“But let’s say someone was following them. The only reason to do that would be to get their hands on the ring, right? Because they wanted it?”
“Or wanted to prevent someone else from finding it.”
Oh. Huh. Right.
“Either way,” Huck said, “why would someone poison Jean-Bernard?”
“Maybe Jean-Bernard knew something. Maybe someone was trying to prevent him from warning Father.”
“About what?” Huck asked.
I didn’t know. But people didn’t just get poisoned out of the blue.
“Look,” Huck said. “We don’t know what Fox found out during his mystery meeting. But whatever it was, I can’t believe he would send us into danger. He said for me to take you home if he didn’t show up here. And he hasn’t. So I think we need to find a Wagons-Lits office and find out how we can use the rest of our train ticket credit and book passage to a port. I have our ocean liner tickets for December. Surely we can exchange them for the next ship bound for home.”
I squinted at him. “New York, you mean?”
That was my home. Not his. Not anymore.
He blinked rapidly and scrubbed the back of his neck. “Your father told me to see you back to Foxwood. What happens after that, I don’t know. But I’ll not put you on a week-long journey across the ocean by yourself. I’ll escort you home.”
Home was the last place I wanted to go. It felt like giving up. Was I supposed to just get on an ocean liner while my Father was in God only knew what trouble?
“I wonder if this is why Father’s letter to you said for us to avoid Paris. Do you think he knows about Jean-Bernard?”
“Do I look like a crystal ball?” Huck stared up at the domed ceiling and groaned in frustration. I knew what he was thinking—that this was all a big mess, and he didn’t have any answers.
ButIdid.
They were right here in the red journal stuffed inside my handbag.
Father gave it to me for a reason. And if I wanted to uncover his secrets and find out where he could be right now, I needed to get serious about cracking his code.
“Give me one more day to study the journal,” I told Huck. “Maybe I’ll learn something that will help us. Or Father. Or Jean-Bernard. We have enough cash for another night in Bucharest, right? If I can’t decipher the code, then we’ll go home. What harm can it do? At least we’re safe here.”
“Now, sure,” Huck said sarcastically. “In ten minutes, who even knows? And your father told me—”
“My father is MIA! He could be dead for all we know. He’s abandoned us in the middle of Europe with dwindling resources and an instruction not to make our way to someone who is currently lying poisoned in a hospital bed—possibly as a result of a hunt for a cursed ring that is still out there unfound and the cause of all this chaos. Besides, Father may have given you an instruction, but he gave me this journal. And I say we stay here.”
Huck sighed heavily. He said nothing for several heartbeats. Then he came at me like Frankenstein’s monster, outstretched arms and feigned monstrous rage, pretending to strangle me. “You’re stubborn—you know that, right?”
“Better than docile and compliant. Are you staying here with me, or are you going to shirk your ‘me big man, me protect little woman’ duty?” I said.
He sighed dramatically, as though the world were ending and all he could do was give in and let it happen. “All right. I suppose another day won’t hurt. You know what they say. Nothing ventured, nothing strained.”
“Gained.”
“Are you sure?” he teased.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure of anything anymore, because at that moment I was utterly relieved that he’d agreed to stay. Not because I couldn’t have managed without him. I could have. I just... didn’t want to. Not right now. Not with everything going on. Besides, we were just getting to a place in our newly reconciled relationship where we could put aside our differences and pretend they didn’t exist. That was healthy, right?
After talking to Andrei about keeping the room one more night, we counted up the money we had left and headed across the street to the Grand Café, which looked like a good place to spend the afternoon working—better than our cramped hotel room, anyway. Scattered droplets fell from an overcast sky, so Huck found us a table under the café’s big striped canopy that was well out of the rain. He flagged down a waiter, and our small table was soon filled with dark coffee, some sort of sweet cheese pastry, and open-faced sandwiches topped with an eggplant spread. And while Huck ate, I cracked my knuckles and got to work on solving my father’s secret code.
I’d definitely decided that the particular code he’d used was a Vigenére cipher. That kind of cryptograph requires a Vigenére square, which is a grid of letters in neat rows and columns that looks a bit like an unsolved word-search puzzle. I’d made one on the Orient Express that night I stayed up trying to crack this code the first time, so I took it out now and opened Father’s journal, flipping to each of the pages that had a code, dog-earing them for easy access.
Cracking a cipher like this wasn’t a straightforward task. You could either spend hours (days, weeks, months) guessing the passphrase, or you could spend hours—days, weeks, years—trying to find patterns in the cipher and plugging code letters into the Vigenére square, hunting for the real letters. Either way, there were too many possibilities.
But since I’d already failed to guess the passphrase, I tried the pattern-searching method. I tried it through two plates of eggplant spread and three cups of coffee. I tried it while Huck read random journal entries out loud in my father’s voice in an attempt to make me laugh. And I continued to try it while Huck leaned back in his chair, providing commentary on the pedestrians strolling past the café under umbrellas.
