Wade and the Scorpion’s Claw. Tony Abbott

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      “It’s a cipher, but I don’t know how it works yet,” Becca said.

      “I’ll tell you!” Lily bounced up, tugged her phone from the charger, and immediately started tapping on its screen.

      “How do you even know what to search for?” I asked.

      Lily snorted. “Because while your brain is going ‘huh?’ mine is going ‘aha!’”

      I glanced over my shoulder. Darrell and Dad were loading up their trays.

      “It’s called a tabula recta,” said Lily. “It’s a ‘letter square,’ created by a cryptological guy named Trithemius in the sixteenth century.” She flipped her phone around and widened an image with a swipe of her fingers. It was almost identical to the hand-inked square Becca had found in the diary.

      “You did it again, Lily,” I said.

      She gave a little bow. “Trithemius’s square includes twenty-four cipher alphabets, so each time you code a letter—say L, for Lily—you give it a different letter. It’s nearly impossible to figure out without the key word. Trithemius was all about improving codes.”

      Dad and Darrell wove through the food court with two trays full of food. I trotted over to help and noticed that Darrell’s eyes were red. I knew right away that he and my dad had had a time-out.

      “Until we get to New York, we’re not going to make much headway,” Dad was saying.

      “I get it,” said Darrell. “I just wish it were all happening faster. I keep thinking of Mom in some dark place with no food—”

      “You can’t go there, Darrell,” Dad said. “You’ll only twist yourself up in knots, and we don’t know anything real yet. Look, let’s eat; then we’ll call Terence Ackroyd, all of us. Get the latest. Okay?”

      “Good. Yeah. Let’s do that.” Darrell settled his tray in the middle of our table. While he stuffed a pineapple spear into his mouth, Becca showed him and Dad the letter square and one of the passages.

      Darrell snorted. “Beefy kahillik buffwuzz ifgabood?”

      “I think you added some letters there, but either way, without the key word, it means nothing,” Becca said.

      “Unless you’re an ifgabood,” he said.

      Aside from the funny nonwords, Darrell wasn’t into it. He calls ciphers “word math,” which is actually a clever way of describing them. Darrell doesn’t plod through stuff. He’s an improviser. Tennis. Guitar solos. He has to jump from one thing to another, one thought to another, one move to another, just to compete. All that moving sometimes makes him hard to follow and jumpy.

      Sometimes it makes him plain brilliant.

      Dad perused the diary. “Eleven passages. One for each of the other relics …”

      “I think so,” Becca said, twisting her lips as she often did when she was deep into translating. “We have to find the key words, but I don’t think they’ll come from the diary. I think they’re out there. In the world. We just have to be smart enough to find them.”

      “Good thing we’ve got such a smarty-pants like you in our gang,” said Lily, winking at her.

      Becca smiled. “Thanks, but you better save the compliments, at least for now. Breaking the code is going to be super challenging.”

      The rest of our brunch-lunch-dinner passed pretty much in silence. I could tell from Darrell’s dark looks that he was going where my dad had told him not to go. Thinking about his mother trapped in a cold dark place with no light, no heat, no food … now I was doing it.

      Finally, Dad keyed in Terence Ackroyd’s number, and we all went quiet. He was about to put it on speaker when it apparently went to voice mail. He hung up without leaving a message and looked at his watch. “It’s nighttime there. Maybe he’s out. He’ll call back.” He stood abruptly. He scanned the concourse in both directions, looking for what, I wasn’t sure. Teutonic Knights? I glanced around, too. No one seemed overly suspicious. Which, of course, made me more suspicious.

      “Okay, team, good lunch,” he said, trying to smile but not quite making it. “We need to keep moving.”

      I got what he was doing. Dad had done this my entire life—taking all the danger and scary stuff into himself so that no one else would worry or feel bad or be afraid.

      If only it were that easy.