“And inside?
“Blank page after blank page.”
“It could be some kind of invisible ink,” Gus said. “If so, you’ve got to do something to make it appear. If that’s the case I can’t help you.”
“I don’t think it is,” O’Hara said. “We’ve already tried a couple of ideas, and the pages just get dirty. Whatever the clue is, it’s here.”
Gus picked up the paper and looked at it again. “It’s by Edgar Allan Poe, which seems appropriate for the game,” Gus said. “But what’s this title?”
“The One That No One Has Actually Read,” O’Hara said. “I have researched every word Poe ever wrote, and there’s nothing with a title anything like this.”
“Of course there isn’t,” Gus said, breaking into a broad smile. “Because this isn’t a title. It’s a description.”
“We did think of that,” she said. “But what good does it do us? I mean, sure, we can rule out the things we read in school-‘The Raven,’ ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’ But he wrote dozens of stories and God knows how many poems and a lot of them are pretty obscure. Where would we start?”
“With ‘actually,’ ” Gus said.
“I don’t understand.”
“The title isn’t ‘The One That No One Has Read,’ ” Gus said. “It’s ‘The One That No One Has Actually Read.’ Which means that it’s something people refer to as if they’ve read it, even though they haven’t.”
“And this means something to you,” O’Hara said.
“It sure does,” Gus said. “Would to you, too, if you’d ever worked as a private detective. Because people who think they’re smart always like to suggest that the solution is much easier than you know it has to be. If you’re searching for something, they want to suggest that the reason you’re not finding it is because you’re looking too hard, and not in the most obvious place. And when they do that, they always make reference to ‘The Purloined Letter.’ ”
She looked at him blankly. “I’m thinking that’s a Poe story.”
“It is,” Gus said. “Although I’ve never read it, either. Nobody has. But we all know the solution-that the reason the police were never able to find the stolen letter was because the thief knew they’d look in every elaborate hiding place, but they’d never notice it if it was left out in plain sight.”
“That’s ridiculous,” O’Hara said. “The police always check the obvious places first.”
“Maybe police work was different back then,” Gus said. “Or maybe it’s a lousy story. That would certainly explain why no one bothers to read it. But the solution is famous, and that’s what this book title refers to.”
“So it’s saying that Macklin Tanner has been in plain sight all along?” she said. “But that doesn’t make any sense at all. He’s not like a letter you can stuff in an envelope. If he was at his home or at the office, someone would have noticed him a long time ago.”
“Then maybe this isn’t the clue you think it is,” Gus said.
“It has to be,” O’Hara said.
“What else can you tell me about the book?” Gus said.
“Just what’s in the picture.”
Gus squinted down at the drawing of the volume’s spine. “What are these squiggles?”
“Those aren’t squiggles,” she said. “They’re numbers.”
“Not these numbers.” Gus looked again. “They can’t be.”
“They are,” she said. “Why can’t they?”
“Don’t you know anything about the Dewey decimal system?” he said, trying to mask his impatience at her ignorance.
“I know it’s how books are classified in libraries,” she said.
“Then I suppose you also know that the numbers aren’t assigned randomly,” Gus said. “That they have specific and precise meanings.”
“Sure. I guess. I mean, they’d have to, or what’s the point?”
“Exactly,” Gus said. “What is this number you scrawled on the Poe book’s spine?”
O’Hara started to answer, then stopped herself. She took the paper back, studied it closely, and then put it down again. “Six-eighty-two-point-seven MTN. Does that mean something?”
“I don’t know yet, but I can tell you exactly what it doesn’t refer to,” Gus said. “The classification for literature, which is the only Dewey designation that makes sense for this book, is eight hundred. If I remember correctly, American Literature in English is classified in the eight-tens. Fiction, I believe, would put it in the eight- thirteens. So this book would be classified as eight-thirteen-point-something Po. But Poe might not be classified with the literature. It could be considered fiction, in which case it wouldn’t have a number at all. The spine would just say FIC and then the first three letters of his last name-which in this case would be his entire last name.”
O’Hara felt her heart starting to pound. This could be something. “So what do these numbers mean?”
“I might be tempted to say nothing,” Gus said. “After all, we have no idea if the programmer responsible for this part of the game knew anything about the Dewey decimal system or if he just remembered there were supposed to be numbers on the spine of a library book. But those letters at the end suggest that’s wrong.”
O’Hara looked at them again. “MTN,” she said. “Macklin Tanner.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Gus said. “Which means that those numbers have to be a map to where he is.”
“So what is six-eighty-two-point-seven?” she said.
Gus got out of his chair and walked across the office to the large desk that sprawled in the exact center of the window. He passed his hand through one of those light beams and the panel slid open to reveal the face of the computer. “Do you really think I’m such a nerd I’d know the entire Dewey decimal system?”
There didn’t seem to be a way to answer that would actually move the conversation forward, so O’Hara didn’t say anything. Gus started typing onto the computer screen.
“Okay,” he said after the display loaded. “The six hundreds are all about technology.”
“That doesn’t do us any good,” O’Hara said. “We already know that Tanner is a technological genius.”
“But not this kind,” Gus said. “Computer stuff all starts in the triple zeroes, because the entire system was developed a hundred years before Bill Gates was born, and there was no way to squeeze a new world of publications into existing categories.”
“So what kind of technology are we talking about?” O’Hara said.
“The kind that existed in the nineteenth century,” Gus said. “In terms of the six-eighties, we’re looking at ‘manufacture for specific use.’ ”
“How specific?”
“Well, six-eighty-five is leather, fur, and related items. Six-eighty-four is furnishing and home workshops.”
“And six-eighty-two?”
He checked the display, then checked it again. “Small forge work,” he said. “Blacksmithing.”
Chapter Twenty-one
As the door closed behind Detective O’Hara, Gus settled back into his desk chair and felt a familiar rush of satisfaction. He had grown tired of so much about the detective business, but he could never get sick of the thrill that came when the puzzle pieces finally began to fall together, when what had been a random set of facts and actions suddenly coalesced into a pattern.
It was true that they still had no idea exactly what the clue was telling them, what kind of connection might exist between Macklin Tanner’s whereabouts and the art and industry of blacksmithing, but that would be a matter of grunt work, not inspiration. Now that they knew where to look, Shawn and Jules could start searching for any connection either Tanner or anyone who knew him had with metalwork.
That thought sent a little pang of jealousy through him. Shawn and Jules were going to have all the fun. They were going to track this clue down to its ultimate meaning, they were going to find Tanner and catch the bad
