Chapter 10
To Alice’s credit, she actually did give me some time and space to think, disappearing into the living room to start calling her relatives and try to coax information on Abigail out of them.
After a couple of hours she came back in, looking annoyed, and I thought it would be better to let her tell me what she wanted, rather than bugging her for details.
‘You want lunch?’ she asked, and I could hear the frustration in her voice.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind ordering something in.’
‘No, it’s all good. I have some chicken that needs to be eaten. I’ll make some salad.’
I kept poking around on my iPad, not really doing much except watching Alice move confidently around the kitchen, preparing salad then splitting it into two bowls.
I wanted to be able to tell her that I’d figured it out – how my mom had gotten the dots onto the paperwork, and what they meant – but I still wasn’t any further along in cracking the clue.
I’d spent most of the past hour researching famous New York addresses that included the number eleven. That hadn’t gotten me very far.
Alice brought the two bowls of chicken salad over to the counter.
‘Thanks,’ I said and grabbed my fork to dig in, suddenly starving.
‘Want to know what I found out about Abigail?’ she asked, stabbing a few pieces of cucumber emphatically. ‘Though I’ll warn you, a lot of it came from the internet, considering my family were not helpful at all.’
‘It all helps,’ I said.
‘So, she was born here in the city, in 1888, which meant she was twenty-four when she got on the Titanic. She actually spent her twenty-fifth birthday on board. She got married to John De Lacy in the summer of 1911, the year before the Titanic’s first sailing.
They’d been in England visiting his family, which is why they ended up on the ship.
’ She gave me a significant look. ‘He was thirty-eight.’
‘How scandalous,’ I murmured.
‘It looks like her family was considered “new money”, which was important at the time, and far more scandalous than their age difference. Abigail’s father had invested in the railways and made a fortune, which meant she should never have been invited to Mrs Astor’s famous society balls because they were for people with old money.
But someone managed to get her an invitation, and that’s where she met John. ’
‘And John died on the Titanic, right?’ I asked.
Alice nodded. ‘Yeah. After the ship sank and Abigail returned to New York, it sounds like she pretty much disappeared, staying at her family’s home upstate for a few years before she came back to the city.
She got married again when she was twenty-nine, to a French man this time.
She kept the name De Lacy, though – she was known as Abigail De Lacy Pinchon for the rest of her life. ’
‘That’s kind of sweet, actually,’ I murmured.
Alice met my eyes and smiled. ‘I know. She never forgot John. She moved to Paris and lived there until the Second World War started, then they came back to New York. She had six kids; one of them died at three months old. She lived until she was eighty-three, so she died in 1971. Is any of that helpful?’ she asked, a little anxiously.
‘You never know when something could end up being helpful,’ I said.
We finished up our lunch while we continued chatting, and when my bowl was clean I got up to put it in the dishwasher.
I knew how to be a good houseguest. If it weren’t for Alice, I would likely be eating instant ramen in a shitty safehouse apartment, and I couldn’t help but feel grateful that she’d barged her way into my life and given me no room to object.
After lunch we moved into the living room and I focused back on the paperwork, but after another hour of staring at the dots, I still couldn’t get my head around them. Even The Codebreaker’s Handbook wasn’t helping.
The last two dots were closer together than the rest, but only by a fraction. Did it matter? I had to think it did – my mom wouldn’t do something like that if it wasn’t significant.
I’d abandoned the idea of a building linked to number eleven and had gone back to Alice’s first suggestion of Morse code.
The letters in Morse code that only had dots, no dashes, were E, H, I and S, and it didn’t matter how much I messed about with those options, I couldn’t find an answer that made sense.
There weren’t any buildings in the city whose names aligned with those letters, and I’d looked – in great detail.
If I decided the last two dots actually represented a dash, then that opened up possibilities.
Before going down that route I forced myself to fully consider what I already knew.
If this really was Morse code, and my mom wanted me to solve it, why make it so complicated?
All I could think of was that she wanted the dots not to be immediately obvious to anyone else who looked at the file – if anyone had spotted them, and deleted them, it would have been disastrous for our scavenger hunt.
I’d thought the dots were decorative at first, and that kind of made sense – it helped them blend in.
If I went with the theory that the last two dots represented a dash, I could add the letters A, T, U and V into the mix. I messed about with those options for a while, eventually deciding I didn’t like the answers either.
The fact I couldn’t spell out a word or the initials to any building in the city made me think my mom had mixed things up this time. It was clear she wanted me to be the only one who could solve the clues she’d set.
Alice was sprawled on the hot-pink sofa, her feet dangling over the arm while she watched some trashy reality TV show that I was able to tune out. Background noise was pretty good for me when I was thinking – total silence allowed my mind to wander too much.
I had to keep shifting my position every twenty minutes or so, otherwise all my aches turned into throbbing pain that even Alice’s Tylenol wasn’t keeping at bay. For now, I was lying on my stomach with a notepad Alice had produced for me, scrawling little notes to myself that didn’t make any sense.
Out of frustration, I flipped back to the page on Morse code in The Codebreaker’s Handbook, wondering if I’d missed something.
I knew Morse code by heart, and had since I was ten. I didn’t need a reminder, but sometimes a visual made everything clearer.
I ran my finger over the smooth paper, closed my eyes and tried to empty my mind.
‘Numbers,’ I muttered.
If the dots represented numbers, rather than letters, I could only come up with one answer.
Five dots – representing the number five. Then four dots and a dash – representing the number four.
Fifty-four.
‘Hmm?’ Alice asked, pausing her show.
‘The dots aren’t letters. They represent numbers. Does fifty-four mean anything to you?’
‘Oh, wait.’ Alice scrambled to sit upright. ‘That actually sounds familiar.’
I sat up too, moving much slower than her. ‘Go on.’
‘Titanic was supposed to dock in Pier Fifty-Nine when she arrived in New York. The Carpathia – the ship that rescued the survivors – dropped the lifeboats off at Fifty-Nine, then went to dock at Fifty-Four. That was where all the survivors got off.’
A tiny, incredulous laugh escaped me. The clue and its answer were both exactly what my mom loved – beautiful, elegant, with only one possible answer.
When I looked up at Alice she was smiling.
‘Wanna go to Pier Fifty-Four?’ I asked.
‘You’re going to like this,’ she said, clicking off the TV. ‘It’s not a pier any more.’
I frowned. ‘I don’t like that at all.’
‘It’s been turned into a park that’s open to the public. You can go all the way out and walk around it.’
‘Are you serious?’ She nodded. ‘Okay, you’re right. I like that a lot.’
That made her laugh, and I smiled back.
‘I can do some more research, if you want?’
That would have been the sensible thing – to look into the pier and its history and try to figure out exactly where the next clue would be hiding. But sometimes action was better, and after hours of research I wanted to do something.
‘Let’s just go there,’ I said. ‘I want to get a feel for the place before the sun goes down. We can always study more tonight if we need to go back tomorrow.’
‘That works,’ Alice said.
‘Especially since it’s not somewhere we need to break into.’
Alice shook her head, making her hair flutter over her shoulders. ‘I’m not sure my nerves can handle another break-in today.’
‘You were great,’ I told her honestly, and her cheeks turned pink.
Before we went back out, Alice wanted to change, and I did too – the clothes I’d borrowed were definitely not my style and had become too constricting for my liking.
While Alice fussed around in her room I switched out the tailored trousers and shirt for a pair of black cycle shorts and a familiar, comfortable, oversize T-shirt with my Chucks, immediately feeling more like myself.
Once changed, I went into the bathroom to pull up my hair. While the bruises on my face had been covered up, I couldn’t help but notice the ones on my now-visible arm. The pain had been a constant companion, but the physical reminder was hard to look at.
I took a second, gripping the edge of the avocado porcelain, to try to pull myself together.
The highs and lows of this adventure were starting to make me feel exhausted, my emotions worn by constantly being tugged in multiple directions.
But this wasn’t the time to lose momentum.
I had to keep going, to finish this journey that my mom had started.
I owed it to her to see it through to the end.
When I went back out to the hallway, Alice was waiting, wearing large sunglasses and a denim dress that had a flouncy skirt.
‘Cute,’ I said with a smile.
‘Thank you,’ she replied
I followed a few steps behind her as we left the apartment, scanning the street for potential stalkers. I couldn’t get complacent. I really didn’t want them to find my current location.