18-6
36-1
22-5
20-21
3-1
4-3
4-3
22-7
11-4
1-1
18-6
11-4
20-10
4-3
10-1
18-20
1-1
18-20
4-3
7-1
20-15
18-20
18-20
1-2
25-4
20-10
1-2
14-1
“You might be on to something, Holmes. But what does that tell us?”
Holmes hesitated. “It tells us nothing … yet. Perhaps the position of zero-1 in the cipher is significant. Let’s see. The cipher contains four columns and 15 rows, which gives us 60 number combinations. Does the number 60 signify anything at all?”
“Nothing to me.”
“Of course, the column-and-row arrangement might mean nothing at all. Perhaps it’s just a convenient size for the paper.”
“It does fill the page. You may be right—and it’s unlikely that every message sent by this cipher would always consist of exactly 60 combinations.”
“Yes, I see that. Could the boxes represent letters of the alphabet?”
“That occurred to me, Tuck. But there are only 26 letters in the alphabet and we have 60 boxes. However, the remaining boxes might represent the numerals. Let’s try that hypothesis.”
For the next two hours we tried the hypothesis … and tried it and tried it. We arranged the alphabet vertically down the columns, then horizontally across the columns, and even diagonally. We started with the numbers and ended with the numbers. Each attempt resulted in gibberish.
“Perhaps it’s just a lot of nonsense,” I groaned at last, collapsing on my bed and wishing Holmes gone so I could sleep. It had been a very long, cold, and exhausting day.
“It cannot be. The lady would not have gone to so much trouble and risk to provide you a message that consists of nonsense.”
It was true. I pictured her wary, somewhat drained face once again as she passed me the envelope.
“In a substitution cipher, the key depends upon some text, like a passage from the Bible or a poem or a book agreed upon by the conspirators.” Holmes was talking to himself, studying the paper even more intently. “But the lady would have provided the text, or some indication of where to find it. There is no such indication, so the entire key must be here—in front of our eyes. It’s all right here. What are we missing?”
I got up from the bed, rubbed at my eyes, and looked once more over his shoulder. “What about the snail shell?” I asked.
“Snail shell?”
Holmes leapt up, hugged me to himself, and sang out, “Tuck, you are a miracle, a prodigy! The spiral! The spiral! It’s here! I completely overlooked it.”
“Well, it is nearly midnight … one does overlook things… .”
But Holmes abruptly sat down again and continued muttering to himself. “Here is a third figure—imposed upon the compass and the pyramid—the figure of a spiral that begins at the heart of the Triangle and revolves symmetrically outward. What do we know about a spiral?”
“It’s found everywhere. In mollusk shells, in the curve of a sheep’s horn, in certain flowers… . ” I was drawn in again and forgetting how tired I was.
Holmes’s finger shot straight up like an arrow. “Suppose we arrange the alphabet in a spiral, beginning with ‘A’ at the apex of the spiral and rotating outward from there.” He drew the spiral in the air with his finger.
We fell to work again, filling one of my last sheets of writing paper with a template where each box on the Triangle contained a letter of the alphabet corresponding to the curve of the spiral. As we ended up with ten empty boxes, we proceeded to fill them in with the numerals from one to 10, which seemed reasonable to us.
“But Holmes,” I said, “are we any further down the road? What is the relationship between the Triangle and the letters in the Spiral?”
“Let us apply our previous hypothesis. Due to the Compass, we now have a degree for each box; due to the Triangle, we now have a number for each box; and due to the Spiral, we now have a letter for each box. If we take the combination zero-1, for example, to stand for one of the letters of the Spiral, we end up with the letter ‘V.’
“Now the first combination in the cipher is 33-3. So … moving in from 33 degrees, we find the number 3, which stands for the letter ‘C.’”
I began putting the letters next to the numbers on the cipher.
“Number 1 at 10 degrees gives us the letter ‘O.’
“Number 1 at 26 degrees gives us the letter ‘U.’
“Number 20 at 18 degrees gives us the letter ‘R.’
“Number 5 at 22 degrees gives us the letter ‘T.’”
This was promising. For the first time we had formed an actual English word: COURT. We looked at each other with subdued delight. “We have it!” Holmes whispered and then continued calling out the numbers as I added them to the chart.
“Number 20 at 18 degrees gives us the letter ‘R.’
“Number 3 at 4 degrees gives us the letter ‘A.’
“Number 10 at 20 degrees gives is the letter ‘I.’”
Now we looked at each other disillusioned: “COURTRAI?” I moaned. “It’s meaningless to me.”
“Perhaps it is only a part of a word. We’ll continue. Number 6 at 18 degrees gives us the letter ‘B.’”
“COURTRAIB? It’s meaningless Holmes. Just more gibberish.”
33-3 C
4-3
0-1
36-1
10-1 O
1-1
3-1
3-1
26-1 U
20-21
20-15
3-1
18-20 R
23-1
4-3
22-5
22-5 T
20-15
22-5
20-15
18-20 R
16-10
34-1
25-4
4-3 A
3-1
4-3
4-3
20-10 I
18-20
1-1
1-1
18-6 B
36-1
22-5
20-21
3-1
4-3
4-3
22-7
11-4
1-1
18-6
/>
11-4
20-10
4-3
10-1
18-20
1-1
18-20
4-3
7-1
20-15
18-20
18-20
1-2
25-4
20-10
1-2
14-1
Holmes threw the pen down and wiped his eyes. The gaslight was wearing out, and he looked suddenly exhausted. I’d seen this in him before—the vital energy snuffed from his body like the flame from a lamp.
“Enough!” he said quietly. “This is a fight we cannot win in any case.” He picked up his hat and walked out of my room without another word.
Chapter 29
The next day was full and tiring, a teaching day. I had no time to bestow any thought on Holmes but figured I would visit him in the evening if he did not visit me first. It was the coldest day of the year, the air inside the schoolroom almost blue with cold, the stove nearly dead for lack of coal, and the children returning from their Christmas holidays in no mood for catechism. The poor little ones bridled at reciting the four cardinal virtues while they were freezing.
“How does the Christian walk?” I asked as sternly as I could.
One little girl raised her hand and shivered out the answer: “’Walk then as children of the light; for the fruit of the light is in all goodness, and justice and truth, having no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness.’”
How could I not love such a child? We moved on to the vision of glory: “What more magnificent can imagination picture than the mansion of heaven, illumined as it is throughout with the blaze of glory which encircles the Godhead!”
Then I let them run circles round my desk. It was the only way I could think of to help them get warm. Heaven knows I wanted to join them. Even my heavy wool cassock wasn’t enough to alleviate the chill; but it warmed my heart to see the children’s cheeks blaze up with glory and to hear their laughter as they chased each other round a make-believe mansion of heaven.
The noise drew the attention of Father Claudian, who peeped through the door at the uproar and then shouted for silence. The children clustered round me for refuge.
“Let’s have an end to this hubbub,” Father Claudian commanded. “We are sending you all home early today because a storm is fixing to start. Quickly, children, gather your things. You are dismissed.”
They were out the doors in an instant. “A welcome dismissal, Father,” I said. “I feared they would turn to ice if I didn’t let them run and play a bit.” I glanced at the fading fire in the stove.
The old priest gave me a disdainful look. “Coal is expensive,” he said.
“Children know only that they are cold.”
“Not as cold as they’re going to be. If they don’t scamper home, they will turn to ice soon enough, all right. It looks to be brewing up a bad storm.” It was true: through the window I could see only a seething black cloud, and the afternoon had turned almost to night.
Father laid an envelope on my desk. “This came for you with the post just now.”
It was an odd missive: no return address, no stamp, no postmark, and there was something like gravel inside. I ripped it open and out fell what appeared to be five dried white seeds—nothing else. I laughed until I realized that Father Claudian had nearly stopped breathing.
He clutched my shoulder and swore. “What have you brought upon us?”
“I don’t follow you. What do you mean?”
“I’ve heard of such a thing but never seen it.” The priest was quaking, and not with the cold.
“No letter. Five pips in an envelope? They look to be from a citron fruit—a lemon or an orange, I’d say. What—does someone want us to start an orangery?”
“It is a warning. It signifies ‘join or die.’”
“Join? Join what?”
The priest hushed me. “Join the Klan, you fool. This is an ultimatum!” He took the envelope and opened the flap. There were scrawled the letters “K K K.”
“I have no intention of ‘joining the Klan.’ They threaten me with death if I don’t join them? Are they mad?”
“Have they asked something of you? What do they want from you?”
I decided not to burden him with the story—he knew too much already, and I was loth to expose him to danger by embroiling him any further in my troubles.
“Don’t worry, Father,” I said in as hale a voice as I could muster. “I think I know what this is regarding, and I fear it is just a misunderstanding. I will deal with it.”
“It’s about that colored man you helped, isn’t it? I warned you … .”
“Yes, that’s it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Father, I have some visits to make which will clear all of this up.”
“Not tonight. You’ll be making no visits.”
“And why not?”
“Look outside.” He pointed to the windows.
I looked but saw nothing. Literally, the world had disappeared from view behind a veil of intense sleet that froze the instant it contacted the ground. The pastor was right. I would be making no visits that night.
Nor the next day. When we arose, we found that the door to the rectory had frozen shut, and it was only by pounding at it repeatedly with my shoulder that I was able to budge it.
The morning was still dark, but the landscape mirrored our lamplight like a million tongues of flame. Everything, every surface—trees, walks, shrubbery—was molded into clear ice. My nerves erupted when I heard what I thought was a gunshot, but it was the sound of a plane tree branch cracking explosively overhead. Then I heard the same retort further away, and again and again. The trees were splitting apart under the weight of the ice.
All that day, nothing moved, not man, horse, or dog. Not the milk wagon, the postman, or a single child for school.
I was desperate to talk to Holmes, but when I ventured to put my boot to the ice, I found that even cautious walking was impossible. The ground was as slick as water. I recalled skating on frozen ponds as a child, but in this seaside clime of South Carolina no one conceived of such a thing as ice skates, so there was no means of mobility at all.
Father Claudian and I celebrated a lonely mass together in the darkened church and then huddled ourselves next to the stove in the rectory kitchen for the rest of the day. The pastor squirmed nervously. I could understand why the weather alarmed him—he had grown up in a climate that varied little from the soft and the humid—but it was more than that. Every crack of a branch or echo of falling ice made him jump, and then he would sigh apologetically. I knew he was nervous because of the five orange pips.
At last I looked up from my book. “Have you seen storms like this before, Father?”
“Once or twice. I remember the ice storm of ’39, and then just after New Year in ’57 when the temperature went to twenty-four below zero.”
“You have quite a memory.”
“For disasters, yes. I’ve seen a few.”
“If it is any comfort to you, Father, I intend to see the bishop at his earliest convenience and accept his invitation to work with him.”
The pastor gave me a pale smile. “That is good. I am glad you can see clear to do your duty.”
“Yes, that is what I intend to do.”
I spent the rest of the day staring at the Compass, the Spiral, and the Triangle. I had seen Holmes sad, disgusted, and angry, but I had never seen him despondent. Confronted with this maddening cipher, his machine-like mind had come to a stop. My determination was nothi
ng compared with his, yet I could not sit by and watch as such a remarkable man disintegrated in defeat.
I made a few half attempts, but the cipher seemed more opaque than ever. We had missed something crucial to its solution and I had exhausted every approach I could think of. It was as if my mind had iced over like the world outside the rectory.
The unnerving storm continued for days, spreading layer after layer of ice over streets and houses and tombstones. The cemetery was a desolate field strewn with ice blocks, making the short walk from the rectory to the convent like crossing Siberia. The sisters worried themselves ill over the absent children, imagining little frozen souls scattered through the streets, but they kept busy boiling water for tea and plying the pastor and me with soup. Steam turned their freezing windows rock-hard, but it was warmer in their common room than in the draughty old rectory.
Sister Carolina, who had just returned from Atlanta, took pains to avoid me. Pale and nervous—more than usual–she gave her full attention to the manufacture of her rosaries while the other sisters worked grumbling round her, cooking and laundering and ironing with a vengeance. She was so solitary that one evening after dinner I approached and inquired after her health.
“I am quite well, thank you, Father.” It was a seasonably icy response.
“How are your preparations for your final vows progressing?” I asked as gently as I could. My resentment at her betrayal had receded, and I was rather sorry for her sitting alone.
She did not reply, and feeling slighted, I turned to leave her. But then she spoke.
“Once we have detached ourselves forever from the world, it must look as if we have done everything and there is nothing left to contend with.” Although she was not really speaking to me, I listened. “But I cannot do that. I cannot feel secure and go to sleep like one who has bolted the door against thieves—for the thief is already in the house.”
“I believe Saint Teresa said something like that,” I replied. “Surely even behind the veil sin is never completely banished. It is in our nature. We all struggle on.”
The Tarleton Murders Page 21