The artist he hired did an extraordinary job capturing the tiniest details. If I was right, we could crack all the messages in no time. An hour at most.
“We were too busy overthinking and overlooking details that were right in front of our noses. These are the keys we need to find the placement of letters in the alphabet. Based on these, we’ll know where to shift the rest.”
“If you feel well enough, do you want to try it now?” Hunter asked.
“Yes, but let me take a quick wash first.” I scratched my arm, then my scalp.
In the hut, I grabbed clean clothes and gathered my shampoo, soap, and a towel. Halfway to the lake, I approached a scene I wasn’t expecting to see. Hunter had secured the blue drum above three bamboo walls. Just like I described to him, he’d attached the watering can to the hose and elevated it by a rope that was tied up to a hook screwed into the tree. My mouth agape, I walked into the outdoor shower with a bamboo floor. This was better than I’d imagined. This was an Instagram-worthy outdoor shower. The upsurge in Hunter appreciation hit me so hard a burst of laughter laced with asqueak of sob slipped between my lips. I didn’t deserve his kindness. More than ever now I wanted to be right about the numbers on the dial and help him crack the message as a thank you.
I set my toiletries on a small shelf nailed to the trunk and stripped off everything, not caring that there wasn’t a door. After days spent alone with Hunter, he’d earned my trust.
Holding my breath, I untied the string and lowered the hose. Like a gift from God, warm water rained down, pulling a loud sigh out of me. I stood with my face skywards, soaking in this luxury. Unhurriedly, I soaped up my body and let my hand travel over my skin. This was a dream. The dream in which my fingers kept turning into Hunter’s as they were reaching the most sensitive places.
I had to thank Hunter.
Feeling reborn, I walked into the hut with one purpose in mind. Hunter stood by the map on the wall, removing colorful pins from it. Without saying anything, I moved to him, set my stuff on the bookshelf, pulled on his hand until he faced me, and wrapped my arms around his waist.
“Thank you for everything,” I said, pressing my face into Hunter’s broad chest. It took everything in me not to burst intotears. His attentive and empathetic personality was too much for me. “Especially for the shower. It is the kindest thing anyone’s done for me in a long,longtime.”
Hunter encircled his strong arms around me, his palms engulfing so much of my back. “You’re welcome.” He rested his head on the top of my wet hair. “It was an exceptionally well-designed idea.”
Waves whispered against the shore as we embraced, neither of us taking the first step to let go. We fit together too well. I was aware of how hot his skin felt against mine, how fast his heart pounded in his ribcage, mimicking mine, how his scent of citrus and sunshine was forever embossed in my mind. And I’d miss him so much when I had to go home. I wished there was a way for me to convince Hunter to return to the States. Because I had to admit I really liked him, and would have loved to take a chance to date him. But would he want to date me? Hunter was a versatile jack-of-all-trades and resourceful problem-solver who most likely was looking for a partner like him, and not a software nerd who didn’t know how to hard-boil an egg until she turned twenty-seven.
Reluctantly, I relaxed my grip and stepped out of his hug. “Ready to crack these numbers?”
“More than ever.” Hunter went to the table covered with paper and pulled two chairs out.
“All right. Assuming these are four separate number-to-letter encrypted sentences, and the bolder digit is a key number, we need to create four separate tables with twenty-six columns with two rows. Once we have new alphabets, we can replace each number in the message with its corresponding letter.” I took my seat and opened a journal to a new page. “The first row will be letters. The second row will contain digits.” I drew the first chart, filling the top row with letters A to Z, then scribbling 2 under N because cardinal point North was under twelve with only 2 in bolder font. “In English, the second letter of the alphabet is ‘B’. In our case, it’s ‘N’. That makes ‘M’ be the first letter. With this, we consider the alphabet is shifted by twelve.”
I wrote three under “O”, four under “P”, and continued filling out the rest of the empty boxes, stopping when I penciled in the last number under “Z”, which was fourteen. Then I returned to the blank cells and wrote twenty-six under “L”, and kept filling them in until I reached the “A” column and scribbled fifteen under it.
Crouched over papers on the table, we created other charts, matching the given keys to numbers: three corresponded to “E”, six matched to “S”, and nine went under “W”. After that, we filled in the remaining empty slots.
Breaking the code wasn’t hard once we knew what to do. The air around us crackled with excitement and joyful certainty. Laughing at some of his or my puns and silly suggestions of what it could be, his shoulder bumping mine, my hand landing on his arm more than once. And, good Lord, his laugh made the thought that we were stranded on an island evaporate into nothingness.
With the first several unraveled words, we high-fived and whooped, the thrill pushing me to write the next one even faster. Several words went quick—okay, fine, I cheated and mostly guessed them—but the word I had to decode letter by letter, ‘Achilles’, slowed me down. Hunter’s hand moved as fast as mine. The more words he jotted down the more muttered curses escaped his mouth, indicating that he was just as baffled as I was as we unraveled sentences. And then, finally, I scribbled down the last word:place.
ChapterFifteen
After days for me, but years for Hunter, of battling these numbers, at last we had our message. Or, in our case, four riddles.
Strong but hollow alive but dead inside
In natures fortress wade into deep before you seek
When the ocean bows low it exposes Achilles fatal flaw
When you face to face with death you are in the right place
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I asked, securing a messy bun on my head with a pencil.
Hunter dragged his hand over his face. “Riddles.”
“I know they are riddles.” I rolled my eyes. None of the sentences made sense, but it wasn’t a surprise that a pirate made it extra hard. I scratched my ankle where the snakes bit. “This is confusing as fuck.”
“Indeed.”
We stared at the written messages in silence. What bothered me the most was the last one that mentioned facing death. Did Captain William Thompson mean metaphorically, or did he hide it somewhere we would literally have to risk death to reach?
