Chapter Six
Edie put her head down on the table in a fruitless attempt to settle down her restless body.
She watched Cosima flip the bottom of the guest book page up and then down again while mumbling to herself and writing in a Gregory Place–branded spiral-top notepad that Morag had produced from the reception desk.
She had not counted on the amount of time required for code-breaking. Or on how little Cosima enjoyed being interrupted when she was trying to concentrate.
“Is the washing finished?” Edie asked Morag, visible through the open door to the kitchen. She was mixing up a quick bread with shredded carrots and raisins that she often served on the side with lunch. Edie had asked for the recipe a dozen times and been denied.
“Already have it on the drying rack by the radiator in the back. Your jacket must be dry.” Morag tipped the bowl toward her body when she noticed Edie was watching too closely, trying to guess the recipe.
“Don’t bother. I have a jacket for you in my room,” Cosima said.
“I will not fit into any of your jackets.” Edie sat up and stretched.
The storm had stopped hours ago. It looked like the sun was out for the first time in a long time, but she didn’t want to leave Cosima to the guest book alone.
She had already hogged it, working on Agatha Llewellyn’s cipher even as she refused to formally, officially commit to the treasure hunt.
“Of course you won’t. Why trade one ill-fitting jacket for another? It’s a jacket that will fit you.”
“That you discovered in Morag’s lost and found? Because I’ve been through that box, and there were not any size-fourteen extra-short jackets with plenty of room in the bust.”
“I ordered it.” Cosima put her pencil down.
“You bought me a jacket? You don’t even eat meals with me. You walked me down a village lane, disappeared for days, and then reappeared to be Indiana Jones with me after several arguments in the middle of the night. I’m supposed to believe you bought me a jacket?”
“Yours doesn’t fit.” Cosima said this with one of her Arch of Hadrian eyebrows lifted, as if it were an answer rather than the kind of statement that inspired countless questions.
Edie felt a strange, fluttery buzz directly under her sternum.
“I realized I hadn’t returned the courtesy of asking you for a walk.” Cosima’s posture was perfectly straight, her shoulders back.
“That is true.” Edie bit her lip to hold back the impulse to tease Cosima, whose perfect posture was a warning.
“However, when I thought to ask you, I remembered your jacket.”
“My brother’s rain jacket. The green one.”
“No color green I’ve ever seen.” Morag contributed this from the kitchen, folding parchment into her baking tins. “I started needing my glasses when I drive after seeing that jacket.”
“Yes,” Cosima confirmed. “It’s terrible, and you look terrible in it.” She folded her hands on top of the open guest book and gazed at Edie with a frank, unperturbed expression. This was the way Cosima looked at Edie when she’d said something she considered outrageous.
Edie had no intention of calling Cosima out. The jacket was terrible, and she did look terrible in it. Hearing these facts spoken aloud did not bother her. She was more interested in knowing why her looking unsightly in a jacket was a problem Cosima had decided to solve.
“So you thought about walking with me, but then you remembered you’d have to walk with me wearing my jacket, and the horror sent you straight to curvy girls jackets dot com.”
Cosima cast her eyes at the ceiling. “To Paul Smith’s, but yes.”
“Oh, quite posh,” Morag called out cheerfully.
“And so you took it upon yourself—”
“—to fix it. Yes. To make you look as you should look.”
“According to…?” She knew the answer. She just wanted to hear Cosima say it.
“Me.” Cosima crossed her arms. “But not me. It’s about you.
A grown woman. You’re a chef. You’ve owned a business.
You’re an intelligent and attractive woman with dramatic features.
You don’t have to wear it.” She added this last statement as she started to grow pink.
“But no one like you should have to wear a hand-me-down poorly fitting windbreaker from their brother. Unless you want to.”
Edie bit back her smile. “Unless I want to.”
Cosima gave a very tiny nod.
“Take the jacket, lovey!” Morag shouted. “It’s a Paul Smith. Pawn it when you get back to Wisconsin for a bit of seed money.”
Edie studied her companion at the table, still trying to work out all the pieces of this puzzle.
Cosima looked perfect, of course, in a starchy rose-colored linen shirt and high-waisted pants.
She wore her hair parted down the middle, slicked into two tortoise-shell barrettes clipped above her ears, her curls smoothed into long coils.
But Edie didn’t feel at all lesser in her jeans (which were the really-let’s-call-them-leggings kind) and Northeast Wisconsin Technical College sweatshirt.
Cosima didn’t work like that. Cosima was very much for herself. She wasn’t Cosima at anyone.
What Edie found herself hung up on was Cosima saying no one like you and an intelligent and attractive woman with dramatic features. Edie had never had anyone suggest she deserved more. Or even that she wear clothes that fit her, or weren’t castoffs or from Kohl’s.
“I haven’t said I wouldn’t wear it.” Edie smiled. “Is it a shooting jacket?”
“No. The shoulders of a shooting jacket wouldn’t properly frame the line of your bust. It’s a walking jacket.” Her cheeks lit with slashes of red across the cheekbones.
“It’s good you’ve considered my assets.” Edie bit her lip, watching the slashes go maroon. “And what color is it?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Cosima closed her eyes. “It’s only a jacket.”
“A Paul Smith!” Morag called.
“It’s green, all right? Green. The green of your eyes.”
“Thank you, princess,” she said, her voice a little rough. “I’m excited to wear it.”
Cosima’s brow furrowed, a ripple across its mirror pond, but then she smiled, politely, looking down at the guest book. She cleared her throat. “I think I know what to do with this. The cipher Agatha made. If you’re interested.”
Edie glanced through the door that led to the kitchen, but Morag had bustled out of view.
Edie and Cosima had compared notes on what they knew about Agatha Llewellyn.
She had written about a dozen moody, gory mystery and thriller novels in the seventies and eighties that were runaway bestsellers but that no one read much anymore.
She was rumored to be a recluse, and her fans complained about her failure to complete the last story in her best-known series.
What had brought her to Gregory Place or made her decide to pen a cipher in the guest book in 1977 was a mystery.
“You have to pay attention when I explain.” Cosima put her hand over the page with the cipher, frowning at Edie.
“I will try my hardest if you ignore my distracting stimming behaviors.” Edie stood up to change her position at the table.
“I don’t mind your squirming and wiggling.”
Cosima’s eyes went wide, and Edie laughed. She slid onto the pew bench next to Cosima. “What have we got?”
“Do you know about the Cistercian monks? The medieval sect. They broke off from the Benedictines around the twelfth century.”
“Oh. I only know about the other Cistercian sects. Not the medieval one.”
“I can’t tell if you’re being serious.” Cosima wrinkled her nose.
“These are the guys into manual labor and who invented their own math, isn’t that right?” Morag had appeared out of nowhere, making Edie jump. She sat down where Edie had been with a large mug of tea.
“Good god, announce yourself, old woman.”
“Yes,” Cosima said to Morag, ignoring Edie’s comment, “though they didn’t so much invent their own math as their own numbering system.
They used variations on a vertical line to represent every number between one and nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine.
” Cosima pointed at the symbols they had noticed on the message portion of Agatha’s signature.
“Those are Cistercian numbers?” Edie inspected the long row of lines. They looked like dozens of number ones, except each had a little appendage in a different place. Some looked like flags. Some like a stick figure with no head. “What’s the number?”
Cosima folded up the page, and the squares cut out of the paper each framed a Cistercian number. Now, next to every tiny window, there was a letter. “You can see how this is assigning letters to go with the Cistercian numbers.”
“Yes.”
“First, I had to write down what letter in the alphabet each Cistercian number went with.” Cosima flipped to a page in the notepad and showed it to Edie.
“Then it was simply a matter of looking up what Cistercian number corresponds to what Arabic number, and then assigning those numbers to the alpha order letters. You’ll see that the reference cipher gives us three is A, six is Z, and so on. ”
“Indeed simple. Ridiculously so.”
“Edie.” Cosima said this with a warning in her voice.
“Quite clever, lovey,” Morag said, taking a long sip of tea. “You won’t need sudoku to keep you sharp like I do.”
Edie took a deep breath. “Could you tell us what it says, Cosima?” she asked in a rush, holding her hands clasped as though begging.
“But I haven’t shown you how I cross-referenced both alphanumerical reference codes to crack what Agatha wrote.” Cosima flipped through several more pages.
Edie gently placed her hand over Cosima’s holding the notebook. “I do have limits.”
Cosima sighed. “Demeter mundum vastat sine filia Proserpinae, quam Hermione in saxum vertit, donec Perdita redit.”
“What it? Reddit?”
“I caught ‘Demeter’ and ‘Persephone,’” Morag said. “Is this about the myth?”
“Oh!” Edie raised her hand. “I do know that myth! The supplier I bought grape leaves from was called Demeter’s, and there was the entire story on their label. Demeter is the goddess of agriculture—”
“Well, actually—” Cosima interrupted.