Jin looked at the paper in his hand and turned red. Neva and David laughed.
“You don’t have anything, do you?” said Neva.
“It’s not a cryptogram,” said Jin. “It can’t be. I don’t think it’s anything.”
“May I see it?” asked Frank.
Jin handed him the paper, and Frank unrolled the page and examined the letters.
“This is the code that was in the doll you were telling me about?” asked Frank.
“Yes,” said Diane.
“Have you tried other decoding techniques? If it’s not a simple cryptogram, it might be another kind of cipher.”
“Do you think you can decode it?” said Diane.
“Don’t know till I try,” said Frank.
Jin looked more depressed than when the cigarette butts were stolen from him.
“Jin,” said Neva, “you can’t know everything. Don’t look so glum.”
“It’s just, I’m really good at codes,” he said. His entire face was turned down in a frown as he watched Frank studying the string of letters on the wrinkled paper.
“Do you know anything about the guy who wrote it?” asked Frank.
“A little,” said Diane. She related the story of Leo Parrish, the treasure train, and the Labor Day hurricane of 1935.
“So,” said Frank, “this whole thing may be a hoax.”
“That’s what I think,” said Jin. “It’s just a string of random letters.”
“Could be,” said Frank. “You know it’s not a cryptogram because the frequency of occurrence of the letters didn’t lend itself to an answer, right?”
“No,” said Jin. “Nor does looking at the two-and three-letter words or the endings or beginnings of words. Nothing makes sense.”
“Then we need to look at another type of encryption method. You say Leo did his thing in the 1930s?”
“Yes,” said Diane.
“OK, so it’s not modern. No computer to help him with it. Maybe it’s something popular among coders of his time, like Vigenere’s method,” said Frank. “Where, for example, the cipher letter for e in one word isn’t necessarily the same cipher letter for an e in another word.”
“Well, you’ve completely lost me,” said Neva.
“Wow,” said Jin, leaning forward, his eyes now sparkling with interest. “No wonder I couldn’t decipher it. How do you know about this stuff, Frank?”
“It’s only what he does for a living,” said David.
“No kidding. I didn’t know that’s what you do,” said Jin.
“It’s part of what I do,” said Frank. “A lot of cybercrime involves hiding things by use of encryption.”
“Can you decipher it?” Diane asked.
“Probably. It will be easier if I have the keyword,” he said.
“Keyword?” they all said in unison.
“Several of the early ciphers required a keyword. Even without the keyword, there are other ways it can be deciphered and a good computer program can work it out, but if I have the keyword, I can do it fairly quickly. Are there any possible keywords from this story of yours?”
“How about a key sentence?” said Diane. “The making of palimpsests was possible even with papyri.”
Frank raised his eyebrows and she explained about the amazing coincidence of hearing that phrase in the library, Juliet’s fear of the word palimpsest and her dramatic reaction to hearing the complete sentence.
“Well that’s certainly odd,” said Frank.
David, Neva, and Jin stared at her with their mouths open.
“Wow,” said Jin again. “We hadn’t heard that story, Boss.”
“There’s been so much going on lately,” Diane said. She turned back to Frank. “Do you think palimpsest could be the keyword?”
“Could be. I’ll give it a try. Can I use a computer?” said Frank. “You do have word processing programs on your computers, don’t you?”
“Of course,” said David.
He led Frank to his computer and called up Word-Perfect. Frank sat down and started typing.
David moved an empty chair next to Frank, and Diane sat down. She was feeling a little weak, and her headache was back, but she didn’t want to mention it. David probably guessed, she thought. Frank reached over and squeezed her hand. He probably senses my weakness too, damn it.
Frank made a grid twenty-seven by twenty-six. On the top row he keyed in each letter of the alphabet in lowercase. Under the a in the first column, he repeated the alphabet starting with an uppercase B and putting the uppercase A on the bottom of the column after Z. He did the same thing in the next column-under the lowercase b he put an uppercase C and put the uppercase A and B at the bottom of the column after Z. Each successive uppercase alphabet was shifted one letter with respect to the previous column.
“This is called a Vigenere square,” said Frank when he finished. “The lowercase letters across the top represent the plain text. The uppercase letters in the columns represent the cipher text.”
Neva made a gesture with her hand going over her head. “This looks too much like math with letters,” said Neva.
“Not far from wrong,” said Frank.
“This is great,” said Jin. “Where have I been that I didn’t know this?”
“I don’t know,” said Frank grinning. “This is Secret Code 101.”
“How does it work?” said Diane.
“Let’s say the keyword is DIANE. In the left column I will use only those letters.” He used the word processing program to highlight the letters of DIANE and continued the shading all across the row in the table for each letter.
“Now, suppose we have the message, ‘The house that Jack built.’ So, we have to make another table…,” began Frank.
“OK,” said Neva. “You mentioned something about a computer program that would do this?”
“Yes, but I don’t have it,” said Frank. “Let’s have a little patience. Think of this as fun. Jin does.”
“You betcha,” said Jin. He pulled up a chair and leaned forward, staring at the screen. “You said you use a second table?”
“Yes,” said Frank. “If the keyword is DIANE, on the header row of this table I write the word DIANE over and over again until I have used up all the letters in the message to be encoded.
“Oh, I get it.” Jin jumped up and sat down again. “That’s brilliant. No wonder I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.”
“Explain it to those of us who don’t get it,” said Neva.
“To encrypt ‘The house that Jack built,’ ” said Frank, “I go to the new table and see that the first letter in the message is t and it is under the letter D in the keyword DIANE. I go to the Vigenere square and use it like the coordinates of a map to find the encryption letter I need. Go to D on the left most column and find where it intersects with t in the top row. The letter where the column and row intersect is W. Do the same thing for the second letter. The h is under I in the keyword Diane. Go to the square and we find that I and h intersect at P. Keep going and you can encrypt the whole sentence. You do the reverse process to decode the message.”
“That is so cool,” said Jin. “You’ll have to show me how to decode it the other ways you were talking about.”
“Sure. It’s more time-consuming. As you see, if you have the keyword, it’s a piece of cake.”
“Yeah,” said David, “I’d like to see the computer program. That would be an interesting algorithm.”
“How about our message?” said Diane.
“OK, we’re hoping the keyword is palimpsest.” Frank took the first word in the doll code and tried it out with his square. KVQ = vvf. “Palimpsest isn’t the keyword,” he said.
“Try papyri,” said Diane.
“Won’t work,” said Frank. “Papyri and palimpsest start out with the same two letters. We’ll end up with vv again.”
“So we’re nowhere,” said Neva.
“Or an alternative method for decoding it,” said Jin.
“Maybe the keyword is his name,” said Neva.
“That would be too easy to decode,” said Jin. “If you are going to the trouble to have an elaborate code, you won’t have such an easy keyword.”
The phone rang and Diane answered. She was expecting Garnett, but it was Beth, the museum’s librarian.
“Beth,” said Diane. “You have something for me?”
“Yes, I do. I can bring it to you. I thought you’d like to know that I did find some descendants of Leo Parrish that you might be able to contact. I don’t know where they are now, but I have info on the last-known locations of some of them.”
“Great. Can you come to the crime lab?” Diane asked.
“Yes. I’ll walk right over,” said Beth.
Diane explained to the others that she’d enlisted the help of a genealogist to discover any relatives of Leo Parrish.
“That was clever,” said Frank.
“And fast,” said Diane. “Librarians are much speedier than private detectives.”
It took only a couple of minutes for Beth to cross from the third-floor east wing to the west wing where the crime lab was. David was at the door to let her in. She entered, looking around at all the glass walls and high-tech equipment as though she’d just stepped onto another planet.
“Well,” she said, “this is certainly different from the rest of the museum.” She was carrying a folder, which she held close to her. They all moved to the round table to learn about the family tree of Leo Parrish.
“OK,” Beth said when they were all seated. “I’ll start with the Glendale-Marsh relatives. She pointed to each person on the chart as she named them, going from generation to generation. “Leo Parrish had an uncle, Luther Parrish, who lived in Glendale-Marsh in the thirties. He had two sons, Martin and Owen. Owen Parrish had a son. The son married and had a daughter-Oralia Lee Parrish. They all left Florida when Martin and Owen lost the family land. The daughter, Oralia Lee, married one Burke Rawson. They had no children that I can find a record of.”
“We should be able to locate the Rawsons,” said David.
“The last address I had for them was Ohio fifteen years ago,” said Beth. “Now, you mention that Leo Parrish wrote to someone when he was in the service. That was his sister, Leontine Parrish Richmond. She lived in Upstate New York.”
“Were they twins?” asked Diane.
Beth nodded. “Leontine had a daughter who was eleven years old in 1935.” She pointed to the chart with their names. “The daughter grew up, married, and had a son named Quinn Sebestyen,” said Beth. “He married a woman named Allie Shaw. And they had two children.”
“Christian and Melissa,” said Jin.
He was seated across the table from Beth and they all looked over at him, surprised.
Jin looked as if he had seen a ghost.