by Eva Gates
I did so now, but I was the only one. Everyone else gathered expectantly around the desk. Curtis and Norman elbowed each other in some sort of display of dominance as they jostled for the best place to stand. Diane didn’t bother to be discreet. She simply stepped directly in front of Mrs. Eastland. Lynne trod on Elizabeth McArthur’s toes, and the professor yelped. I was conscious of Jeremy behind me, standing, I thought, far too close. Everyone scrambled to see better. Everyone except for Connor, who stood off to one side with a wry smile on his handsome face.
Bertie unlocked her desk drawer. She slipped on the white gloves and then carefully lifted up the tin box. I cleared a space on her desk and placed two books on either side to help support the diary. Bertie put the book down, carefully opened the first page, and everyone leaned in.
“No touching,” Bertie said.
“No breathing,” Connor muttered. I suppressed a giggle.
Jeremy’s hand brushed my lower back as he leaned forward, and I squirmed out of the way. “At first glance,” he said, “it looks to be well preserved. The leather binding is in good shape, and there’s little deterioration of the paper.”
“You say it was found inside that box,” Elizabeth said. “That would preserve the paper quite well.”
“The handwriting is good,” Norman said. “Perfectly legible. That indicates the author received an excellent education.”
“Or she was taught at home by a mother with good penmanship,” Lynne said.
“That’s what I thought,” Mrs. Eastland said.
“The first thing we’d like to determine,” Bertie said, “is if this was written in the Outer Banks. The weather entries should give you a place to start.”
“I told the others we could help with that,” Mrs. Eastland said.
“How much is it worth?” Curtis asked.
“Nothing,” Lynne said. “Not in monetary value.”
“Oh.” Curtis lost interest. He broke out of the circle and went to lean against the door. He checked his phone.
“Not everything in this world can be judged by its monetary value,” Mrs. Eastland said.
“Lynne, Phil, and Mabel can come back tomorrow and read it here,” Bertie said.
“I’ll assume you didn’t deliberately slight me,” Jeremy said. “I’ll be part of that group.”
“We wouldn’t dream of working without you,” Lynne said.
“Thank you.” He gave her a slight bow.
Lynne preened. Mrs. Eastland snickered.
“If that’s okay with you, Mr. Mayor?” Bertie asked.
“Sure,” Connor said.
“The history department at Blacklock College is eminently qualified to examine it.” Elizabeth said.
“I’m sure you are,” Connor said. “But as this is, as far as we know, an Outer Banks relic, and of no monetary significance, we’ll keep it for now. Thanks for coming.”
“You’re welcome to use our facilities at the college,” Norman said to Jeremy.
“I might do that if it proves necessary,” Jeremy replied.
“You might not,” Phil said. “I’m with Connor. If we let it leave town, we’ll never get it back.”
“I’m not going to steal it,” Norman said.
“Not in so many words, perhaps,” Lynne said.
“I’ll remind you, Jeremy,” Mrs. Eastland said, “we are a society. We do not work as individuals.”
“Is that so?” he said, “I don’t recall you turning down my financial contribution on the grounds that you only want money raised collectively.”
“That’s completely different,” Mrs. Eastland said.
“Jeremy’s right,” Lynne said, “he—”
“If Jeremy said the sky was green, you’d agree with him,” Mrs. Eastland said.
Jeremy smirked. He was, I realized, enjoying this.
“Who cares?” Curtis put away his phone. “Anyone feel like going for a drink?”
“You should tell Eunice about this, Bertie,” Diane said. Eunice Fitzgerald was the chair of the library board.
“Thank you for your advice, Diane,” my boss replied. “That was certainly worth you coming all the way out here.”
Diane tossed her head. Her hair didn’t move. She took Curtis’s arm and they headed for the door.
“But what about the coded page and the treasure map?” Mrs. Eastland said. “Are you going to show them those?”
Curtis and Diane swung around. Norman sucked in a breath. Elizabeth’s eyes opened wide. Lynne gasped. Jeremy said, his voice low and calm, “There’s a treasure map?”
“That’s what people are saying in town,” Phil said, “I assumed it was nothing but a wild rumor. Is it true then?”
“Mabel!” Bertie said, “We agreed to keep that quiet for now.”
Mrs. Eastland’s hands flew to her face. “Oh, dear. My husband always says my big mouth is my worst enemy. I didn’t mean it. There isn’t any treasure map. No, really. I made that up.”
“Bertie?” Jeremy asked.
“If you found a map, it might have some historical significance,” Elizabeth said. “Not that it’s any treasure map, of course. That’s nothing but overly dramatic pirate stories invented by writers of popular fiction.”
“If that’s a dig at me,” Phil said, “you missed the mark. I don’t write fiction.”
“Or,” Bertie said, “it might be someone’s sketch of where their friends live or a child’s attempt to be clever.”
Curtis snapped his fingers. “Let’s see this map, Bertie.”
She glanced at Connor. He gave her a slight nod. Bertie took the separate sheet of paper out of the box and spread it on her desk.
Curtis stepped forward and gave it a quick glance. “That’s supposed to be a map? It could be anywhere.” He went back to the wall and resumed the study of his phone.
“What do those numbers mean?” Diane asked.
“It’s a map of the Outer Banks,” Norman said. “As it once was. At Blacklock we have an extensive collection of old maps. I’ll take it back and compare, try to date it.”
“And what’s this about a code page?” Elizabeth said. “Let’s see it. It might be the key to the map.”
“Enough,” Connor said. “Everything stays here. If the help of Blacklock College is needed, we’ll be in touch. As for the here and now, I don’t believe you were invited to join us today. Lucy, can you show our guests to the door, please.”
“Now see here,” Norman said.
“Don’t bother arguing,” Elizabeth said. “We’ll go, because we’ve been asked. But we’ll be back. With a court order. You people, amateurs and librarians, don’t know what you have here.”
“May I remind you,” Bertie said, “that we have Charlene Clayton, a librarian so qualified you tried to steal her from us to handle the Ruddle legacy.”
Norman sputtered. “We never!”
“Charlene will be in charge of the care of the notebook and its contents,” Bertie said, “if you agree, Mr. Mayor?”
“An excellent suggestion,” Connor said.
After giving Bertie one last poisonous glare and a sniff of disapproval, Elizabeth followed me out. Norman followed her.
When I got back to the office, having ensured the door was securely locked behind me, I was not at all surprised to find that an argument had broken out.
“It’s not even six o’clock,” Jeremy said. “We can get hours of work done yet. You haven’t showed us this code page yet.”
“Not until Charlene can supervise,” Bertie said. “And that is that.”
“Your suggestion is insulting,” Lynne said, with a peek at Jeremy out of the corner of her eyes. “We at the historical society have handled plenty of old papers before, isn’t that right, Jeremy? Some of them more valuable than this fishwife’s diary.”
“For once I agree with Jeremy and Lynne.” Phil said. “And that doesn’t happen often. But I’ll concede your point, Bertie. Phone Charlene and tell her to get down here.”
&n
bsp; “It’s Monday,” I said.
“So?” Jeremy asked.
“Sundays and Mondays are Mrs. Clayton’s caregiver’s days off. . On Monday, Charlene gets a friend to stay with her mom until five. She won’t come out now and leave her mom alone.”
Even Jeremy couldn’t argue with that.
Charlene was an expert in the care of historic documents. She’d worked in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, among papers far older than anything found in North Carolina. She’d given up the job she loved to come home to Nags Head when her mother fell ill and needed care.
“Tomorrow it is then,” Phil said. “What time does Charlene get in?”
“Nine,” Bertie said.
“We’ll be back at nine then.”
Curtis looked up from his phone. “Anyone for that drink?”
“I can’t,” Diane said. “I have to go to my mother’s for dinner. I told you that.”
“Oh, right. Jeremy, Phil, Connor, you free?”
“No thanks,” Connor said. “Lucy and I have dinner plans.”
Phil shook his head, but Jeremy said, “Sure.”
“I’m sorry, but I have another appointment,” said Lynne, who had not been invited.
Bertie put the diary into the tin box, placed the two separate pages on top, closed the lid with a thud, put it in her desk drawer, gave the key a satisfying twist, and dropped the key into her purse.
Chapter Five
“I have something to confess,” I said to Connor after the waiter had taken our drink orders.
“I figured you did,” he said.
“You did not. I’m not that readable. Am I?”
“The words ‘open book’ come to mind.” He smiled at me. “I can even guess what your secret is. You have a picture of the map and code page on your phone.”
“Oh.”
He laughed. “Don’t worry, I didn’t detect anything in the manner of Sherlock Holmes. Bertie told me you took a picture of them. Can I see it?”
“Even better,” I said. “I printed copies when you and Bertie were chatting.” Before I did my usual after-closing quick sweep and last-minute check of the library, looking for left-behind items, and then ran upstairs to my apartment to change for dinner.
We were at Jake’s Seafood Bar, our favorite restaurant. The intense heat of the day lingered, but a soft breeze was blowing off Roanoke Sound, making it comfortable enough to sit outside. Lights were coming on in the houses lining the shore of Roanoke Island and on boats bobbing gently in the calm waters of the harbor. The fourth-order Fresnel lens of the reproduction Roanoke Marshes Lighthouse flashed its rhythm. A large white candle burned in the hurricane lamp on our table and threw shadows under Connor’s sharp cheekbones.
The waiter arrived with our drinks while I dug in my bag for the sheets of paper and spread them out in front of me.
Connor moved his seat so he was beside me, not across the table. “I see letters,” he said. “Lots of handwritten letters. But no recognizable words.”
“I know something about cryptography. When I was young, one or another of my brothers was always sneaking into my room to rifle through my school notebooks for letters from my friends or in an attempt find my diary. I came up with codes so they couldn’t read them. I got my girlfriends into it, and we wrote back and forth in code for a while.”
“You mean you can tell what this says?”
“Haven’t a clue. It looks like a substitution code to me.”
“And that means?”
“Simply, one letter is substituted for another. Use a b in place of a w, for example.” I studied the printout, looking for a pattern. Nothing was immediately apparent.
“How do you know what’s substituted for what?” Connor asked.
“That’s the problem. You don’t. Not if the originator of the code doesn’t tell you. But words have patterns, so all we have to do is find the patterns. The most common letter in English is e.”
“There aren’t many e’s used here.”
“But there are a lot of w’s. So we speculate that perhaps w has been used in place of e and see what we get.”
We studied the paper in silence for a while.
“Nothing stands out,” Connor said at last.
“It doesn’t, does it? But that would be too simple. The most common method of substitution is to simply reverse the order of the letters. Replace a with z, and b with y, and so on. That’s what my friends and I did at first, thinking we were so clever.” I dug in my purse for a pen and the scrap of paper on which I’d scribbled a shopping list. On the back of the list, I began writing out the letters as they were in the diary page, using the formula I’d told Connor about.
I ended up with a line of gibberish.
“That doesn’t make any more sense,” he said.
“How far have you gotten into Journey to the Center of the Earth?”
“As I suspect that question is related to our puzzle here, I can’t bluff, so I’ll confess I haven’t started.”
“The book club meeting is Wednesday.”
He hung his head. “Sorry, no excuse—just too busy.”
“The story begins when our hero and his scientist uncle discover a coded page in an old book. The solution turns out to be much simpler than they initially thought. Meaning they were making it more complicated than it needed to be.”
“Fine, but in a book like that one, the code is created so the characters can break it, right?”
“Unfortunately, yes. Otherwise, you’d have no story. The problem with a substitution code, if it’s not merely replacing one letter with another, is that you need a key.”
“What sort of key?”
“Sometimes it can be in a book agreed upon ahead of time that both parties have access to. Like the first letter in the first word in the fifth paragraph on the two hundred and fifty-fourth page represents an a.”
Connor’s eyebrows rose. “Meaning without the book you don’t have a chance.”
“You do have a chance, even without the key. If you can find the pattern—if there is a pattern.”
“Okay,” he said. “Do you see any pattern here?” He touched the paper with his index finger.
“No, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Sometimes even figuring out the pattern isn’t enough. The substitution might change at a predetermined place; the fifth letter in the fourth line, for example. You can see how long some of these words are. That means they aren’t likely to be individual words, but several words strung together in order to confuse the search for a pattern.”
“You’re also assuming it’s in English.”
“I guess I am, but all languages have patterns, and if we can detect the pattern, a linguist should be able to tell us what it is.”
“A linguist such as found at Blacklock College?”
“Yes, but not Norm and Lizzie. I don’t trust them one little bit. If we give them the code page or the map, we’ll never see them again. Bertie’s friend Professor McClanahan might be able to help with linguistics. If we get that far.” I mentally began moving letters about.
The waiter appeared at our table, carrying a plate. “A treat from the kitchen.”
I jerked. “What? Oh, sorry. Thanks.” I hastily picked up the papers so the waiter could place the dish in front of us.
“I told Jake you’re here. He says hi.”
“Say hi back,” Connor said. “And thank him.”
I picked up a plump, glistening hush puppy and dipped it into the spicy sauce provided. Jake Greenblatt, owner and head chef, was married to my cousin Josie, and he knew how much I love these tasty little lumps of fried dough.
“Ready to order?” The waiter asked.
I hadn’t even checked the menu. I didn’t need to: I know it by heart. I asked for the shrimp and grits, as I usually did. Jake’s were the best in Nags Head, if not the entire Outer Banks. Maybe all of North Carolina. Connor ordered a steak, rare, with a baked potato and Caesar salad, and we handed our unopened
menus to the waiter.
“I never understand why you come to a seafood place as special as Jake’s and have steak and potatoes,” I said.
Connor just grinned at me and took a sip of his beer. “If the code used here is complicated, does that mean it’s more than a fishing wife hiding something from her husband or a couple of kids playing at pirate treasure?”
“Might be. Might not be. Might be a determined fishing wife or a very clever child. I came up with some pretty imaginative ways of keeping my brothers out of my diary. Although the code page—if it is a code page—was written by a different person than the diarist. The handwriting is totally different.”
“I’d like to have a peek at that diary of yours,” he said.
“It would bore you silly. I was anything but a rebellious child.” That was true. My biggest act of rebellion was to move to the Outer Banks to work in the Lighthouse Library. That, and to turn down the proposal from the man my mother had selected for me.
“Wugmunch,” Connor said.
“What’s that?”
“The only word I can make out is wugmunch.”
“Wugmunch isn’t a word.”
“My point exactly. If you propose that the letter f, which seems to be quite common on the page, is a u, in order to have some vowels, then that”—he pointed at a line of print—“says wugmunch. Or maybe it’s an e, so the word becomes wegmench.”
“Do you know of a place called Wegmench? The town of Wegmench?”
“Lake Wugmunch?”
“Wugmunch Bay?”
“You want that?” Connor pointed to the last hush puppy.
“Help yourself,” I said, and he did.
The waiter brought our meals, and once again I shoved the papers to one side.
“It might not make any sense at all, Lucy,” Connor said as we dug into the delicious food. “There might well be no rhyme or reason to it. The person who wrote that page might not have even been literate. They could have been just copying out letters at random.”
“But the handwriting is so good, and so neat, although a bit rough.”