Chapter 3 #2
out of the painting . . . maybe from the back?”
Still angry, I snatched the paper out of his fingers and unfolded it to find a very old document.
Certificate of Marriage
This is to certify that Robert “Jack” T. Malone
and
Mabel Elizabeth Springsteen
Were united by me in holy matrimony
on June 2, 1918
in Haven Beach, Michigan
“Holy shit,” Seb said softly, reading over my shoulder. “Is that Captain Wyrd Jack’s wedding certificate?”
It looked authentic. “Why was this inside Nana’s painting?”
“Maybe she put it there. Can I . . . ?”
I begrudgingly handed him the certificate while shuffling around him to inspect the painting, see if there was anything else
hidden on the backside. None that I could find.
“This looks real, Paige. It should probably be in the Wyrd Jack museum in the harbor. Wait, what’s this?”
Seb flipped over the certificate and made a small noise. I was so curious that I stepped beside him to see what he’d found.
Tiny dots circled the edges of the old paper. They’d been penciled in, like a doodled border you might draw if you were bored
and daydreaming. But I quickly realized that the dots weren’t random.
Seb realized it, too. “Are you seeing this? Dots and dashes.”
“Morse code,” I whispered, and as my anger at Seb faded into the background, something I hadn’t felt in a long time stirred
inside my chest. Something I’d buried deep down, along with so many childhood memories.
The thrill of the chase.
My heart sped as I stared at the shapes lining the paper’s edges. Seb and I both knew the old telecommunications language
by heart. Nana taught us when we were kids. Even our matching Blackbeard decoder rings had dials that paired letters with
Morse code dots and dashes. We used to write each other secret messages.
Seb and I moved toward the reading light near the sofa to see better.
“Weird. Is it . . . all numbers . . . ?” Seb scanned the document while blindly perching on the sofa next to Punkin. “Yeah, I think these are all numbers. Is this just doodling? Like, someone practicing Morse?”
“On the back of a precious document?”
We both knew that couldn’t be true.
Blue eyes flicked to mine. “Holy shit, Paige,” he whispered. “Did you know someone found a gold bar in a sewer downtown last
month?”
“I heard.”
“The town went insane for a couple weeks, with people scouring downtown for more gold.”
“Maybe that’s who broke in here,” I said.
“Maybe. People said it might be Wyrd Jack’s gold. I thought they were all idiots, but now I’m wondering . . . Do you think
this might be an actual clue to Wyrd Jack’s treasure?”
Waves of excitement rippled through me. I hadn’t thought too much about the Golden Venus in a long time. Not like I used to
think about it when I was younger—obsessively. “Might just be nothing,” I said, trying to temper my own expectations.
“Usually is . . .”
“If Nana had a clue to the treasure, she wouldn’t keep it from us.” Would she? Maybe it didn’t matter. “Hold on,” I said,
getting up to jog to the kitchen counter and quickly returning with a pen and an old bill envelope. “You sure you remember
Morse code?”
“Like the back of my hand,” he said, a little proud. “You?”
“Never forgot it.” I sat on the living room rug, on the other side of the coffee table. “You read it off, I’ll write it down.”
He glanced up from the certificate to arch a brow at me. “Like old times.”
“Just read,” I said, a little frustrated with myself that I was so pumped about digging up an old treasure-hunting clue that it momentarily eclipsed my anger for Seb. Maybe he felt the same way because he began reading the code out to me in an excited voice.
“Three. Eighteen. Nine . . . ?”
“Nine?”
“Hold on, that’s just a smudge. Seven. Then twenty. Five. Thirteen . . .”
I scribbled down everything he read from the edges of the certificate, rotating the page when he finished with one edge. He
was right: there was nothing in the code but a series of numbers. I sneaked glances at Seb while he studied the paper, looking
at his black eye. The way his jaw cut . . .
Blue eyes looked up at me. “What?”
I was still blown away by how much he’d changed. “You look so different. It’s like, I don’t know . . . Owning a tiny yellow
chick as a pet, then the chick being taken away and you don’t see it again until it’s a gigantic rooster.”
Seb snorted a little laugh. “Cock-a-doodle-doo.”
“Just translate the code,” I said, feeling my face grow warm.
“Fine. Twenty-eight. Five. Fourteen . . .”
It took him a couple minutes to call out all the dots and dashes that were penciled on the certificate. Once he’d finished,
I’d filled up the back of my envelope with numbers. Seventy-two of them. “What are we looking at here, do you think?”
“Fuck if I know. Map coordinates?”
“Too many,” I said.
“Several map coordinates?”
I rolled my eyes. “Come on, think.”
“That’s your specialty, Mensa, not mine.”
“Haven’t heard that in a hot minute.”
Seb doled out nicknames like they were going out of style. At least that hadn’t changed.
“Are all the students at Harvard brain trusts? I’ve often wondered if you felt like a little fish in a big pond, or if you
could go toe-to-toe with rich smarties.”
“You often wonder about me, do you?”
He chuckled softly. “Probably more than you wonder about me.”
His eyes found mine, and my mouth went dry, completely thrown by his blurted sincerity. It occurred to me how close we were,
leaning over the table, knuckles almost touching. And then Seb shook his head, like jolting himself out of a stupor.
“Come on, Paige. We got a piece of paper filled with numbers. What do you see? What’s the pattern?”
I sighed heavily and stared at the envelope. “Hold on . . . Were there any pauses in the dots? Breaks?”
He picked up the certificate and studied it. “Hard to tell since it was handwritten God-knows-when. Wait, wait, wait . . .”
He held up a hand, staring at the paper. “How many numbers did I read off?”
“Seventy-two.”
Seb did some not-so-quick math inside his head, then got frustrated and demanded the envelope. He started counting the numbers
with one finger and then looked at me, wide-eyed. “Holy shit. Is this a book cipher?”
Was it? Impossible.
If someone wanted to send coded text, they might find all the words they want to use in their secret message inside a book.
Like, let’s say Webster’s Dictionary. If the word “asshole” is needed for the secret message, and that word is on page twenty, on the seventh line, and it is the first word on that line, the cipher code would be 20/7/1.
When the recipient gets the message, it will look like a string of numbers grouped into threes.
They take out their Webster’s Dictionary, find page twenty, line seven, first word, and bingo!
They would know that the sender is calling them an asshole.
The numbers we’d just deciphered might be a book cipher.
Might.
“Only one problem,” I said. “If it’s a book cipher, we’d need to know the exact book that was used to write the message.”
Both the sender and recipient of a book cipher would need to agree on a book to use for coding and decoding.
“Yeah, that’s a problem, all right. Maybe it’s not even a book cipher. It might be something else, like an A1Z26 cipher, or
some kind of Caesar shift variant with numbers.”
“True . . .”
He pulled his phone out of his pocket when it dinged, squeezing his eyes closed briefly. “Shit. Sorry, Paige. Gotta go.”
“What? Now?” Was he not as excited as I was about this discovery? How could he leave right in the middle of it? “Is it an emergency,
or something? Your father?”
Seb patted his dog, encouraging her to get off the sofa with him. “Fortunately, no. Things have calmed down between me and
my pops these days . . . as long as we stay out of each other’s way. If he doesn’t see me, then he doesn’t ask where I’ve
been.”
“So you’re avoiding each other.”
He shrugged. “Hey, you call it a tomato, I call it ‘getting to keep my head on my shoulders.’ Which I’d like to continue doing
because I’ve grown pretty fond of this head.”
Seb’s father was a Coast Guard captain—decorated, a local hero.
He was also incredibly strict. Two years ago, when the man sent Seb away, it wasn’t a big surprise to any of us.
Seb’s mother left both of them when Seb was nine; one day she woke up and decided she didn’t want to be a wife or mother, so she abandoned her life here and moved out east. Pretty much just disappeared from their lives.
I don’t think Captain Jansen ever got over it, and he certainly didn’t know how to raise a rambunctious boy on his own.
But that was no excuse for why he lorded over Seb.
I’d never been a Captain Jansen fan.
“You can’t leave now,” I told Seb. “What about the cipher?”
He took a picture of the numbers I’d scrawled on the envelope. “Promise I’ll take a look at the code later and let you know
if anything comes to mind.”
“Okay?” I replied, sounding as unsure as I felt.
He gave me a little smile, cocked to one side like he was hiding a thrilling secret. And for the first time since I’d laid
eyes on him at the bonfire, two boyish dimples appeared, indenting his cheeks.
I always loved those dimples.
That was the boy I used to know, with a smile that could charm the scales off a snake.
“Okay, well, obviously I won’t be crashing here, now that you’re back. But are you going to be okay here alone tonight?” He
gave me a questioning look. “You could stay with Jazmine, you know.”
Could I? She still hadn’t gotten in contact with me since I left that voicemail earlier. “I’ll be fine,” I told him. “I’ll
keep the porch lights on and the doors locked.”
He nodded as if he weren’t completely sure but didn’t know what to do about it.
Maybe I didn’t, either.
“Come on, Punkin,” he told the dog as they headed out the back door. “It was nice catching up with you, Paige. Really sorry
about your house again. Maybe you should consider installing some extra locks or at least put up some kind of cheap wireless
security camera.”
“I’ll consider it.”
He nodded and gave me a loose salute. “See ya around the lake.”
Without another word, he left the cottage just as he had any other day, back when our lives were still small and uncomplicated.
If I pretended they still were, maybe we could be friends again.
Maybe.