Prime Cut

I stirred flour into the butter for a roux, and waited until that mixture bubbled over low heat. Gently cook the flour, Andre had admonished me so many times, gentleness is one of the secrets of the sauce. I added seasonings and hot milk to the roux and delicately whisked the sauce. Outside, Tom’s car turned into the driveway. I stirred the cheese into the thickened sauce and watched it turn golden.

“Oh, Mom, thanks!” cried Arch, dashing into the kitchen. “Slumber Party Potatoes, and we’re not even having a slumber party!”

Tom kissed and hugged me and announced that he’d had plenty to eat, and that he had some work to do in the kitchen. Was there any way Arch and Julian and I could eat outside? Arch said he needed to feed Jake and Scout and give them fresh water. Julian quickly offered to help me set up on the deck. When we finally had scraped the outdoor chairs together, covered the picnic table with a bright tablecloth, set out silverware, plates, bowls of crisp bacon, steamed broccoli, hot cheese sauce, and steaming potatoes, Julian abruptly declared that he needed a break and was going to go back to the rec center to swim laps. He left without eating a bite.

I raised my eyebrows at Arch, who had finished his animal care duties. “Any reason for the sudden interest in swimming?”

Arch dabbed cheese sauce on half a potato and licked his fingers. “Rustine’s not there, if that’s what you’re asking, Mom. Rustine said there was too much chlorine in the pool, and it would wreck her hair, so she didn’t go in. Neither did Julian. And Lettie saw some friends from school, so she didn’t really talk to me very much.”

“Arch,” I said, “there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

“Oh, brother. Now what?”

“Did you print out my client list and all my schedules, assignments, and prices for your father?”

“No! No way!”

“Did you print it out for anybody?”

“Yeah,” he said immediately. “That guy who’s trying to do Dad’s finances? Hugh Leland? Mr. Leland called when you were on a job. He said he couldn’t figure Dad’s portion of my tuition at Elk Park Prep While he was in jail until I faxed him a copy of your client list and prices, to verify that you couldn’t pay the tuition.”

“Arch, that is complete baloney. Your dad pays the tuition, as ordered by the court.”

“Well, that’s not what Mr. Leland said, Mom.”

“Please, hon. Please don’t give out any information about me, or us, or the business, to anyone.” I heard the sharpness in my voice, but couldn’t suppress it.

“I’m sorry.” Arch looked stricken. “I was just doing what I thought I was supposed to do, Mom.”

I swallowed my anger. Despite what he had done, it was impossible to blame my son: He’d just been trying to help. And yet, John Richard’s ability to manipulate him appalled me. I glanced upward, trying desperately to think of something else to talk about. On the roof, Arch’s ham radio antenna still dangled like a forgotten spider web. “How was Lettie’s ham radio set? Did it work any better than yours?”

Arch set his plate aside, the food virtually untouched. “Look, Mom, I know you really want me to be happy and all that, but don’t ask me a bunch of questions about Lettie, okay? Please?”

“Sure.” He was at an age where trying to establish a conversation was as treacherous as navigating a mine field. I was forever veering away from one subject where I was tempted to give advice, to another, where I would have to bite my tongue not to lecture. I looked up again at the forlorn antenna, the remnants of Arch’s first obsession with high-tech encryption. Wait a minute.

Arch had always been fascinated by a bit of history told him by Julian, whose adoptive parents in Utah had taught him to speak Navajo. During the Second World War, Navajos serving in the American military had spoken in their own language, over the radio, to other Navajo soldiers, who’d passed on details of troop movements and other matters of military importance to Allied military intelligence. Navajo is one of the most difficult languages in the world. It was a code never broken by the Germans.

What was the one thing everyone said about Charlie Smythe? He was a signalman for the Confederacy….

Rabbi Horowitz had told us: The Resistance … taught codes to all their trainees.

One of the secrets of the sauce … Andre had never seen the cookbook or the letter in the wall. But he had seen the enigmatic letter from Leavenworth, the later letter Charlie Smythe had written to his wife … not the earlier letter, which had remained hidden in the wall all these years.

“Arch,” I said suddenly. “You know your work with telephone encryption? Did you ever learn any codes that are universal? I mean, besides Morse.”

He eyed me. “There are codes and ciphers that have been used over and over. But the question isn’t whether you can put something into a code, Mom. The question is whether the person receiving it can understand it.” He pushed his glasses up his nose and tilted his chin. “Why?”

“If I showed you a letter that a man wrote from prison, that might be in a fairly common code, do you think you could read it?”

“Is it in English?” he asked dubiously.

I told him that it was and ran inside for my file. When I handed Arch the photocopy of Charlie Smythe’s letter to his wife from prison, he pondered it, chewed his tongue, then reread the paper in his hands. He did not know that Winnie Smythe, incapacitated by stroke, probably never had understood the letter. He did not know the history of the Smythe cabin. He did not know about the aborted remodeling work that Gerald Eliot had begun there. So it was with true astonishment that I heard Arch’s next set of questions.

“So. Did this woman, Winnie, tear out her kitchen wall? Did she use a”—he peered down at the letter —“cookery book? Is that a cookbook?” I nodded, speechless. “And let’s see—this guy’s gun? To find some treasure?”

“Show me,” I whispered.

“It’s a real common code, Mom. It’s one a lot of prisoners used over the years, because it usually gets past censors.” He pointed to the paper and I read it again.My Dear Wife,

You must know how very much I love you, and how I would tear out my Heart to see you again. To get to my cell, I pass a wall in which I have tried to carve your name. I remember our cabin Kitchen with its smell of Bread and Pudding, how you would use Cookery to show your love for me. I have only read one book. Sky here is seldom seen. I long for our bed, children, Family tales, rifle, horses, Cabin, and beautiful land where I believed to find Riches. One day, my Love. Your Loving Husband

Arch said, “You just read the first two words in each line. So it’s: You must tear out wall in cabin kitchen use cookery book skytales rifle find riches.” He paused. “Did this lady know the code?”

“No. At least, I don’t think so.” If she had been able to act on the letter, Winnie would surely have found the precious rifle her husband had so carefully hidden in the wall. “What’s a skytale?”

“It’s another way of encoding a message, Mom. It’s been used for a really long time. Say you have a message. You write it on a long, thin piece of paper. That’s called the plaintext, that you wrap around a cylinder of a certain size; that’s called a skytale. But on your plaintext, you put lots of numbers or letters in between your message, so that nobody can read what you’re saying, see? The person who’s decoding the message rolls your sheet of letters or numbers around the skytale cylinder. Then the extra numbers or letters aren’t seen. Just the one line of letters is seen, and that’s your message. Get it? The trick, once you have a strip of paper, is to know which cylinder to roll it around.”

I remembered Rustine’s copy of the note in the wall: Make the Rolls as I showed you. It wasn’t bread Smythe referred to, but strips of paper. I closed my eyes and shook my head.

Arch asked, “Do you have the cookbook?”

“I have a copy. There are letters written on two of the pages. They must form the strip of words, somehow.” My heartbeat sounded loud in my ears.

“What about this rifle?”