At five o'clock Tess and I walked through the inside passageways to the front desk of Silver Acres. Tess wouldn't let me go alone. The gentleman who had been there had left and the lobby area was deserted.
I opened the desk drawer of the receptionist and pulled out the ring of keys. I was becoming an expert at clandestine operations. The outside door leading in to the lobby was locked, so Tess posted herself as a sentry where she could watch the inside corridors. She signaled an all clear.
I walked swiftly over to the door of Carol's office while searching for her door key. I missed it my first time through the keys on the ring so I repeated the process. I still couldn't spot it. Cursing myself for my degenerating eyesight, I started to examine the keys carefully, one at a time.
I glanced at Tess. She subtly but frantically signaled to me. Someone approached. I quickly moved the few steps to the reception desk and tossed the key ring and the notebook into the drawer, just as Harriet walked into view.
Tess greeted Harriet, effusively, standing so that Harriet had her back to me, but I was too noisy; she turned and saw me, just as I shut the drawer.
“Hi, Harriet,” I said, trying to appear nonchalant. “I guess I'll see you Wednesday at the bridge club.”
I immediately launched into an explanation of why I was still in the bridge club.
“Excuse my ignorance,” Harriet said, “but why wouldn't you still be in the bridge club?”
It took us a few sentences to sort out the fact that Harriet didn't even know I had been evicted from Silver Acres. I thought the whole world knew.
“I'm looking for stamps,” Harriet said, after we cleared that up. “I need to mail a letter, but the gift shop is closed and I hoped they would have stamps at the front desk.”
“I have a stamp,” I said, reaching for my purse. I always carry two or three with me. I fumbled in my purse, finally came up with a stamp and gave it to her. I refused payment and soon she departed back along the corridor.
“I hope she doesn't tell Carol what she saw,” Tess said, worriedly.
“Well, since I made a fool of myself,” I said, “thinking the whole world knew about my martyrdom, who knows what she'll do? And by the way, I couldn't find the key to Carol's office.”
Tess helped me check the key ring and after some serious searching it finally dawned on me that the key was no longer there.
“Carol wants to make sure you don't get into her office again,” Tess said.
“So what do I do with her notebook?”
Tess opened drawers of the receptionist's desk until she found a large manila envelope. She slid the notebook inside, fastened the envelope with the metal clips provided and wrote “Carol” on the outside. Then she shoved the envelope into Carol's mail slot on top of the desk and said, “There.”
“She won't know who found it or where.”
“Do you want to put 'From Lillian, with love,' on the envelope?
“No.”
“Then this will become one of the mysteries of her life.”
CHAPTER 23
I took a walk with King down Albert's road first thing Monday morning. At least that custom didn't have to change. Then I struggled with Carol's code during the time when I would have been taking the water aerobics class, had I still been at Silver Acres.
Actually, before I tried to break the code I re-read The Gold-Bug , by Edgar Allan Poe, because it contains a beautiful example of how to decode a cipher, as Poe called it. Fortunately, I had anticipated the need for Poe's story; one of the books I had checked out of the library contained his works.
Unfortunately, it didn't help me very much. Carol's code consisted of 10 lines of letters. In each line there were 14 letters, with spaces after the fourth and ninth letters. The top line looked like this:
The lines were suspiciously similar to each other so I decided to disregard the spaces. Each line couldn't possibly consist of one four-letter word followed by two five-letter words.
Like Poe's treasure hunter, I counted how often each character appeared. The counts ranged from seven to 20, but only ten different characters were used, not the 17 or 18 that I would expect in a coded message of this length. It didn't look like the English alphabet. I couldn't assume that the character with the count of 20 was E because there were also counts of 18, 16 and three 15's. And I couldn't find enough repetitions of the same three characters to pick out common words like “the” and “and.”
There were some numbers on the page, also, and I wondered if they were a key to the code. However, they looked like a telephone number: seven digits, with a dash between the third and fourth digit, and after trying for a few minutes to connect them with the code in some way, I gave up and decided they were what they appeared to be.
After several hours I had achieved exactly nothing. I took a break for lunch and then decided to give my brain a change of pace by attempting to solve Mark's oddball problem. Twelve balls, balance scale, one ball heavier or lighter, three weighings. That should be simple for me.
At first I floundered. If I weighed six balls against six, one side would be lighter. So what? I knew that already. And I knew from experience that problems like this couldn't be solved with straight-line logic.
By trial and error I approached the solution. Split the 12 balls into three groups of four. Weigh group A against group B. If they balance, the oddball is in group C, so all but four balls have been eliminated. Otherwise, it is in group A or B but its relative weight will be known when it is found.
So far so good. Now came the tricky part. Assuming the oddball was in group A or B, the second weighing demanded creative thinking. With a balance scale one tended to think in even numbers, but I discovered that this didn't work. I had to remove three balls from the second weighing, for example one from group A and two from group B. I replaced one of the removed Group B balls with a Group C ball to keep the same number of balls on each side of the balance scale.
Once I hit on this approach the solution came quickly. I wrote it out in all its ramifications to show to Mark. And to prove I wasn't yet senile. Invigorated, I returned to Carol's code. Perhaps straight-line thinking wouldn't work in solving this, either. I assumed that she was writing in English, but what if she wasn't?
The only language I could think of that might contain as few as ten letters in a typical piece of text was Hawaiian, which has place names like Aiea, but I doubted that Carol knew the Hawaiian language.
What if it wasn't a language at all? What if it was…numbers? Of course! We use a base-ten number system, which means that there are ten digits. Why? Probably because we have ten fingers and ten toes. Each of Carol's ten letters must represent a digit, from 0 to 9. The fact that the letters were lined up in nice neat columns lent credence to this argument.
My euphoria didn't last long. Even if I was right, even if I could assign a digit to each letter, what would it mean? I did make an attempt to assign digits to letters. Maybe one column was composed of dates. No-there weren't the regular patterns of numbers necessary for days, months and years.
I did discover two patterns. The numbers (I now assumed they were numbers) in the third column started with just three different letters, but in no particular order. And the numbers in the first column started with just two different letters.
The first four numbers in the first column started with P and the other six started with S. Although this column might consist of numbers in sequence, they definitely weren't consecutive. Based on the sequential assumption, I could probably determine that some letters represented digits higher than others. For example, S was probably one higher than P. But by this time I was tired of the whole thing.
Well, Lillian, I thought, you've had your fun. Maybe now it's time to get on with the business of living. Whatever that meant. The first thing I did was to phone Tess to find out how the water aerobics class had gone. At least that was my excuse.
