But what difference did it make? Celeste sighed, wandering toward the cliff. Things weren’t working out the way she’d hoped. Her spells had screwed everything up. She supposed the coaxing spell had led her to the store, but Jolene had already been following that trail. She’d have found the boxes with the rock in it even if Celeste weren’t there, so did that even count? And, anyway, it seemed that now the rock wasn’t even necessary, although it had led them to this island, so at least that was something.
Then there was the spell she’d cast to keep Dubonnet’s ghost away. That had backfired and almost caused them to drown. Even the little charm that she’d cast to bring Jolene and Matteo together didn’t seem to be working. She was useless.
“Glum again?” Mirabella appeared as if out of nowhere, her flowy sash fluttering in the breeze, long black hair swirling around her shoulders. Not a surprise for a ghost—they were prone to doing that.
Celeste felt a new sense of depression. Not only had she failed her sisters, she might have failed Mirabella too. If it turned out the relic had been swept away by the current, Mirabella would never get the closure she’d been waiting for all this time.
“I’m afraid I might have some bad news,” Celeste said.
“About the relic hidden in Marie Antoinette’s jewels?” Mirabella swirled around, brandishing her sword as if practicing fighting off an enemy.
“Yeah, well, about that relic. I had it in my hand, but I lost it.”
“Lost it? How?”
Celeste sighed. “I guess it’s not really lost. Not yet, anyway. The guys are diving down to try to find it.”
“So you located it, then? That’s half the battle.”
“Yes, but it wasn’t exactly where you said. I mean, the quartz line wasn’t exactly how you said it would be. But we did find the secret hiding hole in the cavern.” Celeste clenched her fists. “I had that jeweled box right in my hand and let it slip away.”
“Jeweled box? What are you talking about?”
Celeste’s gaze flicked from the ocean to Mirabella. “The domed box with jewels on it. That’s where Marie Antoinette’s gems are, right?”
“No. It was never in a box. When Dubonnet was upon us, I pried the relic out of the necklace and wrapped it in part of my sash.” Mirabella ran her fingers along the gold-and-magenta sash that hung at her waist. “I gave it to Constantine to hide inside the tunnels. He wanted to hide it somewhere where I could recover it should he run afoul of Dubonnet and his crew, so he told me he followed the quartz line. He etched the location on the rocks. He didn’t say anything about a cavern, but we didn’t have much time after that.”
Wait a minute—if the relic wasn’t in that box, then where was it? Maybe Cal should be focusing on decrypting the directions on the rocks instead of diving in the cavern. “Are you sure? The box was quite fancy. It looked like real gold and was studded with gems.”
“Part of the other pirate booty that we hid. There’s treasure hidden all over this island, and Marie Antoinette’s jewels were in the domed box. But not the relic. I separated it from the others in the hopes that anyone looking for the necklace would be satisfied with what remained in the box.” Mirabella frowned. “But I don’t think the other treasure would not have been near the relic. Did you follow the quartz line?”
That explained why the quartz line they followed was different. It wasn’t because treasure hunters had excavated different tunnels over the years—it was because they had been in the wrong place. But where was the right place? “We did follow one, but it didn’t look exactly as you described.”
“What about the map he etched in the rocks?”
“We’re having a hard time decrypting it. Cal said it needs a columnar transposition cipher or something. Maybe you can help with that. Do you know what Constantine would have used as the cipher key?”
Mirabella shrugged. “My Constantine was very smart with those things. He was an expert navigator and could sail us to any piece of land. But me, I’m better suited to making deals and fighting. I have no head for ciphers and keys. But it must not be that hard, because the man that came before you figured it out. At least he seemed to have. I heard him say he had all the pieces.”
“LeBlanc? You spoke with him? But I thought you hadn’t talked to anyone but me?”
“I didn’t speak with him. No one else has been able to see me except for you. But I can see them. And that man—the man that took a piece of the rock—spent many nights over the campfire, scribbling. He was alone with no one to talk to but himself. I ventured far enough to listen. He mumbled to himself that he knew where to dig and those that were after him would not find his hidden fortune. He fled in the night just as others were coming to the island. That was the last time I saw him. No one else that has come has seemed to even come close to figuring out the code.”
“How do you know he didn’t leave with the relic?”
“I’m still here, aren’t I?” Mirabella looked at the ground, regret ghosting across her face. “Maybe if I hadn’t stayed glued to this spot, I would have been able to follow him and help him out somehow. I know he was homing in on the location, but he had to leave the island quickly before he could finish. If only I’d helped him find it before he had to leave.”
“But you didn’t want to leave Constantine.”
“Perhaps that has been my downfall. If I weren’t selfishly staying here, I could have helped others not be harmed. I could have helped this LeBlanc person find the relic, but I was afraid Constantine would be lost to me forever if the relic was discovered and I wasn’t near his final resting place.” Mirabella bent down and placed her palm on the indentation of earth. “I also wasn’t sure that LeBlanc would get the relic into the right hands. I believe he was only after the money.”
“Maybe it was better you didn’t help him, then,” Celeste said. From what she knew, LeBlanc had no association with the people she worked for. The relic could have easily gotten into the hands of Bly’s predecessor if LeBlanc had recovered it.
Mirabella looked up at Celeste. “I am sure of you, though. I know you will get it into the right hands.”
“I will.” Celeste felt a renewed sense of purpose. If what Mirabella was saying was true, then the box they were currently diving for in the cavern did not contain the relic.
Now she knew more than she had before. LeBlanc had decrypted the code. And if he’d been chased off the island and taken the rock to thwart the efforts of whoever was chasing him, she was sure he would have written down the cipher he used to decrypt it. And, given what Cal had explained about the columnar transposition cipher, she had a pretty good idea where he might have put it.
Chapter Twelve
Celeste rushed back to the cabins. She had a unique opportunity to redeem herself, and she didn’t want to screw that up. Inside the cabin, she rummaged in Cal’s backpack for his encryption notes, which she brought back out to the picnic table. She spread all the printouts and Cal’s notebooks, which included his handwritten notes, out on the table.
“What are you doing?” Jolene appeared at the doorway to her cabin, a rolled-up sleeping bag in her hand.
“The relic wasn’t in that box we found.”
“What? How do you know?”
Celeste tapped her finger on Cal’s notebook. “I think I might know how to decrypt the code on the rocks.”
Jolene frowned. “Do we need that? They’re diving for the relic right now.”
Celeste shook her head. “Mirabella told me the relic wasn’t in that box.”
“Oh.” Jolene glanced toward the cliff. “You just talked to her?”
“Yes. She said she was sure that LeBlanc had cracked the code. But when Cal looked at that section of rock over by where Bly’s guys went into the tunnels, he said he thought maybe the reason he couldn’t decrypt the whole thing was that he needed the key for a columnar transposition cipher.”
“A what?”
“It’s some kind of cipher that has letters in columns.
Like rows of words.”
“Okay.” Jolene rummaged around in her backpack and pulled out her laptop. “So what are you thinking?”
“I think the key is in that note that LeBlanc left. The one Dorian got that started all this. It had three rows.”
Celeste rummaged through the printouts they’d brought until she came to a photo of the note. “See, right here.”
X marks the spot
The key is hidden in plain sight
My fortune is resolved
“Let me call up the software Cal uses to decode what’s on the rocks for us.” Jolene got to work on the keyboard, her fingers flying over the keys. “One problem. The three lines on the note don’t have the same amount of letters, which is needed for a columnar transposition cipher.”
“Maybe the empty spaces are ignored. Fill them in with nulls,” Celeste suggested.
Jolene did as told, and they stared at the screen as a message formed.
Jgaroeoodfij
Aodifgjolvf
soreokfkdd
Jolene sighed. “Well, that doesn’t make much sense. Let me see if I can figure something else out.” She typed some more then cursed. “Dang, that didn’t work either. I’m not sure what to do. All I get is nonsensical gobbledygook. Maybe we should get Cal up here to help. He’ll know what to do.”
“We should, but try moving the empty spaces around. Mash the words all together, and fill the nulls in at the end.” Celeste didn’t want to call Cal. Not yet. Maybe she was being selfish, but she wanted a chance to prove that she could help… and if her hunch was wrong, and if by some odd chance the relic really was in that box, she didn’t want to call them away from the dive and ruin their chances. Instead, she stared at Cal’s decryption notes, and the clacking of the computer keys had a mesmerizing effect. Maybe the note wasn’t the key. But there was something about it. The last line seemed awkward.
My fortune is resolved
The fortune!
Celeste jumped up and rushed into her cabin. Rummaging through her clothes, she tossed aside the black jeans, the gray jeans, and her yoga pants.
Jolene appeared in the doorway, a quizzical look on her face. “Now what are you doing?”
“I’m looking for the jeans I wore the day we brought those boxes back from the Chinese-food restaurant.”
She spotted the faded jeans under Cal’s T-shirt and grabbed them. She plunged her hand into the pocket, her fist curling around a tiny piece of paper. She pulled her hand out and held it up triumphantly. “This came out of the fortune cookie in the box. I put it in my pocket for Cal because he likes old, cryptic stuff. The cookie looked ancient.”
“Okay.” Jolene drew the word out.
Celeste rushed past her back to the picnic table.
“Don’t you see? My fortune is resolved. That’s what LeBlanc wrote in the note. He did figure out the cipher key. Resolved is another way of saying ‘figured out,’ right? That last line was a clue to the key.” Celeste held the piece of paper up. “This is it on this little piece of paper. All those lucky letters at the bottom. He must’ve hidden it in the fortune cookie for some reason. Maybe someone was after him. We don’t know what was going on with him. He supposedly died of a heart attack, but what if someone killed him and made it look like a heart attack?”
“A paranormal could do that. Maybe they knew he had cracked the code and killed him. But he had already put the clue in the box and hidden it in plain sight just like Dorian said,” Jolene said.
“Bingo. And if that is the case, then we can use this fortune to decrypt the code.”
Jolene went to the picnic table and swiveled her laptop around so they could both see the screen. Then she held her hand out for the fortune. ”Let me plug this into the cipher program.”
They both stared at the screen as the software worked at using the letters and numbers on the fortune to decrypt the letters on the rocks that Cal had entered earlier.
Celeste frowned as a series of letters started to emerge. “Are you sure that’s the only way to use it? Maybe we need to enter them in backwards or something.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“But that doesn’t tell us anything. I was expecting words. You know, something like, ‘take three steps north’ or ‘x marks the spot.’”
“Right. That’s what we’ve been expecting, but wait…” Jolene’s gaze shifted from the letters on the screen to the pictures of the rocks. “What’s this here and here?” She pointed to two smaller marks.
“I thought they were some kind of separators, like punctuation or something.”
“Hmm… Wait a minute. See the decrypted letters?”
“Yeah, they don’t make any sense.”
“Right. But notice how none of them come later in the alphabet than the letter ‘I’?”
“Yeah.”
Jolene pulled the computer close and copied the decrypted garbage into another program, and they both watched it spit out a series of numbers. “That’s it!”
“Numbers?”
“Each letter corresponds to a number. I should have known. The etchings didn’t have enough letters to contain much in the way of directions, but pirates used directions in a different way to navigate. Constantine etched in longitude and latitude. Not instructions. Coordinates.”
“Really? How would he know what the longitude and latitude were three hundred years ago?”
Jolene pushed up from the table and rummaged in her backpack. “They used sextants back then. Figured it out using the stars. Longitude was easy. Latitude not so much. I’m not sure how accurate these are.” Jolene glanced back at the screen. “But they are definitely coordinates. Those little marks are decimal points, and the letters at the very end actually still stand. See? So this first half is 44.5123N, which is the longitude.”
“Great. Do we need a sextant to figure out where they lead?”
“Nope.” Jolene held up her cell phone. “I got an app right here that will tell us. We should probably call the others…”
Celeste grabbed the phone. “We will, but first, let’s see if these coordinates are even on this island. It could be a wild goose chase, and I don’t want to pull them away from the dive for nothing.”
“Why not? If the relic isn’t in there… Hey, wait up!”
Celeste had trotted off, not wanting to wait for Jolene to call the others. A spark of hope bloomed as she navigated her way through the woods with the app. Maybe her original spell calling the clue to her hadn’t failed after all. She’d been compelled to follow Jolene to the original place where they’d found the boxes, and then she’d discovered both the rock and the fortune inside the box she’d been looking in. If the fortune really had just decrypted the clue Constantine had left, giving them the coordinates, then maybe she wasn’t as useless as she’d thought.
They pushed their way through branches and shrubs. Birds chirped, and squirrels scurried, going about their normal business as if unaware of the girls’ important mission.
She stopped in an area that was shaded by tall pines and massive oaks and crowded with scrubby shrubs. “The good news is the coordinates are on the island. The bad news is they lead right here.”
“But nothing’s here.” Jolene turned slowly. She was right—there were no outcroppings of rock, no caves, nothing that would gain them entrance to the tunnel system where the relic was buried.
“Maybe the latitude is off.” Celeste scuffed around the forest floor, craning her neck to see if there was any kind of boulder or hill within the same longitude. She didn’t see a thing—except for three gigantic tree stumps. Constantine had mentioned three large Scotch pines to Mirabella. Celeste had thought it was in relation to where he’d left the clues etched in the rock, but maybe he’d been talking about the entrance to where he’d left the relic. She started toward them.
The toe of her hiking boot hit something hard, and she stumbled.
“What’s this?” She scuffed at the ground with her boot. Whatever was under
foot looked to be square. Man-made. She bent down and brushed away the leaves and dirt to reveal a rusted square iron plate with a large, thick ring in the center. “Maybe those coordinates were right after all.”
“We should call the others,” Jolene said.
Celeste bent down and tugged at the ring. It barely budged. “Just help me get this open, and we’ll see if anything is even under here before we bother them.”
Jolene squatted down, curling her fingers around the ring. “Okay. One. Two. Three. Pull!”
Celeste pulled back as hard as she could, digging her heels into the ground and throwing her entire body weight into it. The cover lifted a hair. She gritted her teeth and pulled harder.
The cover flew open. Celeste and Jolene landed on their butts, the cover flying off to their right.
Jolene scrambled to her feet. “Looks like there is something here.”
Celeste looked down into a dark hole. Rusted iron rungs started just under the top and continued into the darkness. She turned on Jolene’s cell phone flashlight app and shined it into the hole. “It doesn’t go down that far. It’s only about eight feet.”
She crouched down, dropping her arm into the hole to shine the light deeper. “It leads to a tunnel.”
Jolene joined her at the edge of the hole, her gaze flicking from the tunnel to the western part of the island. “I think this tunnel is parallel to where Bly’s guys blasted through that rock.”
“Right.” Celeste started down the rungs, testing them gingerly with each step to see if they would hold. The ladder creaked, but the rungs were still strong.
Fatal Fortune (Blackmoore Sisters Mystery Book 8) Page 9