The Memory of Eva Ryker (15 page)

Jan fidgeted in her chair. “Not exactly a revelation.”

“Patience. We're just getting warmed up. Now let's try substituting R with T.”

Her eyebrows raised. “Still a lot more question marks than letters.”

“Well, let's try A for P.”

“We're getting somewhere,” I said cautiously. “Now let's try O for I.”

“Now we try N for B.”

“I for U.”

I rested my head on top of the typewriter and searched for a pattern. There was OON ENT, whatever the hell that meant. I gave up on that one and studied the vertical columns.

“Janice,” I said softly. “Give me a pencil.”

Snatching the paper out of the machine, I circled the letters.

‘“T ITA NI.'
Titantic
. It couldn't be anything else.”

“Except wishful thinking.” Jan scratched her head in frustration. “No, you're probably right. But I still can't read the message.”

“Me neither,” I confessed. “But we've almost got it licked. I'm going to type out a key and see what letters we've already found.”

We studied our six pitiful decoded letters for minutes on end. No inspirations were immediately forthcoming.

“The thing that gets me,” I said, “is that there doesn't seem to be any connection between these damn letters. They're scattered all over the alphabet.”

“Why don't we keep on with our substitutions, working with the frequency-of-letters chart?”

“That's fine, in theory. But look at the letter count of the cipher. There're a half dozen different letters we could choose next. We could grow old and gray chasing down dead ends.”

With a sigh I began retyping the cipher, replacing E with R. Halfway down the first column I flubbed on the board with the right index finger, logjamming keys on top of the ribbon.

Jan watched sympathetically as I swore and wrangled with the eraser. “Why don't I take over?”

“Good idea,” I said. We both type about the same words per minute, but she has a more graceful touch.

She reached the middle of the second column, then stopped.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

Without an answer Jan picked up the incomplete key I'd typed and held it out next to the keyboard.

“Come here and look at this,” she said. I obeyed, then watched, mystified, as she tapped out every letter on the keyboard.

Jan was beaming and exultant. I answered her smile, then shrugged my shoulders.

“So?”

Evidently I was slow on the uptake, but Jan was too happy to be annoyed. “We're looking for a connection between the letters, and it's been staring us in the face all afternoon. The letters we've already discovered are N, O, A, T, I, and E, right?”

I nodded.

“Okay. Now, where's that pencil?”

I passed it to Jan and watched her circle the letters as they were positioned on the keyboard.

“Now look back at our key.”

I looked back and forth between the key and the keyboard and it hit me. With a grin I grabbed Jan from behind, kissing her neck.

“A genius, Janice! You're a goddam genius!” I let her up, wearily shaking my head. “We make quite a team, my dear. My name and your brains.”

“Come now. You would have discovered it eventually.”

“Yeah. That's the operative word. ‘Eventually.'”

“Well you
would
,” she said staunchly. Jan grabbed the pencil and circled the key to the cipher.

She pointed at the keyboard. “All you have to do is study this and you'll see that the letters we'd already discovered are set one key to the right of the original letters in the cipher.”

Jan retyped the Marconigram, her hands shifted one space to the right. Within three minutes all the question marks disappeared.