A Fugitive Truth (22 page)

I tried to shove the phone away, but I could already hear someone answering on the other end. Michael danced away, just out of reach with his hands held high over his head. He sat down on the back of the couch in the parlor, arms crossed over his chest and grinning, to watch me squirm.

“Good afternoon, Van Helst Rare Book,” I heard a disembodied voice say.

“Is this Van Helst?” I said, stalling, scrambling for a ruse. Michael cocked his head to one side, frowning slightly: I was disappointing him so far. Hell, I was disappointing myself.

“Yes, the rare book room. Can I help you?”

“Yes, thank you. My name is,” I took a deep breath, “Margaret, ah, Mallowan”—I could see Michael shaking his head, mouthing my new name, his brow furrowed—“and I am calling for Dr. Michael Glasscock.” I turned away momentarily, gloating, while Michael jumped up from the back of the couch, shaking his head, silently pleading, “No, stop!”

“Ah, yes, he was here just a short time ago. I remember him quite well.” The female voice—gruff, dragonlike, and not at all collectible—chilled noticeably and suggested to me that there had been moments of tension between her and Michael at the time of his visit.

I added just a hint of knowing amusement to my voice. “Oh, well, he’s not the sort you forget in a hurry. In any case, I am cawling”—a generic bit of New York City drifted into my accent—“because Dr. Glasscawk wanted to make certain that he had the cor-rect names for your staff in his acknowledgments and asked me to as-cer-tain whether my list was accurate?”

In the parlor Michael nodded, giving grudging approval to my gambit.

“Just a moment, I’ll check who was on call that month.” I heard the tapping of computer keys as, presumably, schedules were brought up. “Here we are. Let me read them to you…”

She ran down a list and I echoed it, making assenting noises after checking off an imaginary list. I noticed that Michael had brought out his notebook and was writing down the names as I said them aloud; he’d forgotten them himself.

“Oh, de-ah,” I said. “I have one more name, I can’t quite make it out—”

“His handwriting made one grateful for computers,” the librarian grumbled. “I could barely make out his call slips.”

“Oh, his penmanship is just dread-ful,” I agreed. Michael, who had by now sidled up to me to hear the conversation, stuck out his tongue. “This one looks like Sarah, Ruskin, Russian, something like that?”

“Of course. Sasha Russo. She had been with us for quite some time, then left for a new position. She came back for two weeks on her vacation to assist us with a grant project she’d been listed on before she’d left. I’m not surprised he had
her
name,” the librarian muttered.

“That must be it. Thank you so much for all your help. Good night.” I hung up and looked around for approbation.

Michael nodded. “Okay, okay, but…Margaret Mallomar?”

“Margaret Mallowan,” I corrected. “I was going to use Margaret Chandler, but I figured there was a chance that someone working in a library might have heard of her—”

“Oh, good call,” he said sarcastically, nodding even more vigorously. “That would have given us away, especially after Demi Moore popularized the character in her last film.”

I ignored his caustic remark. “Well, just in case, I used Mallowan, after Max Mallowan, the archaeologist. He also happened to be Agatha Christie’s husband,” I added. I decided to push on. “Michael, so you were down there too, the same time as Sasha, the same time as the thefts—”

“Yes, I was. No, I didn’t do it,” he interrupted in a bored voice. “Don’t you think it’d be stupid to pull the same stunt at two different places? Please, enough. I’m tired. I want to eat.”

In that second, I realized just how skillful Michael was at manipulating situations through force of his character. People made excuses for him because of his genius. I made excuses for him because of his brains, and because he made me laugh. Harry’s words came back to me, reminding me that the activities of my erstwhile colleague might not be able to stand much scrutiny…

The phone rang. I answered brusquely. “Hello?”

A man’s voice asked, “May I speak with Emma Fielding, please?”

My husband sounded so shy and cute and sweet that I would have kissed him to pieces had he been there in front of me. “Brian, it’s me.”

“You sure didn’t sound like you. Look, I checked my machine; I’ve got a few minutes before the cab comes for the airport. What’s wrong? I thought everything was okay.”

Right. I’d forgotten all about Brian’s impending recruiting trip. “It is, but everything’s gotten pretty exciting around here.” I quickly told him what had happened in the past twelve hours.

“Oh God, Emma, I can’t tell you how relieved that makes me feel,” he said after. It sounded like he just took his first deep breath for a long time. “I almost decided to cancel the trip, I was so worried.”

I didn’t bother to tell him about my private belief that this wasn’t as neatly tied up as the detective might have wished. Not when I needed to give Michael Glasscock a little more consideration as a suspect. Not when Brian’s cab was coming soon.

“Tell me about home, I need to hear about home.” Brian obligingly ran down what had been going on at the Funny Farm and I listened to the details hungrily.

“And Marty? The baby?”

“She’s huge and really more than ready to whelp. It should be any minute now.”

“And is Kam still going to look in on Quasi?”

“Yep, he said that if the baby came, he’d get Roddy to do it. Otherwise, he said he’d pop a couple of Benadryl and bring the twelve-gauge along. In exchange for a little wine shopping I’m to do for him while I’m out there.”

I chuckled softly. Kam was always so infuriatingly composed—in person and dress—that one of my favorite memories was the sight of him, runny-nosed and teary-eyed, when we discovered that he was violently allergic to our cat. Well, Brian’s cat, really. Ever since Brian brought him home as a feral kitten, when he promptly revealed himself to be a cross between Satan, a Maine coon cat, and who knew what else, Quasimodo’s been a one-man cat. Adoring eyes only for Brian, evil-assed attitude for anyone else. I was tolerated—barely—for my opposable thumb and my ability to use the can opener.

The realization that Brian had been speaking brought me back to the present conversation. “—and so now you can focus on your work, which is why you’re there anyway.”

“Oh yeah, I remember,” I said ruefully, and sighed. “Something about a diary? God, that code’s driving me nuts. What do
you
know about codes, sugar?”

“What kind of codes? Genetic, Morse, area, zip, bar?” The buoyancy in Brian’s spirits was audible in his enthusiastic chatter. “Did you know that there used to be a journal called
Bar Code Weekly
? I haven’t looked at supermarket scanners the same since—”

“I’m talking encryption,” I said. “If I’m going to get anything useful from Madam Chandler’s diary, I’ve got to crack it. I’ve tried everything I can think of, which wasn’t much, but I figure the code can’t be too difficult.”

“Yeah, just enough to keep you scratching your head! You’re right though, it doesn’t have to be complicated to be effective.”

“Madam Margaret’s got groups of numbers, nothing higher than twenty-six.”

“So it’s alphabetically based,” Brian said confidently. “Okay. You’ve tried a Julius Caesar code? Just slide each letter, say, four letters forward each time, so A is D, B is E, et cetera?”

“Yep, a couple of times. I couldn’t make any sense out of it—there’s no order.”

“In that case, my best guess is that it’s a code based on a book or a poem or something. You know, you take a passage with a lot of different letters in it and number the letters according to their appearance in the passage. How about those?”

“I could try that,” I said slowly. “She read an awful lot, though. I’d have trouble pinning down what was the most important book in her life.”

“I thought you were always telling me that the Bible would have been the one book that most people knew. Y’know, in the olden days.”

For Brian, a native Californian and born hard scientist geek, the olden days were those prior to 1960. “It was and I’ll try that first, but I honestly don’t think it’s going to be Genesis chapter one, verse one, you know what I mean? I think she was a little more sophisticated than that. But it is a starting place.”

“Oops! Cab’s here, gotta go. You’ll do it, sweetie, just start at the begin—”

He hadn’t even finished the word, but Brian’s unconscious use of Kobrinski’s mantric phrase hit me like a speeding freight train. I knew what the key to Madam Chandler’s code was.

“Start at the beginning! Holy snappers!” I looked around frantically for my briefcase. There! By the chair!

“What?” I heard his voice over the phone, but now it seemed as though it was coming from a very great distance. “What’s wrong? Emma?”

“Nothing, but you’ve got to hush, I can’t—” The phone cord wasn’t long enough for me to reach my briefcase, even though I strained every inch of muscle. “I think I know what the code is—hang on!”

“I can’t!” Brian insisted. “Look, you’re okay, right?”

“Yeah, but I just need two minutes to check whether I’m right—”

“Look,” he interrupted. “When you sound like that, you’re right. Don’t worry, just go do it, okay? The cab’s here,” Brian said. “I’ll call you if it’s not too late when I get into Stanford, okay? I love you.”

I felt torn in half, rotten for ditching Brian, desperate to check my new theory. “I love you too, I really do—!” But even as I was saying it, I was scrambling over to hang up the phone. It took me a couple of tries to get the receiver back on the cradle, because it kept bouncing off, with all the force I used.

I pounced on my bag like a hungry lion on a slow gazelle. I tore the buckles open, and ripped through the thicket of legal pads, folders, and filing cards until I found my research notebook and my computer. Flipping the screen up and switching the machine on, I then rifled through the notebook until I found the first page where I’d copied out the first epigram that opened Madam Chandler’s third diary for Michael to look at:

During the eon that it took my computer to boot up, I sat there on the floor and started numbering the letters in consecutive order as they appeared in the quotation: 1 for S, 2 for I, and so on.

Okay, “it.” I is repeated, so T is 6, skip to P, that’s 7, O—“Oh, man! It’s going to work!”

Finally my word processor program came up, and I opened the file that contained my transcription of the diary, so far. Excitement flooded me, and I kept overshooting where the first series of code numbers started.

Finally, a brief entry with code appeared and I struggled to calm myself to compare the series of code numbers with the key I had just worked out: 12, 14, 8, 1, 6, 6, 5, 17, 17, 2, 9, 10, 5, 16, 12, 15, 9, 17, 5…Then I wrote down the letters that corresponded to each number.

“A, M, O—” Amo? That didn’t make any sense unless—Please God, no! Don’t let her be writing in encoded
Latin
, my tired heart just won’t take it! Amo was “I love,” and that was about the extent of my knowledge of Cicero’s language. Never mind, Emma, keep going, keep
going
!

“A, M, O, S, T, T, E, R, R, I—” That double T didn’t look like Latin after an S. Keep going, keep going! There’s still a chance.

“—B, L, E, D, A, Y, B, R—” I kept scribbling down letters, not even looking at them, just praying that I would get enough to tell me how to start making sense of them. The problem was, there were a couple of letters that weren’t contained in the quote, so I knew that I’d have to get them from the context.

And then suddenly, magically, the letters seemed to shift into place, separating themselves into words I could recognize. In English. Once my eye distinguished the first couple of words, breaking up the rest was easier:

“A most terrible day breaks and I know not if I have the strength to face it…” I whispered to myself. A quiet calm stole over me, and I automatically assigned J, K, Q, W, X, Z—the letters that weren’t in the quote—the numbers 21 through 26, thus completing the key.

Sitting on the floor, I stared at the translated sentence in silence. Almost three centuries ago, a woman found herself in a strange new world, isolated from her family, her husband, and her community. Alone in that wilderness and faced with the threat of being hanged, she poured out her heart into a book that was her only companion. I thought of Margaret Chandler trying to exorcise her fear by writing. She’d literally written volumes. I imagined the burden of complete despair she must have borne by the end of this journal, when she was convinced she would be executed and still, in plain, uncoded words, steadfastly maintained her innocence. I thought of the pride she must have had to keep those fears concealed from casual glance, even in the face of public condemnation. The woman carried herself with outward dignity with those thoughts carefully hidden away. Hidden until I had cracked her code and read the secrets in her heart.