plate and half a cup of coffee to the other side of the table and picked up the card with the cipher.
“What are you doing?” Sterling asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just looking. Maybe there’s something here.”
“I looked already,” she said, sounding a little sullen. It was unlikely I’d find something she hadn’t, but so far, this had been Sterling’s game. I’d only been along for the ride. Maybe new eyes would help.
I studied the inside of the lid, closed it, and examined the red and white of the logo and the old-fashioned script. Everything looked normal. I pulled out my phone and searched for the brand of peppermints to compare our lid to others. Image after image popped up on the screen, our tin matching a picture of a vintage peppermint tin of the same brand. I zoomed in on the picture but couldn’t find any differences in the design. If the key was hidden there, I couldn’t see it.
I flipped open the lid and examined the inside. The bottom was a thin layer of white wax paper cut with rounded corners to fit seamlessly beneath the first layer of mints. The mints were long gone, as was the top layer of paper.
“Did you look at this?” I asked, pointing at the paper.
Sterling rolled her big blue eyes. “Of course. I’ve looked at everything.”
With a light touch, I nudged the edge of the paper, peeling it up and turning it over. The faint smear of graphite caught my eye. “Can you grab the magnifying glass? It’s in the kitchen drawer.” I raised my chin in the direction of the junk drawer where I’d tossed the magnifying glass after Sterling had used it the night she’d brought the Vitellius to my door.
She returned with it a moment later. “What do you see?” she demanded, leaning in to try to peer through the magnifying glass.
“I don’t know,” I said, afraid to guess. But there—small and faint, but very much there under the lens of the magnifying glass—the graphite smear resolved into a tiny series of letters and numbers running along the edge of the wax paper. “Here.”
Sterling took the magnifying glass, holding it above the paper and squinting down. “I swear I looked at this. How did I miss it? Are the lights brighter in here?”
“Does it mean anything to you?” I asked, elated to have found something even though I had no clue what this new code meant. Was it a key or another cipher?