51

Nikki’s first thought was that her fashion lessons were paying off. She had asked Wellington to meet her at Starbucks after the show—a convenient excuse to avoid the prospects of another night with Byron. When she arrived, she was pleased to see an untucked light-blue cotton shirt hanging loose over reasonably long khaki shorts. The kid wore sneakers without socks, but then again, they hadn’t worked on footwear yet.

The harsh lights and relative quiet of the Starbucks threw Nikki off stride. After the decibel volume in the bar, followed by the tunes she had cranked up on the way to the Starbucks in the Sebring, her ears were buzzing. Or maybe it was the gin and tonics catching up to her. Finney’s bizarre escape attempt had forced her to have one or two extras.

She decided that she needed a cappuccino before joining Wellington at the table. When she sat down opposite him, she realized that her first impression had been wrong. Most of Wellington’s shirt was still tucked in, and he wore a V-neck T-shirt underneath that screamed of the eighties. The poor boy’s instincts were all wrong.

Wellington looked up at her with bloodshot eyes, his hair sticking up from running his fingers through it. She wondered if maybe Finney’s antics had caused Wellington to hit the bottle too. He had a frantic look in his eyes, and Nikki noticed the chaotic pencil scratches on his normally neat tablet.

“You okay?” she asked.

“I can’t figure it out,” he confessed. He rubbed his face and looked ready to cry. “I’ve been working nonstop since the minute I saw Finney’s last message.”

Nikki reached over and turned the tablet so she could see it. Wellington had made his usual charts, but as far as she could tell, he had just been writing and erasing guesses, without figuring out a single letter. It looked like one of her sheets. The letters blurred a little, partially a result of the alcohol but also due in part to Nikki’s worsening eyesight. One of these days, she would have to get LASIK.

“Did you watch the show tonight?” Nikki asked.

Wellington nodded guiltily. “I did take a break for that.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that. I just wondered if you saw Finney try to get off the island in that kayak.”

“Yeah. Weird.”

“It’s definitely not like him,” Nikki agreed. “I’m worried about him. He didn’t look good. But then again, he was his usual ornery self when they questioned him afterward.” She slurped on her cappuccino and noticed Wellington stare. It wasn’t that loud.

“Something’s not right with Finney,” Wellington said. “We’ve got to break this code.”

Even through the haze, Nikki could tell that Wellington needed a break. “Maybe you ought to get a little sleep,” she suggested, thinking that maybe she could use some herself, “and start again in the morning.”

“I can’t sleep,” Wellington said emphatically. “Not until I figure this out.”

Can we say obsession? Nikki was no psychologist, but she was pretty sure that her boy was beyond the point of being productive. You couldn’t stare for hours at a page full of symbols and keep your focus. Her own limit was about fifteen minutes.

“You want to grab something to eat?” she suggested. “Maybe that would help.”

When Wellington turned down food, Nikki knew they were in big trouble. “What can I do to help?” she asked, trying not to sound despondent.

The question brought a look from Wellington that was hard to read. But if Nikki had to guess, she assumed he was thinking something like, I’ll never be that desperate. Eventually he shrugged. “Just give me a little more time.”

She tried to focus again on the incomprehensible code from chapter 4 sitting in front of her. She had glanced at it earlier in the day but didn’t really give it a second thought, assuming that Wellington would solve it with no problem. Earlier tonight, even when she was completely sober, the letters and numbers had made no sense. Now, with a buzz going, they practically ran together.

teAJ9EBQStsWoo5tvhhtt2N16

ad8tep130Y6671E8ptzt2f5DN

BCC5ra8eegO2Iid5ecq9

“Maybe it’s another Poe cipher,” Nikki suggested. “Didn’t he use letters and numbers and some other stuff?”

“He didn’t use numbers,” Wellington said flatly. “I tried breaking it down like a Poe cipher and got nowhere. Then I tried analyzing it like a substitution cipher and then a transposition cipher and then a combination of the two. One of the problems is that the message isn’t very long, so it’s harder to decipher. Plus, Finney didn’t just use the alphabet. He’s got small letters and capital letters and numbers, so it’s probable that the frequently used plaintext letters have more than one symbol representing them.” Wellington took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirttail, thereby solving one mystery for Nikki—why his shirt was half-untucked. “I just don’t know if this one is solvable.”

“Nonsense,” Nikki said. “Think about it.” She took a sip of her cappuccino, hoping it would chase the alcohol away. “If Finney didn’t think you could solve this chapter, he would have told you to skip to the next chapter in his last coded message.”

Wellington’s eyes brightened, and Nikki realized she had actually made a good point. Just like a sober person might. “You’re just too caught up in these little—” She motioned at the sheet in front of her, temporarily forgetting the name for those squiggle marks. What are they called? “You’re just all caught up in these cipher doohickeys,” she said. “Think about the big picture. What clues are in the book?”

Wellington pointed at the air as if lecturing an invisible class. “You’ve got a point. The cipher in the last chapter was incredibly hard—it took a hundred and fifty years to solve. But we solved it in a matter of minutes once we realized it was one of Poe’s ciphers that somebody else had already solved.”

“So what famous ciphers did he drop hints about in chapter 4?”

“That’s just it,” Wellington said. “I didn’t see any.”

Nikki tried to wrap her mind around this. They must be missing something obvious, something right under their noses. “What was chapter 4 about?”

“The Pharisees and lawyers challenged Christ to give them a sign that He was the Messiah,” Wellington responded as if he had been over this point a thousand times already. “Jesus gave them the sign of Jonah, saying that just like Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the big fish, Jesus would be three days and three nights in the ground and then would rise again.”

“I don’t suppose Jonah had any ciphers?”

Wellington trotted out an are-you-crazy? look.

“Okay, that might have been the alcohol,” Nikki admitted. “But I still think this is the right approach to solving this thing.”

“Judge Finney says in the chapter that the case for the Resurrection is the most compelling case ever presented to a jury. Then he spends most of the chapter giving a closing argument, just like a lawyer would in court, arguing the historical proof that Christ rose on the third day, just like He predicted.”

“So what’s that got to do with a code?” Nikki asked.

For the next hour, they kicked around that very question. Eventually Wellington speculated himself out and Nikki’s heavy eyelids got the better of her. She fell asleep with her head resting on an arm propped on the table. She woke when a door behind her opened and let in a muggy breeze. She gave Wellington a sheepish smile. The kid was scribbling on his pad again.

“Do you need me to drive you home?” Wellington asked. She could see the concern etched on his face and sensed that a lecture on drinking and driving was coming.

“I’m fine,” Nikki replied. “It’s just been a long day, that’s all.”

Wellington looked skeptical.

“Do you want me to recite the alphabet backward?” Nikki asked.

“Sure.”

Halfway through her slow but nearly flawless performance, Wellington acquiesced.

“Be careful,” he said.