CHAPTER 55

The next day at school, I didn’t wait for Jameson to find me. I found him. “What if the numbers aren’t dates?” I said.

That got me a slow, winding, wicked smile. “Heiress, you took the words right out of my mouth.”

I half expected to end up back on the roof, but this time Jameson took me to one of the “learning pods” in the STEM Center. Basically, it was a small, square room where the walls, ceiling, and floor were all painted with whiteboard material. There were two white rolling chairs in the center of the room, and nothing else.

Eli started to follow us inside, and Jameson took that as his cue to run a hand down my back and bring his lips to the spot where my neck met my jawline. I arched my neck, and Eli went bright red and stepped out of the room.

Jameson shut the door—and went to work. There were five dry-erase markers attached to the back of each of the rolling chairs. Jameson grabbed one of the markers and began writing on the wall directly in front of the chair. “Eight, three, seven, five,” he said.

I rattled off the next four numbers from memory as he continued writing. “Nine, seven, four, eight.”

Writing the numbers without the dashes freed up countless possibilities. “A passcode?” I asked Jameson. “A PIN number?”

“Not enough digits in either of them for a phone number or a zip code.” Jameson stepped back, sat down in one of the chairs, and pushed off. “An address. A combination.”

I flashed back to the moment when he and I had stepped off a helicopter, with a different sequence of numbers. The air between us had felt electric—just like it did now. We’d been flying high—and thirty seconds later, he’d gone cold.

But this time was different, because this time we were on the same page. This time there were no expectations. I was in control. “Coordinates,” I said. That had been one of Jameson’s suggestions, the last time around.

He turned the chair and, with a push of his heels, came skidding back to me. “Coordinates,” he repeated, eyes alight. “Nine-seven-four-eight. Assuming the numbers are already in the correct order, nine has to be the number of degrees. Ninety-seven is too big.”

I thought back to my fifth-grade geography class. “Latitude and longitude run from negative ninety to ninety.”

“You two don’t know the valence of any of the numbers, obviously.”

Jameson and I whipped our heads back toward the door of the pod. Xander was standing there. I could see Eli, still red-faced, behind him. Xander stepped into the pod, shut the door, and, with no hesitation whatsoever, leaped forward to flying-tackle Jameson to the ground.

“How many times do I have to tell you?” the youngest Hawthorne demanded. “This is my game. No one is solving this without me.” He plucked the marker from Jameson’s hand and stood. “That was a friendly tackle,” he assured me. “Mostly.”

Jameson rolled his eyes. “We don’t know the valence of the numbers.” He echoed the last thing Xander had said pre-tackle. “And we also don’t know which is latitude and which is longitude, so nine degrees could be nine degrees north, south, west, or east.”

“Eight-three-seven-five.” I grabbed another marker off one of the chairs and underlined the numbers on the board in different combinations. “The degrees could be eight or eighty-three.”

Jameson smiled. “North, south, east, or west.”

“How many total possibilities?” Xander mused.

“Twenty-four,” Jameson and I answered at the exact same time.

Xander gave us a look. “Is there something going on here that I should be aware of?” he asked, gesturing between the two of us.

Jameson shared a brief look with me. “Nothing of note.” He said nothing like it was something.

“None of my business!” Xander declared. “But for the record: You lovebirds are incorrect. There are way more than twenty-four possible locations here.”

Jameson narrowed his eyes. “I can do the math, Xan.”

“And I can humbly inform you, big brother, that there are three different ways of listing coordinates.” Xander grinned. “Degrees, minutes, seconds. Degrees, decimal minutes. And decimal degrees.”

“With only four digits,” Jameson insisted, “we’re probably looking at decimal degrees.”

Xander winked at me. “But probably is never good enough.”

“Pacific Ocean,” Jameson called out, and I wrote the location next to the designated coordinates. “Indian Ocean. Bay of Bengal.”

Xander picked up right where his brother had left off. “Arctic Ocean. Arctic Ocean again!”

Both of them were entering coordinates into a map search. My brain kicked up a gear with each location they called out. The Arctic. That couldn’t be where this clue was supposed to point us, could it? And that was assuming that these numbers were coordinates at all.

“Antarctic Ice Shield,” Jameson offered. “Times four.”

By the time we were finished, the number of actual, non-arctic land locations on our list was much smaller than I’d expected. There were two in Nigeria, one in Liberia, one in Guinea, and one in…

“Costa Rica.” I said out loud, unsure at first why that location was the one that had jumped out to me, but a moment later, I remembered the last time I’d read the words Costa Rica—in the binder.

“You have that look on your face,” Jameson told me, his lips quirking upward. “You know something.”

I closed my eyes and focused on the memory, not his lips. Skye’s bequest had led to True North, one of the Hawthorne family’s many vacation homes—mine, now. I tried to remember the pages I’d flipped through the night of the auction. Patagonia. Santorini. Kauai. Malta. Seychelles…

“Cartago, Costa Rica.” I opened my eyes. “Tobias Hawthorne owned a house there.” I pulled out my phone and looked up the latitude and longitude of Cartago, then turned my phone’s screen toward the boys. “It’s a match.”

I tried to remember what the Cartago house looked like, but all I could see in my mind’s eye was the surrounding vegetation and flowers, lush and bright and larger than life.

“We need to go to Costa Rica.” Xander didn’t exactly sound put out about that.

“I can’t,” I said, frustrated. I’d had to fight to go to Colorado. There was no way that Oren and Alisa would sign off on international travel—not when I could only spend two more nights away from Hawthorne House this month.

“Xander’s not going anywhere, either.”

For a second time, I found myself turning toward the doorway of the pod. Thea stood there.

“Are you just letting anyone in?” I called to Eli.

The reply I got was muffled, but I made out the words “not my job.”

“Rebecca needs you,” Thea told Xander. For the first time since I’d met her, she wasn’t wearing any makeup. She looked almost mortal. “She didn’t come to school today. It’s her mom. I know it is. Rebecca won’t answer my calls, so it’s going to have to be you.” It was clearly killing Thea to ask him, but there she was.

I expected Xander to put up a fight. How many times had he said that this was his game? But Xander just stared at Thea for a moment, then turned back to Jameson. “I guess you’re going to Cartago.”

Jameson glanced at me. I was fully prepared for him to ask me for another plane. Instead, the expression on his face shifted. “Can you call Libby and Nash?”