Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
FORREST
“ C offee?” 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?
“I think this goes with the Jefferson cipher wheel, the one I have at home.” Sterling replaced the wax paper and card with the cipher back in the tin. Surging to her feet, she tossed the magnifying glass in her purse along with the tin and grabbed my hand. “Come on, let’s go.”
I let her drag me out of the house, slowing only long enough to lock the door behind us. Sterling gave me a little shove toward the passenger door of her car. I got in without argument, not wanting to waste time. She slid behind the wheel and started the engine, a determined look in her eyes. That cipher had been making her crazy, I could tell. Now that she had a lead on the key, nothing was going to stop her.
I wanted to find the next clue, especially if it felt like another message from my father. But more, I wanted to see her face when she solved it and the one after that. I wanted to see her triumph, needed her to be a part of this journey of my father’s.
Her tires ate up the miles between my house and Heartstone Manor. Sterling didn’t say anything on the drive other than muttering under her breath once or twice that she swore she’d looked at the wax paper already. I was sure she had, too, but as she’d said earlier, the light in her bedroom wasn’t great. In contrast, you could do surgery on my kitchen table. I liked a bright kitchen. Maybe she’d looked under her desk lamp and missed the tiny, pale gray scribbles. It was more than possible.
Sterling didn’t say another word until we were in her room. She went straight to her desk, setting the peppermint tin in front of her. Pulling the Jefferson cipher wheel out of a drawer along with a pad of paper and a pen, she began the painstaking work of deciphering the code.
“This is it,” she said when she was only a few letters in. “It’s an address.”
“Four, five, two, Laurel Lane,” she read aloud, “Right, let me check this again.” She’d written a row and stopped and gone back, checking the cipher wheel and the alphanumeric code again before slowly writing the last two letters: RC .
“I don’t know what that last part means,” she said, “but the first part is definitely an address.”
I read from the screen of my phone. 452 Laurel Lane was an address deep in the mountains, less than an hour from Heartstone Manor. Based on the satellite view of the map, it looked like it was on at least a few acres of forested land. Nothing about the location rang a bell to me. I had no memories of visiting the place I saw on the screen, nor did I recognize any of the town or street names nearby.
“That must be where we find the key to the cipher on the index card,” Sterling said. “Come on, let’s go. It’s not that far.”
“Maybe we should do some research first,” I said.
Sterling shook her head. “What’s there to research? We have an address. We’ll take my car. That’s the one that the Learys aren’t tracking. Hawk already checked it.”
“You don’t want to tell Griffen or Hawk where we’re going?” I asked, following her down the hall to the main stairs.
Sterling slowed, appearing to think about my question before shaking her head and picking up her pace, “No, we’re not going far. We’ll be back by lunch.”
“Sterling,” I started, torn between caution and the same need that drove her. I wanted to follow the lead. I didn’t want to wait and be careful and cautious. I didn’t want to be sensible. What were the odds that this new place, 452 Laurel Lane, would be the end of our search? Unlikely. I had a feeling I’d know when we were at the end, and this wasn’t it. This was just one more piece in the puzzle, and no one had any incentive to hurt either of us until we got to the end.
I closed my mouth, deciding to let it go. For the first time, it felt like Sterling and I were in this together. I felt the same driving beat in my bloodstream, the same need to solve the clue, to know what came next. What would I see when we got there? Would it come to life as a part of my past, the way the boathouse had brought back Sugar Mae and Bob? I wouldn’t know until we got there.
We didn’t talk much on the way, letting the navigation app guide us through winding country roads, up the side of a mountain, and down a weed-infested gravel drive to a small, faded Craftsman bungalow surrounded by trees. There was a real estate lockbox on the door, probably holding the key, but it looked as if it hadn’t been touched in months. The whole place had a faded, sad feel. The curtains were drawn, and old, dusty pollen was thick on the floorboards of the front porch. Whoever had lived here, they were gone. No one had been here for a long time. Sterling strode up the steps, leaving footprints in the dust. She raised her fist to bang against the door.
I followed her, eyeing the curtained windows and seeing no movement, crowding close in case there was someone inside and they didn’t appreciate visitors. We waited, her knocks echoing through the house, but no one came to the door.
“It looks abandoned,” she said quietly.
“It does,” I agreed. “Let’s try around the back.”
We picked our way around the side of the house through the rocky yard. The grass was knee-high and half dead in the summer heat. I decided not to think about snakes or ticks or anything else that could be lurking out of sight. We tried the back door. No answer. Sterling eyed the windows. Locked.
Her gaze dropped to a rock in the yard, and I followed her train of thought. Before I had to talk her out of breaking a window, my gaze caught on the weathered wooden door half buried in the long grass. In a flash, letters after the address made sense.
“Root cellar,” I said. “RC is root cellar.”
Sterling turned from the rock to look at me, pointing down at the grass. Confusion faded from her eyes.
“Oh!” Going to her knees, she swept the long grass away from the wooden door, revealing a weather-worn handle. The door was secured by a simple slide bolt. “Bingo.”
I pulled the bolt back and tugged on the handle. The door resisted, the thick, long grass growing over its hinges holding it down. Sterling curved her hands around the edge of the door as soon as I had it open an inch, and together, we yanked once, twice. On the third hard pull, the door flew open.
We stared into a black hole in the ground. “Please tell me you have a flashlight in the car,” I said.
Sterling slowly shook her head, looking into the dark hole. “Only on my phone,” she said, pulling the device out of her pocket. She tapped on the screen until a beam of light speared out from the back, illuminating the stone steps into the root cellar. Before she could start down, I got in her way.
“Let me go first.” She started to argue, and I added, “I’ll check for snakes.”
“Good point,” Sterling said. “You go first.”
I didn’t see any snakes, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. The root cellar was pitch dark, not a single dusty window to let in any light. The air was chilled and musty even with the summer heat above. “Careful,” I said, feeling Sterling move behind me. The steps were shallow and steep. Finally, there was dirt beneath my feet and the ceiling just above my head.
“How are we going to find anything down here?” Sterling asked, moving her phone’s light across the walls like a searchlight, revealing nothing but damp stone and hard-packed dirt.
Long ago, there had been shelves lining these walls, probably covered in jars of canned vegetables and fruits, jams and jellies, root vegetables stored in burlap sacks. Now, it was mostly empty, with only broken wood and nails as a reminder of the shelves, not a jar or a sack to be seen.
“Maybe the key is in the walls, like hidden behind a stone?” Sterling asked. She looked around, her eyes wide, taking in the hundreds of stones that made up the walls.
“Maybe,” I said. “We better start searching.” After a careful sweep of the cellar for a bigger threat than dust and cobwebs, she headed for the closest wall and began to examine the stones.
We were so absorbed in our task we never heard the footsteps that must have echoed above, vibrations in the ground that couldn’t penetrate our focus. I heard the creak of old wood, but it was too late.
I looked up just in time to see the door of the root cellar slam shut above our heads, the rough slide of the bolt locking us in.
Then, only silence.