At once, Wolf relaxed and seemed to forget about his familial troubles. “Oh, I could go on for ages! It was built in 1929…”
As Wolf prattled on, my attention wandered, ping-ponging between the man at the bar and the man at his table across the restaurant.
By the time Wolf released me from his company, the afternoon faded into a purple evening. My stomach protruded far past my rib cage, due to the many courses of extravagant appetizers, filling entrees, and lush desserts that Wolf had ordered throughout the course of the meal. I felt as if I’d never need to eat again. I also felt a bit sick.
Evelyn wasn’t in the room when I returned to it. Part of me was grateful, since I was in no condition to go another round with her. The other part of me wished I could have my best friend back, without her cantankerous mood.
I called the front desk and asked them to send something up to settle my stomach. A few minutes later, room service delivered fresh tea steeped with real ginger root. I sipped it in the bath and let the rising steam settle my stomach.
Once in bed, I felt well enough to do a little research. With my laptop perched on my things and the journal I’d found in the alleyway—its pages now dry—off to the side, I delved into various websites about simple ciphers and codes. Most of them involved substituting the letters of the alphabet with alternate letters. The simple key to decoding it was to determine how the letters corresponded to one another.
A Caesar shift, for instance, was relatively easy to break. The code replaced each letter by shifting it right or left a certain number of spaces along the alphabet. Once you figured out one letter, you could break the entire code.
From the look of the journal, I guessed the writer had used a Caesar shift, but no matter how much I fiddled with the journal entries, I couldn’t figure out the code. Some letters matched to a certain shift, but others didn’t. Infuriated, I cast the journal aside.
I examined what I had written down already. I’d managed to complete a third of a single sentence. So far, it read I as on i e ei in e.
That was it. Just a few letters decoded. Grumpy, I almost crumpled the paper and threw it away. Then I noticed another pattern in the phrase. I guessed at the letters. I as on ith the ei in e.
“With,” I muttered, filling in the fourth word. “W. Was.”
I was on with the ei in e.
I stared at the letters I had yet to decode, forcing my head to fill in the blanks.
“I was h…” I muttered, scribbling hastily. “I was b… bor… born! I was born with the devil in me!”
The completed phrase shot out of my mouth from memory, not because I had deciphered the remainder of the sentence. It was a quote, not the journal writer’s original work, and I knew exactly who had first put those words on paper:
H.H. Holmes, otherwise known as America’s first serial killer.
7
When Evelyn crept into the loft later that night, her gentle footsteps woke me from slumber. I unstuck my cheek from the journal’s pages and wiped drool from my chin. Evelyn didn’t notice as I sat up. In the darkness, she silently removed her boots, coat, and top sweater. Then she snuck toward me to get a towel from the closet. When she noticed me sitting upright, she yelped and dropped the towel in a heap.
“Bloody hell,” she said, bending to retrieve her fallen linen. “I didn’t realize you were awake.”
“I wasn’t.”
“I tried to be quiet.”
“I’m a light sleeper.”
She cleared her throat, unsure of what to say. “Nice day today. Weather-wise.”
“Hm-hmm.” I stared her down. She wasn’t getting off the hook that easy.
“A little warmer,” she went on. “No rain. I hate cold rain.” She forced a laugh. “I guess I don’t know why I live in London then. Christ, this is torture—” Evelyn sank onto the foot of the bed and looked up at me from under her long lashes. “Jack, I’m sorry, okay? I’ve been a complete arse the last few days, and it has nothing to do with you.”
I crossed my arms. “What does it have to do with?”
She glanced past me. “It’s nothing. It’s this dumb wedding. I’ve never been more stressed in my life.”
“Really? Not even when you saved me from a serial killer last year?”
I’d never forget the night Evelyn pulled me from inevitable death. Sure, I’d identified the person pretending to be this century’s Jack the Ripper, but Evelyn was the one who actually detained the culprit. Evelyn faced enormous challenges every day for her job, so I hardly believed her when she claimed the wedding as the source of her foul behavior.
“You know what I mean,” she said.
“No, I don’t.”
“It’s different,” Evelyn claimed. “Doing that for you—it’s what I do every day for Wagner. I protect people. But this—dealing with my family all day long—it’s different.”
“If you say so.”
She lowered her voice. “I wouldn’t lie to you, Jack—” She caught sight of the journal and yanked it out from under my pillow. “Doing a little light reading, are we?”
I squared my shoulders and lifted my chin. “I’ve been decoding it.”
“Of course you have. And?”
“You actually want to know?” I drew back, suspicious. “What happened to turning it over to the police?”
Evelyn, sighing, flipped through the journal pages. “I should have learned by now that you do what you want when it comes to your investigations, regardless of what I think of your actions.”
“That’s not true.”
She gave me a look.
“Fine, it’s not entirely true.”
“I shouldn’t have yelled at you,” she admitted. “But I’m scared that you’ll do something like this one day, and you won’t get away with it.”
I squeezed her pinky finger. “It’s just a journal, Ev.”
“Is it?”
“Well, it’s a journal that might belong to
