Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
STERLING
“ N o, I, uh, I wrote a program—” My eyes skipped to Forrest’s face and back to the screen, registering his look of surprise. But I quickly turned away, not wanting to see it change into anything else.
Clearing my throat, I started again, this time with more confidence.
“I wrote a program to try to crack the cipher. I tested it on a few ciphers I found online, and it worked. But it can’t do anything with this one. I’ve looked everywhere for a key, and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” I said, my shoulders slumping as I finished. The same frustration I always felt enveloped me, a feeling that swamped me every time I hit run on the program and nothing happened.
“Show me how it works,” Lucas said, leaning over my laptop.
I walked him through my rough code. “I tried it with this cipher.” I clicked and pulled up one of my test ciphers. “See, it works.”
I knew it was slow as programs went, but I was proud of it. Pushing aside my fear, I plugged in another cipher I’d used to test the program, a simple alphanumeric cipher that used a shifting alphabet code. Within forty-five seconds, my program spit out the answer.
“It worked on this one too.” I entered a different code, one that used a simple key, and again, this time in a minute and a half, my program spit out the correct answer. “But this—” For the millionth time, I pasted in the code on the index card in the peppermint tin. And for the millionth time, my program hung.
Emmett nudged my hand away from the keyboard and scrolled through the code. “You wrote this?” he asked, looking to Lucas and back to me.
I shrugged in agreement, my cheeks still hot.
“It’s not bad for a beginner,” Emmett said.
Lucas agreed. “It’s pretty damn good for a beginner. How did you figure this out?” He pointed to a section of code I had labored over.
“I, um, found some open-source code I thought would work and tweaked it,” I admitted.
“Clever,” Lucas said, scrolling through the rest of what I’d written. When he was done, he sat back and crossed his arms over his chest. “The problem isn’t with your program. Your program is actually pretty fucking good. The problem is that you’re not dealing with an alphanumeric cipher. This is a polygraphic substitution cipher.”
I’d seen the term but didn’t know what it meant.
“What are you thinking?” Lucas said to Emmett.
“Either a Pollux cipher or fractionated Morse,” Emmett said.
I’d never heard of either of those. “What’s the difference?” I asked.
“Both ciphers,” Emmett said, “have more than one key. Or rather, there’s a key to decipher the key. The Pollux cipher uses fill-in-the-blanks, in a sense, and the fractionated Morse cipher uses Morse code. You couldn’t solve it with your program because you were only looking for one key.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I said, feeling my brain stretching to try to make sense of what Emmett meant.
“Here, let me show you. Hold on a second.” Emmett left the conference room, grabbed something off a desk in a nearby office, and returned. “We work with ciphers more than you’d think. In the old days, I came across them a lot. Check this out.” He opened an app on his laptop that was a hell of a lot slicker than what I’d cobbled together. “Give me that.” He looked at the cipher on the index card, typed it into a box, and clicked a few menu items. “There’s a key to the key, basically. We have to figure out what it is.”
So, I’d been on the right track. A spike of warm gratification shot through me.
“I’ve looked everywhere,” I said. “With every other cipher Forrest’s father left, there was a hint or a clue of some kind. With this one, it’s just the card with the cipher.”
Lucas leveled his gaze on Forrest. “Then the key is probably something that you would have known. Right?”
“That makes sense,” Forrest said. “So far, it’s felt like my dad expected us to do this together. Except for the clue that ended up being a decoy, I’ve either known or recognized everything, even though I thought I’d forgotten a lot of it. It seems like he planned for us to do this a long time ago.”
Lucas and Emmett exchanged another extended, silent look. I wondered what they were communicating.
“All right,” Lucas said after a moment. “This is the fun part. Let’s start going through things you would have known back then. Do you remember your street address growing up?”
“I do,” Forrest said and told them.
Emmett typed it into the search box. First, just the numbers, then only the street name, finally, everything together. Nothing.
“Middle name,” he demanded.
Forrest answered. Nothing.
“Childhood dog.”
Still nothing.
“Cat.”
Dead end.
They went at it for a while: Forrest’s school, his favorite book, Alan’s favorite band.
“What about your mother?”
“Emily,” Forrest said. “Back then, she still used my father’s last name.”
Emmett typed in “emilybuckley” with no capitals or spaces. For the first time, something happened when he hit enter. The cipher rearranged itself into a different alphanumeric code, then to Morse code, and then into something entirely new. Treasureislandp178
“ Treasure Island page 178,” Lucas said. “What the fuck are you supposed to do with that?”
Forrest sat back in his chair, letting out a long, weighty sigh. “We read it together,” he said. “The year before he died. He had an old edition. It was illustrated. It was really cool, actually.”
“Do you still have that copy?” I asked, my stomach clenching at the thought that we might lose the trail simply because so much time had passed. The book could have been donated, thrown away, or lost.
Forrest closed his eyes for a long second. When he opened them, he said, “If I do, it’s at my mom’s house.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket, looked at the three of us. “Do you mind if I step out and make a phone call?” Without waiting for an answer, he rose and left the room.
I watched him through the glass—the light in his eyes dimming as I assumed his mother answered the phone, the way his brows pulled together while he waited.
“So, what are your plans?” Lucas said, interrupting my study of Forrest.
I dragged my eyes to Lucas’s and raised my brow, not wanting to assume I understood what he meant.
“Hawk says you’ve been taking coding classes,” he clarified. “And that you’ve studied a little cybersecurity, and you liked it.”
“Yeah, I, um…” Hawk’s words echoed in my mind again, and I sat up straight. Lucas had said I was clever. He hadn’t laughed. This was a shot for me, a chance to be this new Sterling. I wouldn’t know what could happen unless I opened my mouth and talked to him. “As you can tell from my program,” I said, “I’m still a beginner. But I love it. I’ve been checking out how the security system works at Heartstone, and I want to know more. I was hoping, um, Hawk said that you two might be able to tell me what I need to learn.”
“That depends on what you want to do,” Emmett said.
“I don’t know,” I countered. “I don’t know what all my options are, but whatever it is you guys are doing in here looks pretty cool. And Hawk said you wrote all the code for the system we have. Is that true?” I asked Lucas.
“Yeah, I did. Emmett has done similar work, but that’s not all we do here.”
“I want to know all of it,” I said in a rush, my brain driving my mouth, leaving no room for insecurity or fear. “I want to learn everything.”
Lucas sat back, crossing his arms over his chest. “I like your program,” he said. “And there aren’t many people’s judgment I trust more than Hawk and your brother. So, here’s what we’re going to do. If you want.”
I nodded, ready to agree to anything.
“You’re going to keep taking those coding classes,” Lucas went on. “You need to lay a good foundation, and the program you’re in is a solid start. Emmett and I will add on a few classes you’ll find through different sources. And when you’re done with all of that, we’re going to train you. If you make it through all the training, we’ll put you to work.”
“Really?” I said, afraid I’d misunderstood. “You’ll train me? Teach me the stuff I don’t know? And then you’ll give me a job?” I felt queasy at asking so bluntly, but this was too important, and I didn’t want to misunderstand.
“Yeah, if you can learn what you need to know,” Lucas said. “And given the way you’ve run through these ciphers, I’m sure you’ll soak up everything we can teach you. Then hell yeah, we’ll put you to work. I know you’ve got the thing with the will, but we can do a lot of this remotely. We’ll figure it out.”
“Thank you.” My heart pounded furiously in my chest. This was so much more than I’d hoped for. “I won’t let you down,” I promised.
“I don’t think you will,” Lucas said.
Forrest came back into the room, his phone in his hand. “Good news and bad news. The good news is that my mom says she has everything from my room before we moved boxed up in the garage at her house in Oregon. The bad news is that she doesn’t want anything to do with this.” He looked to me. “If we want to find that book, we’re going to have to go to Oregon and hunt through her garage ourselves. She didn’t exactly hang up on me, but it was close.”
My heart, still thrumming from the sudden change in my future and the possibilities, took a second for his words to sink in. He sat beside me, and I reached for his hand. I knew Forrest had been close to his mom and that the only thing they never discussed was his father. “I’m sorry you had to ask her,” I said quietly.
Forrest just shook his head.
“I think you two need to get out of town,” Lucas said. “Until you know who sent you into that root cellar, I don’t think you should go back to Heartstone Manor.” His eyes flicked to me. “Not unless you have to. And with the Learys involved, Oregon seems like a great place for a vacation. You can go through those boxes on your own. As long as you’ve got a phone with a camera, you can touch base with Emmett or me if you need to.” Lucas stopped and looked at Emmett, his chin lifting and dropping in the tiniest increment.
Emmett let out a breath. “There’s more. When Sterling cracked the code on the Vitellius, Hawk asked me to do another dive into you.” Emmett looked at me. “He thinks of you like a little sister. He trusts your judgment. But he wanted to make sure this one wasn’t hiding any more secrets.”
“I’m not—” Forrest started.
“Yeah, I know.” Emmett gave a semi-apologetic shrug of one shoulder. “This isn’t about you. It’s about your father.”
“He’s been dead a long time,” Forrest said.
“That’s one of the things I was looking into.” Emmett sat back. “The official story is that your father committed suicide.”
Forrest gave a curt nod, and I tightened my fingers on his hand.
“I don’t have any definitive proof,” Emmett went on, “but I don’t think your father killed himself. I don’t know if there was corruption or just laziness, but there are too many things that don’t add up.”
“Like what?” Forrest asked, his voice gruff.
“Like the fact that your father paid in full for a luxury European tour a week before he died. Your father was on the frugal side for a man of his means. I’ve seen his spending records. I can’t see him plopping down that kind of cash, knowing he wouldn’t be around to enjoy it, especially since it was going to be a surprise. I based that on the fact that you and your mother didn’t go on the trip or even attempt to cancel it and get a refund.”
Forrest shook his head. “We didn’t know about that. We’d talked about going, but it was… There wasn’t a firm plan.”
“There were other transactions that indicated he planned to be alive well after the day he died. There’s this scavenger hunt with the ciphers that it looks like he intended to do with you. And then there was the crime scene. The police report said he was killed by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. But when I dug into it, the gun they found at the scene hadn’t been fired, and he didn’t have any residue on his hands. I don’t know why no one followed up on that. I’m still poking around. I’ll let you know if I find anything else, but I think…” He looked to me, then back to Forrest. “I think it’s likely that whoever took the Vitellius ended up killing your father.”
My heart sank as I realized what Emmett was saying. “You think my father killed Forrest’s father or had him killed?” I asked.
“Theoretically, it could have been anybody. But it’s established knowledge that your father took the Vitellius from Alan Buckley.”
I glanced at Forrest. This time, it was he who squeezed my fingers.
“My guess is he thought it would be easy,” Emmett said. “He thought the number on the bottom was the account number, and having the statue was as good as having the money. Then, when it turned out not to be that simple, I think he went after your dad. And either your dad wasn’t willing to give him what he wanted, or more likely, Prentice or whoever he sent lost patience. I can’t prove any of this in court. I can dig for more, but…” He paused, maybe waiting for a response from Forrest.
Forrest just looked poleaxed.
Lucas stood, looming over us. “You should talk to your mother,” he said. “If what she remembers lines up with what Emmett’s found, we can always push this. I’ll talk to Cooper.”
Forrest nodded. “I guess we’re going to Oregon,” he said, his hazel eyes shifting to me.
“I guess we’re going to Oregon,” I agreed.