Chapter Three

Customers were sparse at three in the afternoon, which made it impossible for Rosalind to enter the restaurant without being spotted by the other two girls on duty. Fern smirked at her from the coffee station behind the large horseshoe-shaped counter that could seat up to forty guests. Rosalind ignored her, set the water pitcher at the cold beverage station, and continued moving forward. Dottie winked at her as she approached the front sideboard and paused in her collection of fresh linen napkins in order to signal a seat number. Four fingers extended from her left hand above the open linen drawer, while her right hand circled into a fist. Seat number forty.

Of course he’d be sitting there. He always sat there, in the very last chair in the northeast corner. The corner opposite the kitchen and farthest from the depot. The seat that afforded the nearest thing to privacy that could be found in the Harvey lunchroom. Which was why Rosalind had kept her gaze firmly directed toward the south when she’d entered. Yet she couldn’t avoid him forever. Customers must be served in a timely manner, after all.

Steeling her resolve not to be charmed, Rosalind grabbed a menu card, circled the sideboard, and headed down the east side of the counter. Grace and efficiency. Those were a Harvey Girl’s trademarks. She’d focus on efficiency today. The faster she took Caleb Durrington’s order, the faster she could escape his warm smile and affable manner.

As she approached, however, the oddest thing happened. He didn’t look up. He always looked up. Smiled. Greeted her by name. But not today. Even when she halted directly in front of him, he ignored her. Why would he ask for her by name only to ignore her? And why did his lack of attention rankle? He seemed far more interested in the letter lying on the counter than in her.

Good. She wanted him to lose interest in her. And she’d just keep reminding herself of that fact until the ache in her chest resolved itself.

“What can I get you to drink today, sir?”

He chuckled softly at something, still keeping his head bent over that letter. It must be quite something to hold him so enraptured that he failed to hear her ask for his order. She knew she shouldn’t peek but stole a quick glance at the paper anyway. He was making no effort to hide it, after all.

But what she saw when her gaze darted over the paper made it impossible to look away.

Squares and dots. Well, not really squares. Not all of them. Some were shaped like L’s, though they turned every which way. A few were angled. Other figures had three sides. About half had dots inside. The rest were empty.

No wonder he made no effort to hide his correspondence. It was written in hieroglyphs. Yet Mr. Durrington seemed to have no trouble deciphering the shapes. His finger followed the lines of symbols just as one would keep one’s place on a page filled with actual words.

Intrigued, she longed to ask him about it, but to do so would be highly improper, so she asked him the only question she could. “Do you care for coffee today, Mr. Durrington? Or something else?”

Finally he looked up, the remains of his quiet chuckle leaving a smile upon his face. Heavens, that smile did strange things to her equilibrium. And Callie was certainly right about his eyes. Rich brown, like the tea Rosalind preferred, sweetened with honey. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t noticed his eyes before. She had, but she usually avoided extended eye contact with male customers. Especially Mr. Durrington. She’d taken to mentally rehearsing menu options in her mind when serving him to stay focused on company business, but that crazy letter had distracted her, and now that she was caught in his gaze, she couldn’t seem to look away.

“It’s a pigpen cipher,” he said.

She blinked. “Excuse me?”

He pointed to the letter. “A pigpen cipher.” He turned his head as if considering the symbols for the first time. “I’m guessing it got its name from the opened and closed ‘pens’ with the occasional pig-like dot inside, though I’m not really sure. What I do know is that Freemasons used it a hundred years ago to keep their records and correspondence private.”

“Like a secret code?” Rosalind pressed her lips together. What was she doing? This was veering dangerously close to the edge of professional and dipping into the realm of personal. Yet before she could apologize and ask again for his drink order, he answered her question.

“Exactly.”

Why did he have to smile like that, like he found her exceedingly clever? A woman could come to crave such a smile.

“Here, let me show you.” He reached into the satchel that sat on the vacant seat beside him and pulled out a writing tablet.

He scooted his carefully arranged place setting aside and set the pad of paper directly between them. He drew a three-by-three grid in the top left corner, another in the right corner, then beneath those, he fashioned two large X’s. He added dots to the interior corners or lines of each square section of the second grid, then did the same at the inner angles formed by the crisscrossed lines of the second X. Then he put a letter of the alphabet in every grid square and triangle.

“I had a friend in law school who shared my love of puzzles. We ran across this cipher while researching a case that took place following the War Between the States. Union soldiers who were imprisoned in Confederate camps used this code to communicate.”

“Fascinating.” The whispered word fell from her lips without her consent.

“David and I memorized the figures and started utilizing the code with each other in short notes until we became proficient enough for longer items. It wasn’t of much use for note-taking in class, since drawing the figures takes considerably more time than regular penmanship, but it’s perfect for using in date books or anything else one wants to keep private. When we graduated, we agreed to carry on the tradition in our personal correspondence. We wouldn’t want our code skills to grow rusty.” He turned the tablet around so that the cipher key faced her. Then he placed the letter his friend had written beside it. “Give it a try,” he urged.

Rosalind’s gaze darted from the papers up to Mr. Durrington’s face. “I couldn’t. That’s your private correspondence.”

“David won’t mind. It’s mostly dry details about a property case he’s working on. Nothing personal.” He pushed the two papers to the far edge of the counter, directly under her nose. “Just the first line. Here.” He handed her the pencil he’d been using. “You can make notes at the bottom of the cipher page.”

She hesitated, then glanced over her shoulder. No one was paying her any mind. No new customers had arrived in her area. Maybe she’d have time to do a couple words. She’d already noticed a pattern in the symbols—a three-item block that appeared several times over the page. A common word. No repeated symbols, so each of the letters was distinct. Probably the or and. She checked the key. The first symbol was an angle pointing right. T. It must be the. But it didn’t appear in the first sentence.

Rosalind knew she shouldn’t engage with the challenge—it wasn’t proper Harvey Girl procedure—but her fingers picked up the pencil anyway. The puzzle was simply too intriguing to resist. A five-letter word sat at the top of the page. Most likely Caleb, Mr. Durrington’s given name. The L-shaped first symbol confirmed the word started with C. She wrote out the name, then moved on to the sentence beneath. She didn’t have time to verify each letter. Mr. Ledbetter could inspect the dining room at any moment. If he caught her . . .

She’d just have to be fast.

First word in the first sentence. Three letters. A mountain with a dot at its peak: Y. A box open on the left with a dot: O. You. Next word. Four letters, the end two were the same, and the first was the mirror image of the symbol for Y. Will. Square with dot: N. She recognized the next two symbols. Not. The next word was longer, started with B. Rosalind jumped to what she hoped was a logical conclusion. Believe. Another W word but with a table-shaped second letter: H. What. Next word had five letters, started with a backward L with a dot in the corner: J. This was a lawyer friend, right? Judge. The next grouping was probably the judge’s name. She couldn’t guess that and didn’t want to take the time to translate the long string, so she skipped it and called him X. The last three words were short and had familiar shapes. She jotted down the remainder, dropped the pencil, and scooted the paper back toward her customer.

You will not believe what Judge X has done now.

Her heart thumped as if she’d just run to the courthouse square and back. Partly due to the anxiety tied to the possibility of getting caught fraternizing with a customer, and partly due to the pride swelling in her chest over her accomplishment. Caleb Durrington was a highly educated man—a lawyer. Rosalind might work in an eatery, but she was no dullard. She’d been piecing her own clothing designs together for years, a craft that required mathematical precision, geometric arrangement, and an eye for detail. What were those, if not puzzle-solving skills?

Mr. Durrington stared at the paper for a moment, then slowly wagged his head from side to side. Rosalind’s heart raced faster, worried she’d done it wrong and made a fool of herself. But when he glanced up, it wasn’t disappointment she read in his features. Not charm or flirtation either. It was awe.

“And here I thought David and I were the clever ones. But you . . . you’re a natural. Your speed was astonishing!”

Rosalind felt a blush heat her cheeks. She offered a shrug, embarrassed by his praise even as his compliment slid into a secret, thirsty part of her soul that slurped it up like a cat lapping cream. “Well, I’m on duty, so I had to hurry. I guessed at most of it.”

“Intelligent, insightful guesses. You’ve surprised me, Miss Kemp.” He flashed one of those heart-stopping grins, the ones she’d been doing her best to avoid these past few months because they set off a riot of unwanted fluttering in her midsection. “I knew you to be a woman of many fine qualities, but you’ve been hiding more than pretty blue eyes behind those spectacles.”

Hiding. If he ever discovered how much she was hiding, all the puzzle-solving in the world wouldn’t preserve his good opinion.

Rosalind dropped her gaze and took a step back. She pasted on a bright, patently false smile and retreated behind her Harvey apron. “What can I get you to drink, Mr. Durrington?”

Her abrupt change in demeanor didn’t have the desired effect, however. Instead of resuming the light, professional relationship of customer and server as she’d signaled him to do, Caleb Durrington peered at her even more closely, as if he’d caught the scent of secrets lurking beneath her surface and decided to keep digging. Without a word, he picked up his cup from his saucer, turned it upside down, then set it back on the counter, tilting the mouth of the cup against the saucer.

Rosalind jerked her gaze from his hands to his face. He’d made the effort to figure out the Harvey cup code? Right side up meant coffee. Upside down inside the saucer meant hot tea. Upside down outside the saucer meant milk, and tilted meant . . .

“Iced tea, please.” No cheeky grin. No smug look of victory. He simply exuded a calm confidence that made her feel . . . safe.

Odd. A man with such an obvious propensity for solving puzzles should deepen her anxiety, not ease it. Yet here she stood, the knots in her belly loosening and the starch in her spine relaxing.

Then he smiled, his eyes going warm and gooey like cookies fresh from the oven. “And a piece of blackberry pie.”

Pie?

“Everything all right over here, Miss Kemp?”

Rosalind blinked as Mr. Ledbetter’s voice cut through the haze that had dulled her wits.

She smiled at her manager, who was striding over from his position at the cashier’s counter. “Absolutely, sir.” Drat. She’d lingered too long and roused his suspicion. Mr. Ledbetter harbored a kind soul, but he was a stickler for the rules. “Mr. Durrington has decided on blackberry pie.”

The manager drew to a halt and gave her a nod before casting a warning glance at Caleb.

Rosalind scurried off to fetch the pie and iced tea her customer had ordered, but her feet stuttered. When had she started thinking of him as Caleb?

Pull yourself together, Rosie. Just deliver the order, then you can keep your distance.

And that was what she did. Poured his tea without a word, delivered his pie with the most platonic of courtesy, then retreated to the west side of the horseshoe until Caleb Durrington took his leave.

She knew the precise moment he swiveled out of his chair and gained his feet. She might be across the lunchroom, but she was still acutely aware of every move he made. Including his long, slightly bowlegged stride that more closely resembled a cowhand than a man of letters. She released a breath when the door closed behind him. Hopefully, with him out of sight, she’d be able to get her mind back where it belonged.

Returning to his seat to clear away his dishes and redo the place setting, she snatched up his empty pie plate and fork, then reached for the napkin sporting a small purple smear of blackberry filling. The moment she lifted the napkin, however, she realized the truth. She wasn’t going to be able to put this man out of her mind as easily as she had hoped.

For on the counter, beside the generous monetary tip he’d left her, lay a folded sheet of paper, the top of which opened slightly when the weight of the cloth napkin was removed. Even before she reached for it, she could see the boxes and angles of the cipher symbols he’d taught her.

How on earth was she supposed to resist a man who left her a note penned in secret code?