After a tense moment Huck shook his head and exhaled loudly through his nose. “Yes, I breezed through the journal a little. I didn’t have a lot of time, between the hiding and the driving and—”
“Bathing?”
One corner of his mouth tilted upward. “I smelled like a dead yak, banshee. You should be thankful. Anyway, what I did peep at in the journal was boring, and almost none of it was about me. Isn’t that the only reason to read someone’s private diary?”
“Well, when you werenot-reading it, did you notice the code?”
“What code, now?”
“The cipher,” I said. “He’s used it in several places.”
Huck sat up in the bed to look over my shoulder. “Like, espionage?”
“Like, he didn’t want casual snoopers to read what he was documenting.”
Father had always loved ciphers, and he was good at both writing and cracking them. He’d even helped decode enemy messages during the war. He’d taught me cryptography before Huck moved in with us, when I was a young child.... The Caesar Shift. The Cardan Grille. The Scytale Wraparound. He used to leave me coded messages in my room, mostly silly things. A lot of jokes and a few clues about where he’d hidden one of my books or a piece of chocolate.
But when my mother died, so did our ciphers; I guess we were too busy grieving to keep it up. I turned to crosswords for my word fix, and he turned to obscurer treasures that required more and more time out in the field.
Discovering that he’d been using ciphers privately made me feel a little marshmallowy. And now I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d intended for me to decipher his journal. I mean, why else would he have instructed Huck to give it to me? Why not just let Huck keep it safe?
“Uh-oh. What’s that?” Huck asked, waving his finger at my face. “That look right there—I recognize that. You’re excited, aren’t you?”
“Aren’tyou?”
“Should I be?”
“This is the most interesting thing Father’s done in years,” I insisted, feeling a rising sense of momentum for the first time that day. One that cut through the tension between us and made me temporarily forget our issues.
There were too many journals entries to skim at once; it would take hours to go through them all. Longer still to crack his code—I once spent an entire month diligently deciphering a message he wrote out for me, only to find that it said:STOP DECIPHERING CODES AND GO TO BED.Where to start with this cipher, though? Sometimes starting at the end has advantages, so I sneaked a look at the journal’s final page:
JOURNAL OF RICHARD FOX
November 23, 1937
Tokat, Turkey
I’ll never forgive myself. I should have never brought Huck and Theo here. This is my fault. What can I do? Theodora, if you’re reading this, the Dragon—
Smeared across the paper, a line of ink trailed away from the last word, as if he were interrupted.
A sense of unease crept over me. “What is this?” I murmured. None of it sounded good. I reread it several times and pointed to the page. “What is he talking about here? ‘Dragon’? Vlad the Impaler was sometimes called Vlad Dracula,sonof the Dragon. It was his father who was the actual Dragon. I mean, so to speak. It was a byname, like... Alfred the Great. That sort of thing.”
“Vlad the Dragon. Breathes fire. Not literally. Just don’t piss him off.”
“Like that,” I confirmed. “And obviously both father Vlad and son Vlad have been dead for more than four hundred years—despite the loose connection to Bram Stoker’s fictional Count Dracula, they weren’t immortal vampires.”
“You say ‘vampire’ as if it were a possibility. Have you run across something with sharp teeth and a hatred of garlic over the last year?”
“Sadly, my investigations have been vampire-free,” I said.
“Good to know,” he said, making the sign of the cross in the air for good measure. Then he pointed at the journal entry. “Look here at the date—yesterday. That’s when I was arranging for transportation. He had to have written this before he slipped out of the hotel and left me in Tokat.”
I thought for a moment. “So he took the second mystery meeting with an unknown person, returned to the hotel while you were out searching Tokat for a plane or a car, began writing this journal entry, and then... quickly left the hotel?”
“Seems to be so,” Huck murmured.
Maybe the previous journal entry would shed more light. It had been written the day before the last entry:
