To make things easier, I focused on one block of cipher from the next-to-last journal entry:
I need to retrace my steps back to my summer trip in Romania. Must talk to: XTTNMVGAFWVLWJQUIKLWLAUCJ. One of these three has the true ring, I’m certain.
If I could solve that, I could solve the rest. I was almost positive that Father had used a seven-letter passphrase. I could tell that much. Seven-letter words... There were, oh, I don’t know—ten thousand possibilities? Twenty?
Hoping the word was something common, I madly scribbled lists of seven-letter words—a task with which Huck happily aided me—but none of them fit. And by late afternoon, when the drizzle turned to a steady rain, I was completely frustrated and out of ideas. My brain felt as if it were about to explode from overuse.
“I’ll never crack it,” I moaned to Huck, who had kicked a leg up onto an empty chair and now awoke with a start.
“What?” he said, groggy. “What time is it? It’s night already?”
“It’s just the rain clouds making it look dark.” I checked my watch and gritted my teeth. “Oops. It’s half past six.” I hadn’t meant to work that long.
He stretched and stared at the table. “Christ. We ate lunch here, and now it’s time for dinner. I think we’ve outstayed our welcome.”
Maybe he was right. It was time to give in and pack it all up. I blew out a long, frustrated breath and stared at the café table. In front of our empty coffee cups stood three origami animals Huck had created with folded café napkins and twisted paper straws. I smiled at his handiwork and asked, “Cat and dog?”
He pretended to be outraged. “That’s you and me.”
“Us?” I said, a little embarrassed. “What’s on your head?”
“Pilot goggles,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Anyone could see that.”
“Naturally,” I said. “And that other napkin is me?”
“The pointy part is your crown, and the coffee stains are your big eyes, little empress.”
I groaned. “Don’t call me that. You sound like Father.”
“Empress this, empress that,” Huck mocked, reviving his Richard Fox impression. “So smart, so defiant, so beautiful... most amazing girl in the whole wide world, blah, blah, blah.”
My cheeks warmed. “He does not say that.”
“It’sallhe says. I could never compare to his beloved Theodora, empress of his heart.”
I started to tell him to shut the hell up, because (a) Father never talked that way about me, and (b) all I ever heard was praise about Huck. But lightning struck, both in the dark sky above and inside my head.
Seven letters. Empress.
Ignoring Huck, I copied down the same section of my father’s code that I’d been focusing on, and using my Vigenére square, I found the row forEand followed it to the column for the first letter of the code, and thenM, and on and on, writing each new letter beneath the cipher until I was finished. I set down my pencil as Huck looked over my shoulder.
XTTNMVGAFWVLWJQUIKLWLAUCJ
THEWIDOWTHEHERMITTHETWINS
We stared at the letters in silence. Then Huck read it aloud. “The widow, the hermit, the twins. Don’t know what any of it means, but, banshee, I think you cracked it.”
My heart raced. I felt the same thrill I used to feel when I was a child, cracking Father’s silly cipher messages. And maybe I was feeling something else, too: a little ache of sentimentality because he had used my nickname as his passphrase. Maybe he’d used it only because it was convenient; just because you use your kid’s birthday for your safe code doesn’t mean you should win Parent of the Year.
But regardless, the code was cracked, and that was what mattered. It was all I could do not to jump on the café table with my arms in the air. But cracking a code was one thing. We still had to figure out what my father meant.
“Widows, hermits, and twins...,” Huck mumbled. “These are people he talked to this summer, and he thinks one of them has the real Vlad Dracula ring, yeah?”
“Seems so, yes.”
“Well, who are they?”
I hadn’t read every journal entry yet. But now that the adrenaline of victory was wearing off, I realized I might know who one of them was. In fact, I was quite sure of it. I’d seen it in passing when I was flipping through the journal the first night, on the train.
