After Brineesha said grace and offered up a prayer for those who’d lost loved ones in the attack, we passed the food around. No one really seemed to have an appetite, not even Tony or Ralph.
The meal was uneventful and we decided to wait until later for dessert.
After we left the table, Ralph and I went to his basement for a little privacy.
He and Brineesha had a one-room apartment down here, where Brin’s mom had stayed with them before she died late last summer.
Lien-hua spent some time here recovering after she was attacked by Richard Basque in April. Brin was a nurse, so rather than stay at my house, it had made sense to have Lien-hua stay where Brin could help her if necessary. Also, the basement had access from the driveway so she hadn’t had to deal with the stairs.
Using my laptop, I looked for anything relating to the Latin phrase—even excerpts of it—but didn’t come up with anything.
Ralph took the opposite approach and searched for Tessa’s translation online to see if it was a quote from somewhere.
Nothing.
It might not appear anywhere. It could have just been written by someone to taunt you.
Yes, that was a possibility.
I heard footsteps on the stairs. Tessa’s gait. “Can I come down?”
“What is it?” I said.
“Did you solve it yet?”
“Not yet, but—”
“I’ve been thinking about it. I might have something for you. Can I come down or do we have to do this whole talking-to-each-other-up-the-stairs thing?”
I looked at Ralph, who shrugged. “Come on down,” I told my daughter.
She joined us in the basement. Ralph had his weights set up in the corner of the room and she took a seat on the weight bench.
“The language of the Church is Latin,” she said. “Maybe it’s something from one of their catechisms or the Vatican archives . . . or . . .” Her voice faded out as she got caught up in her thoughts. “With the whole skull deal maybe it’s an inscription on a sculpture or something. You might want to have your team search medieval books or writings from the Church. . . .”
My cell rang.
Angela’s ringtone.
“Hold that thought.” I answered the phone. “What do you have, Angela?”
“Nothing is coming up for the phone number that the text came from.”
Why didn’t that surprise me. “So whoever’s behind this has found a way to send texts from numbers that aren’t his?”
“Unfortunately, that’s not too difficult. For less than ten dollars you can download apps that’ll do it. I’ll search for mnemonics and look a little more closely to see if I can decipher the origin of the text.”
“Good. Thanks.”
When we hung up Ralph said, “Anything?”
“Not yet.” I turned to Tessa. “You were saying?”
“It might be lyrics from a song or a refrain from a poem. Could even be something contemporary.”
“Wouldn’t they show up online?”
“Maybe,” she acknowledged. “But it could be that someone translated the phrase from English into Latin and that would mean they might have used a slightly different word order or syntax. So, the lyrics might not have come up if you searched for them with those specific words.”
“It would be some pretty dark lyrics, don’t you think?” Ralph said.
She shrugged. “Not really.”
“Any idea on bands?” I asked her.
“I mean, House of Blood or maybe Death by Suzie might have some lyrics like that, but I know most all of their songs, so . . . probably not. Maybe Boomerang Puppy—they actually have a whole song in Latin. The phrase isn’t in it, but who knows? It could be there’s a song out there that I don’t know about. I’ll do some checking.”
She already had her phone out. “And we need to send out an inquiry into the Latin underground.”
She’d gone through this with me before. Over the last decade there’d been a resurgence of Latin on the Web: discussions, videos, podcasts, all in Latin. An essentially dead language was being revived and revitalized by Latin geeks online.
“Tessa, let’s say someone didn’t know Latin as well as you do and was translating from the English into Latin, or vice versa. Can you come up with some other phrases—”
“That could have been translated that way.”
“That’s what I’m thinking, yes.”
“So, you’re officially asking me to help you with a case?”
“It’s not exactly a case, it’s just—”
She patted her hand against the air to stop me. “Sure. Let’s just pretend it’s important.”
Some time ago I’d given her the nickname Raven, partly because of her interest in Poe and partly because, with her black hair and untamed imagination, she made me think of a free-spirited bird. And now the nickname slipped out. “That’s not what I mean, Raven, I . . .”
“No, it’s cool. I get it, Agent Powers.”
“Agent Powers, huh?”
She shared a look with Ralph.
I let them have their fun.
Tessa retreated upstairs to look into the Latin underground, and I called Angela back to have her team do image searches on skulls, album and CD covers, different translations of the Latin—and to contact the Vatican just in case my daughter was right about their catechisms or archives.
“Whoever sent that text to you knew how to cover his tracks,” Angela told me. “I wasn’t able to find out exactly where it came from. It was routed through a carrier in North Carolina, but the GPS seems to have come from the DC area.”
“So North Carolina or DC?”
“There are digital signatures that point to both. That’s what I’m saying. That’s why it stuck out to me.”
“Interesting.”
“And that’s not all. Lacey has been busy. Remember the list of words that the numbers in the column of the book might spell out mnemonically?”
“Yes.”
“And one of them was Meck Dec?” She sounded like I should know what that was referring to.
“Yes.”
“That’s our link.”
“What’s our link? Meck Dec? What does that mean?”
“The Mecklenburg Declaration.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“I hadn’t either, but Lacey dug it up. Before the actual Declaration of Independence was written, a year earlier, back in 1775, the people in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina—where Charlotte is located—well, they wrote up their own declaration of independence and had a local tavern owner deliver it to DC. The stories are a little conflicted from there on out, but apparently he completed his trip but the declaration was rejected. He returned to Charlotte and became something of a folk hero. Captain Jack. You know, like in Pirates of the Caribbean. But he was a tavern owner, not a quirky, fey yet gorgeous pirate.”
“Gotcha.” I’d almost forgotten how much Angela, who is single, is in love with Johnny Depp. “So what happened to this declaration?”
“It was destroyed in a fire, although there was an alleged copy of it printed in 1819 in the Raleigh Register.”
“Alleged?”
“Some of the phrases are so close to what’s found in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence that some people think he plagiarized it, others think the version printed was a fake. In any case, in Charlotte they take it all pretty seriously. They even celebrate May twentieth, the day it was signed, as Meck Dec Day.”
That gave us three investigative threads that led to North Carolina: the stolen Colonial weaponry; the numbers scribbled in the book, if they really were referring to the Mecklenburg Declaration; and the origin of the text message.
She said, “I’m going to forward you the list of words that can be made from the phone number you sent me. I think one of them will catch your eye.”
“Which one is that?”
“Trust me. You’ll know it when you see it.”
She ended the call and a few seconds later her list of words arrived.
Of the ones that actually contained some meaningful combination of letters, I found gam-back, ham-cab-5, I-coca-a-5, and more, but it only took a second or two for my eyes to land on the one that made the most sense.
4-26-2225
I-am-back
I showed it to Ralph.
“What are you thinking?
“I’m thinking it’s time to call Margaret. We may need to take a road trip to North Carolina.”