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)
“Sterling,” I prompted.
She grunted, her eyes still flicking back and forth over the page.
“Look,” I said, pointing to a capital A at the beginning of a sentence. And thereupon we all entered the cave.
Then, to a lowercase d. I beheld great heaps of coin… And to a lowercase m and r. How many had it cost in the amassing, what blood and sorrow…
“Do you see?” I asked, flipping to the prior page and back again.
“Oh,” Sterling breathed, reaching to trace the letters with a fingertip, catching the curves and lines on those letters—deeper, wider, darker than the rest of the type in the book, showing the grooves of indentation from his pen. The one and seven in the page number had received the same treatment.
“Do you have a notebook?” Sterling asked. “I need my laptop. Hang on.”
She jumped up and sprinted from the garage, returning in a few minutes with her bag slung over her shoulder, a little out of breath. Sitting back on the overturned bucket, she pulled out both her laptop and a notebook.
“How many of them are there?” Sterling asked.
We made our way through line by line, finding four of the slightly distorted letters just in the first paragraph. And between them, an entire word with each letter ever so slightly shaded. Not enough that it jumped off the page, at least not until I knew what I was looking for.
“I think it’s a Caesar cipher,” Sterling said. “I have one here, but it’s a pain to read, so I made a program instead.” Digging in the front pocket of her backpack, she pulled out a thick coin and shoved it at me.
Once in my hand, I realized it wasn’t a coin. It was two discs, one set inside the other, both with the alphabet engraved on the edges. A hole in the center coin revealed a number beneath. Sterling leaned over and spun the center coin.
“You line it up to the number that’s the key, and the alphabets align,” she said. “One set of letters is the code, and the matching letter is the solution. But it’s hard to read the numbers through that hole or hold it still while I turn it to read the letters.”
Flipping her laptop open, she navigated to a file and double-clicked. It opened to a black screen with two text boxes outlined in white. One asked for the code, and the other the key.
Turning from the Caesar cipher coin in my hand, she typed A, D, M, R into the code box. Into the box labeled KEY, she typed seventeen and hit enter.
RUMI appeared below the boxes.
“Rumi?” Sterling asked, raising an eyebrow. “Like the poet?”
Something teased at the back of my brain. “I think…” I struggled to make the picture in my memory snap into focus, but it refused. I closed my eyes, remembering our old house in Willow Springs. A book with a golden-yellow cover floated to the surface of my mind. My heart sank when I remembered where I’d seen it last.
“I think my mother has a collection of Rumi’s love poems,” I said. “I remember it from when I was a kid. My father must have given it to her.”
“Shit,” Sterling said, and I silently echoed her sentiment.
“Do you think she kept it?” I asked more to myself than to her.
Sterling looked around, then popped to her feet and scanned the labels on the boxes we hadn’t gotten to. “That’s pretty sentimental. I would have if I were her. Any chance your mother has books packed away here?”
I hoped Sterling was right. The amount of stuff my mom had saved—particularly from her wedding—told me she hadn’t erased my dad’s memory from her life as much as I thought she had. A book of love poems, though. I could see that being incredibly painful. And if she’d gotten rid of it, then what would we do?
There was only one path forward. We’d look ourselves, and if we couldn’t find it, we’d have to go to my mom.
“She could have some in here,” I said.
I didn’t see any, but we went through the rest of the labels and opened a few more bins. We found ancient cookware, a tea set that I thought had been my grandmother’s, and a stack of quilts. But none of my mother’s books or more personal items.
“I hate to say this,” Sterling said, “but I think we have to ask your mother. I wonder… At first, it seemed like your dad meant to do this with you—which makes a lot more sense if he was murdered—”
I nodded in agreement. It felt like that to me, too.
“But now I wonder if it wasn’t meant for the two of you,” she continued. “Once it was obvious that you were part of the key to solving it, it seemed weird it was only for you. You were a kid. What were you going to do with all that money?”