Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
FORREST
S terling and I grabbed cold cans of soda on our way back to the garage. It wasn’t hot, not yet, but the day was warming up. I stood in the doorway, surveying the shelves of boxes. How had one kid accumulated so much crap? I didn’t know, but I was going to find out.
I pulled the first of the plastic storage bins off the top shelf and set them on the floor. Sterling dragged over the bucket she’d used the night before and sat. I did the same with a nearby step stool.
One by one, we opened the neatly labeled bins and went through what was left of my childhood. Baby blankets. My christening gown. Picture books. A bin of artwork, pages and pages I imagined had been sent home from school, dutifully admired by my mother, and then packed away. Only a parent would see anything worth saving in my childish scribbles. I hadn’t been meant for a future as a painter.
I found another box with my mother’s wedding album. A white candle, the wick barely burned, beside a bouquet of dried flowers. I probably should have closed it, but I pulled out the album and opened the front cover. Sterling slid her bucket to sit beside me, her cheek warm against my shoulder as we flipped through the pages. They’d been so young, both of them. My mother’s beaming smile shone through the decades, my father beside her, not just happy but enormously pleased with himself. Love and pride were clear in his eyes when he looked at his bride.
It was hard to imagine they’d ever been apart. I was only halfway through the album when I closed it, feeling like I was violating my mother’s privacy. I knew without asking that she wouldn’t want us going through this box. Not yet. Maybe never.
Sterling seemed to understand. She took the album from my hands gently and nested it in the box as it had been, careful not to disturb the flowers.
“Maybe someday she’ll be ready to look at this again,” Sterling said.
“Maybe,” I agreed.
I lifted the bin back onto the shelves and opened another to find uniforms and patches from Cub Scouts and my short tenure in Boy Scouts, a stack of soccer gear buried in the bottom. We uncovered a bin of Halloween costumes, revealing my youthful obsession with cowboys and knights in shining armor. With a twinge, I thought of my lies and losing Sterling for so long. Some knight I’d turned out to be.
Sterling smiled down at the plastic helmet and sword in her hands. “I bet you looked cute with this.” She flashed me a grin.
“My mom probably has pictures somewhere,” I said. “I’m sure she’d love to embarrass me.”
“I want to see them.” Sterling opened another box and let out a whoop.
“Did you find it?” I asked, leaning over her shoulder.
“ Treasure Island ? No, but look, books. We must be closer.”
Closer, maybe, but there was more than one bin of books, and while they weren’t big, they were packed full. Painstakingly, we went through them, double-checking all of the covers beneath the dust jackets. And then there it was, halfway through the third box, my much loved and very dog-eared copy of Treasure Island .
My father had read it to me when I was no more than nine or ten, a chapter at a time before bed every night. Later, not long before he died, I’d reread it by myself. Now, here it was, maybe a key to finding what he’d had left behind, what he’d died for.
I handed her the book, and she turned to page one hundred seventy-eight. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to see. A note in my father’s handwriting. Something.
There was nothing. It was just a page like any other. Except it wasn’t. Page one hundred seventy-eight held the scene where they found the treasure. That couldn’t be a coincidence. The next code had to be here.
I let out my breath in a gust of frustration. “What am I missing?” I asked out loud, both to myself and to Sterling, squinting down at the familiar lines of the story. Sterling didn’t answer, her eyes glued to the page. Her finger was running down it line by line, moving back and forth. Something caught my eye.
“Sterling,” I prompted.
She grunted, her eyes still flicking back and forth over the page.
“Look,” I said, pointing to a capital A at the beginning of a sentence. A nd thereupon we all entered the cave.
Then, to a lowercase d. I behel d great heaps of coin… And to a lowercase m and r. How m any had it cost in the amassing, what blood and sor r ow…
“Do you see?” I asked, flipping to the prior page and back again.
“Oh,” Sterling breathed, reaching to trace the letters with a fingertip, catching the curves and lines on those letters—deeper, wider, darker than the rest of the type in the book, showing the grooves of indentation from his pen. The one and seven in the page number had received the same treatment.
“Do you have a notebook?” Sterling asked. “I need my laptop. Hang on.”
She jumped up and sprinted from the garage, returning in a few minutes with her bag slung over her shoulder, a little out of breath. Sitting back on the overturned bucket, she pulled out both her laptop and a notebook.
“How many of them are there?” Sterling asked.
We made our way through line by line, finding four of the slightly distorted letters just in the first paragraph. And between them, an entire word with each letter ever so slightly shaded. Not enough that it jumped off the page, at least not until I knew what I was looking for.
“I think it’s a Caesar cipher,” Sterling said. “I have one here, but it’s a pain to read, so I made a program instead.” Digging in the front pocket of her backpack, she pulled out a thick coin and shoved it at me.
Once in my hand, I realized it wasn’t a coin. It was two discs, one set inside the other, both with the alphabet engraved on the edges. A hole in the center coin revealed a number beneath. Sterling leaned over and spun the center coin.
“You line it up to the number that’s the key, and the alphabets align,” she said. “One set of letters is the code, and the matching letter is the solution. But it’s hard to read the numbers through that hole or hold it still while I turn it to read the letters.”
Flipping her laptop open, she navigated to a file and double-clicked. It opened to a black screen with two text boxes outlined in white. One asked for the code, and the other the key.
Turning from the Caesar cipher coin in my hand, she typed A, D, M, R into the code box. Into the box labeled KEY , she typed seventeen and hit enter.
RUMI appeared below the boxes.
“Rumi?” Sterling asked, raising an eyebrow. “Like the poet?”
Something teased at the back of my brain. “I think…” I struggled to make the picture in my memory snap into focus, but it refused. I closed my eyes, remembering our old house in Willow Springs. A book with a golden-yellow cover floated to the surface of my mind. My heart sank when I remembered where I’d seen it last.
“I think my mother has a collection of Rumi’s love poems,” I said. “I remember it from when I was a kid. My father must have given it to her.”
“Shit,” Sterling said, and I silently echoed her sentiment.
“Do you think she kept it?” I asked more to myself than to her.
Sterling looked around, then popped to her feet and scanned the labels on the boxes we hadn’t gotten to. “That’s pretty sentimental. I would have if I were her. Any chance your mother has books packed away here?”
I hoped Sterling was right. The amount of stuff my mom had saved—particularly from her wedding—told me she hadn’t erased my dad’s memory from her life as much as I thought she had. A book of love poems, though. I could see that being incredibly painful. And if she’d gotten rid of it, then what would we do?
There was only one path forward. We’d look ourselves, and if we couldn’t find it, we’d have to go to my mom.
“She could have some in here,” I said.
I didn’t see any, but we went through the rest of the labels and opened a few more bins. We found ancient cookware, a tea set that I thought had been my grandmother’s, and a stack of quilts. But none of my mother’s books or more personal items.
“I hate to say this,” Sterling said, “but I think we have to ask your mother. I wonder… At first, it seemed like your dad meant to do this with you—which makes a lot more sense if he was murdered?—”
I nodded in agreement. It felt like that to me, too.
“But now I wonder if it wasn’t meant for the two of you,” she continued. “Once it was obvious that you were part of the key to solving it, it seemed weird it was only for you. You were a kid. What were you going to do with all that money?”
“Good point,” I said. “Unless there isn’t any money, and it was just about the fun of the treasure hunt. But either way, I could see him wanting my mom to be a part of it. And we don’t know how long he planned to wait for us to try solving the clues.”
“True,” Sterling agreed. “So, what do we do now?”
I hated causing my mom pain, hated the look in her eyes when we talked about my father. She was still so raw and so angry. I couldn’t picture asking her for help, but the thought of not doing that, of walking away and leaving this unfinished, was equally untenable.
“Forrest,” Sterling asked, shaking me out of my paralysis. “What do you want to do?”
“We’re going to have to talk to her,” I said, knowing we didn’t have another choice.