It wasn’t much.
If there was a code hidden in them, she hadn’t cracked it. She’d put them in order of sending date and tried every combination she could think of to find a pattern. The first letter of every city from which they were sent. The first letter of every state. Letters turned to numbers, zip codes turned to letters. She’d scoured every nuance of every picture. The photos seemed entirely random, as if Siofra hadn’t taken any care in picking the images. Some were of the local attractions, some promotional postcards from restaurants where she’d probably eaten, some random animal shots with cutesy phrases on them. She particularly liked the one featuring a spotted, blue-ribbon porker with Happy as a Pig in Mud! scrawled across the front in a font that appeared as if it was fashioned out of hay. Siofra must have picked that one up at a 4-H Fair.
Charlotte picked up another card and stared at a picture of a lake full of ducks.
Why postcards at all? There were a million ways to send messages to people. Why wasn’t she emailing? Was she frightened someone would trace her IP address back to her? Were Angelina and her father so sophisticated? Or was it someone else she feared?
Charlotte shook her head and tried to approach the puzzle from a new angle. How about money? How did Siofra afford to eat at restaurants and visit these attractions? Was she independently wealthy? Did she search out employment in each town? And if she did, was it always the same sort of job? The food cards implied maybe she picked up waitressing jobs. Then again, maybe she was a tour guide.
Charlotte jotted down a reminder to ask Angelina about Siofra’s resources and then spent a few minutes solving the greater mystery of how the tiny coffee maker sitting on top of the bureau worked. When it finally bubbled to life, she grabbed her computer and set it on her lap in bed. She shuffled through the postcards to find where she’d left off and started once again plugging in the cities from which the cards had come.
Like the evening before, she found the locations had little in common with each other. Some were small towns, some large cities, and none seemed to share much, other than people, houses and postcards for sale.
Charlotte huffed.
There has to be a thread that connects these places.
Clearly, Siofra didn’t want to be found. Why did she send postcards at all? If her father was motivated to find her, wouldn’t he go to the place from which the cards were sent?
That would be too easy.
Charlotte sat up a little straighter.
Right. That would be too easy.
Siofra wouldn’t send the cards from somewhere she could be found. That left two options: she either sent them from somewhere she wasn’t—maybe towns she drove through—or she sent them from somewhere she had been. Past tense.
If she chose cards from towns situated between one place and another, random towns she drove through on her way to her next destination, then there had to be a reason she picked the cards she had. There had to be a pattern based on the towns’ names or zip codes or something other than the places themselves. But Charlotte felt she’d already exhausted every possibility when it came to patterns. If Siofra was using a code, like spelling out words using the first letter of the towns where she bought the cards, then it was in an alien language she didn’t speak.
Charlotte slipped out from beneath her laptop and poured a tiny creamer into her tiny paper coffee cup.
Maybe Angelina was wrong about Mick not understanding the cards. If Mick and his daughter had a secret language through which they communicated, she’d never crack the code. Maybe the various jumbles of letters she’d generated from the cards made sense if you had a key.
If Mick had a key, it was probably in his room. Maybe Angelina could help her look for it. She groaned thinking about having to ask her. Getting Angelina to share anything was a chore—getting her to ransack Mick’s room would be like pushing a boulder, wearing black tights and heels, up a hill.
Charlotte slipped back into bed, put the coffee on the nightstand and the computer back on her lap.
There was the other option—that the towns were places she had been in. But again, they didn’t seem to have anything in common—
Except the date she’d visited them. They all had a time when she’d been there. All different dates, of course, but why there and at that time?
Charlotte started typing cities and dates into her laptop.
She scrolled through the results for Decatur, Illinois three years previous in April.
A few newspaper articles popped up including one about a missing girl who’d been found alive and one about a local man who’d won a prize at a car show in Chicago.
Hm.
The car show prize didn’t seem important but the missing girl piqued her interest.
She tried Austin, Texas. A new library wing opening. Yawn. A woman sent to jail for killing her husband in an elaborate plot.
Double hm.
Laramie, Wyoming—another murderer captured.
Charlotte looked up.
This is it.
She hit back on the browser and tried to find more information about the missing girl found in Decatur. In an article the police thanked the public for their help in finding the girl. In Austin, the authorities again thanked anonymous tips for pointing them in the right direction.
Charlotte plugged in a few more dates and cities from the postcards. A couple didn’t seem to click but most did.
Charlotte shook, a giddy trill running through her body.
She’s solving crimes anonymously.
My aunt is some kind of vigilante detective.
What were the chances they’d be in the same line of work?
Charlotte reached over to
