Chapter 18 #2
If she noticed his hesitation, she didn’t say anything.
He pushed his trepidation—he refused to call it fear—aside and headed up the stairs.
Again he hesitated at the door to her bedroom.
He saw the laptop sitting askew on a folding TV tray.
He took a deep breath, charged in, snatched it and the charger up and bolted down the stairs.
This, she noticed. She turned to him with eyebrows raised. “See anything?”
“Didn’t look.” He crossed to the table and set the laptop down, his heart pounding. He sat, breathing through his nose so she wouldn’t hear him struggling for breath. He flipped open the top to see a password screen. “You want to sign me in?”
“My password is EDD13.”
His turn to lift his eyebrows as he typed it in. “You trust me enough for that?”
“What are you going to do? Steal my secret recipes?”
“You have secret recipes on this thing? Maybe I will.” He grinned at her when she turned to glare at him. “Is this like code for Eddie, or something?”
“What? No, my initials. And the number 13, clearly, which is Taylor Swift’s favorite number.”
This time, his surprise was a bark of laughter. “You’re a Swiftie?”
“One hundred percent.”
He admitted he didn’t know a lot about Taylor Swift, but it seemed like she was more for girly girls, which Erielle had proven herself not to be. But he wasn’t going to question it right now. Instead, he opened a new browser tab and typed in “languages with curly fonts.”
And realized he wasn’t connected to the internet. “What do I do here?”
She walked over, woke up her phone and set it up as a hotspot.
Okay, that wasn’t the most helpful. Russian was on there, which was one of the languages he suspected, but he couldn’t match up any letters.
“It’s not Russian, at least, most of the letters don’t look like they could be.”
“What else could it be, then?”
Her tone was exasperated, like she didn’t want any comments until he had the right answer. Which was fine. He continued to search, first scanning, then looking more closely. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
The timer on the oven went off, making him jump. Okay, maybe his nerves were a little on edge today. Erielle pulled out the biscuits and set them on top of the stove, then pulled down a couple of plates.
“Do you want your biscuits smothered, or gravy on the side?”
“On the side,” he said, and watched her sure movements as she served them both, then carried the plates to the table.
Once she sat across from him, she turned the screen her direction so she could look at what he’d been looking at.
“Whoa.”
He cracked open a biscuit and started spreading butter on it. “Right? I thought I’d look at the images, but it’s a lot.”
“Maybe there’s a translator app that could help? Like, isn’t there, when people travel to another country, they take a picture of a sign and there’s an app that translates it?”
That was a good idea. He turned the laptop back to him, opened another tab and searched for translator apps, even though the smell of the food in front of him was driving him a little nuts.
Once the screen filled with suggestions, he pulled out his own phone, opened the App Store, and searched. While the app downloaded, he took a bite of the gravy, and his eyes rolled back in his head.
“You served this in your restaurant?”
She gave a choked laugh. “No. This is purely Gigi’s recipe.”
“Yeah, but this is some good down-home cooking. I would think there’d be a market for that somewhere.”
“The places that might have a market for it probably already have a place with down-home cooking.” She took a bite of her own smothered biscuit.
“I mean, if this is what you can do with the most basic of ingredients…” He let the thought trail off and took another bite, then checked his phone. Still downloading. Of course, this place probably didn’t have the best connectivity. So he dug into his breakfast. The mystery could wait.
Well, maybe it couldn’t. Erielle pulled the laptop toward her and scrolled through the images.
“Everything that looks close doesn’t match up completely.”
“What if it’s a made-up code? Like, steals from different languages?”
“Then there’d maybe be a key somewhere? Like where?”
She pushed out of her chair and flipped the painting over. “There’s something about this painting. Something someone wants us to see.”
She placed two of the napkins on the painting, revealing only a small section of the painting, which she studied before shifting the napkins over and studying another part.
“What are you doing?”
“I think looking at the whole thing is overwhelming, so I am just looking at a small section at a time to see if there are any clues.”
Okay, that was intriguing, and he’d had enough breakfast to be satisfied for a bit, so he rounded the table to sit in the chair beside her.
She smelled of butter and the bed they’d shared, and that set off a whole mess of feelings that he shouldn’t be feeling right now.
He both wished she could always smell this way, and worried what it meant that he wanted that.
So he forgot to look at the picture a moment. She’d already moved to another section.
“I think we probably need a brighter light. But let’s wait, see what the app turns up.”
“You do that and I’ll do this,” she said, her tone distracted.
He went back to his side of the table, saw the app was ready, gave it the proper permissions, and took a picture of the first page of the book.
The image was not great—the pages were yellow and the writing was faded, so the app was no help. He repeated the process with a few different pages in the book, but no luck.
“It’s not working with the book. I think it’s not getting clear enough pictures.” An idea struck, and he walked over to the window, snapped a picture of the carved symbols.
But when he looked at the photo, no symbols appeared. Just the frame.
“What the hell?” He turned his phone for Erielle to see it.
She frowned and wiped her face with a napkin. She rose and took his hand, tugging him out of his chair. When he was up, she picked up the chair he’d been sitting in, and marched into the living room. She set the chair in front of the window and climbed up on it, then held out her hand.
A moment passed before he realized she meant for him to hand her the phone. He did, and she took a picture in the app, checked the screen, then silently held the screen for him to see.
Nothing. A chill ran through him.
He took the phone from her, switched to just the camera app. He didn’t know why they hadn’t taken photos of the symbols before, why she had done the rubbings, figured it was just because she didn’t have a way to print out the pictures to look at them side by side. But now he wondered.
She snapped a picture, checked the screen, again showed him.
Nothing.
“What the hell.”
She reached up and rubbed her thumb over the carving. “I feel it. It’s there. So why isn’t the phone seeing it?” She looked down at him. “You see it, right?”
“I do.”
She shook her head and climbed down, placing her hand casually on his shoulder as she hopped to the ground. “Okay. This is….this is weird.”
“Let’s go back to what we were doing. I’ll look up languages, you inspect the picture, then we’ll switch. See if we see something the other person missed.”
She made a noise in her throat that may have been acceptance, and walked back into the kitchen. But she sat in his chair and pulled the laptop closer, so he pulled his breakfast plate to the other side of the table so he could finish eating. The frantic clicking of keys sounded from the laptop.
“What are you doing?”
“Making notes of everything we know right now. I don’t want to forget any of it.”
They worked together quietly, and he noticed she barely ate anything, despite all the work she’d done.
He cleaned his plate, though the gravy had cooled and congealed.
It still tasted good. When his eyes started hurting from the reflected light of his flashlight on the painting, he got up and washed his plate, then eyed the remaining biscuits.
“You have a way to save these?”
She made a noise and gave him a wave, like she wasn’t going to worry about it now, so he opened a couple of cabinets before he found a box of baggies for the biscuits.
He didn’t find anything for the gravy, so scraped it into a coffee cup and set it in the fridge.
Then he washed the pans and wiped down the stove.
“What are you doing?” she asked finally.
“You cooked, I clean.”
“Are you done with the painting?”
“My eyes were getting tired. Taking a break. You find anything?”
She rubbed her thumb between her eyebrows. “There are so many, and the websites take so long to load. Nothing matches exactly.”
“You want to switch?” He hung the dishtowel back on the front of the the oven.
She nodded, and they rotated. He watched her for a moment. She took much smaller areas of the picture to inspect. Probably more effective. He noticed she went back a little over the area where he’d gone. Yeah, she was going to take forever.
He must have zoned out while scrolling, because her voice gave him a jolt.
“I think I found something.”