Jameson narrowed his eyes. “I can do the math, Xan.”
“And I can humbly inform you, big brother, that there are three different ways of listing coordinates.” Xander grinned. “Degrees, minutes, seconds. Degrees, decimal minutes. And decimal degrees.”
“With only four digits,” Jameson insisted, “we’re probably looking at decimal degrees.”
Xander winked at me. “But probably is never good enough.”
“Pacific Ocean,” Jameson called out, and I wrote the location next to the designated coordinates. “Indian Ocean. Bay of Bengal.”
Xander picked up right where his brother had left off. “Arctic Ocean. Arctic Ocean again!”
Both of them were entering coordinates into a map search. My brain kicked up a gear with each location they called out. The Arctic. That couldn’t be where this clue was supposed to point us, could it? And that was assuming that these numbers were coordinates at all.
“Antarctic Ice Shield,” Jameson offered. “Times four.”
By the time we were finished, the number of actual, non-arctic land locations on our list was much smaller than I’d expected. There were two in Nigeria, one in Liberia, one in Guinea, and one in…
“Costa Rica.” I said out loud, unsure at first why that location was the one that had jumped out to me, but a moment later, I remembered the last time I’d read the words Costa Rica—in the binder.
“You have that look on your face,” Jameson told me, his lips quirking upward. “You know something.”
I closed my eyes and focused on the memory, not his lips. Skye’s bequest had led to True North, one of the Hawthorne family’s many vacation homes—mine, now. I tried to remember the pages I’d flipped through the night of the auction. Patagonia. Santorini. Kauai. Malta. Seychelles…
“Cartago, Costa Rica.” I opened my eyes. “Tobias Hawthorne owned a house there.” I pulled out my phone and looked up the latitude and longitude of Cartago, then turned my phone’s screen toward the boys. “It’s a match.”
I tried to remember what the Cartago house looked like, but all I could see in my mind’s eye was the surrounding vegetation and flowers, lush and bright and larger than life.
“We need to go to Costa Rica.” Xander didn’t exactly sound put out about that.
“I can’t,” I said, frustrated. I’d had to fight to go to Colorado. There was no way that Oren and Alisa would sign off on international travel—not when I could only spend two more nights away from Hawthorne House this month.
“Xander’s not going anywhere, either.”
For a second time, I found myself turning toward the doorway of the pod. Thea stood there.
“Are you just letting anyone in?” I called to Eli.
The reply I got was muffled, but I made out the words “not my job.”
“Rebecca needs you,” Thea told Xander. For the first time since I’d met her, she wasn’t wearing any makeup. She looked almost mortal. “She didn’t come to school today. It’s her mom. I know it is. Rebecca won’t answer my calls, so it’s going to have to be you.” It was clearly killing Thea to ask him, but there she was.
I expected Xander to put up a fight. How many times had he said that this was his game? But Xander just stared at Thea for a moment, then turned back to Jameson. “I guess you’re going to Cartago.”
Jameson glanced at me. I was fully prepared for him to ask me for another plane. Instead, the expression on his face shifted. “Can you call Libby and Nash?”
CHAPTER 56
It makes no sense,” I told Max that afternoon. “Jameson never lets up on a puzzle. What’s his angle here?”
Nash and Libby had agreed to go to Cartago. I was sitting in my bedroom, staring at the photograph of the Cartago house. A quartet of columns held a tile roof over a large porch, but the house itself was small, less than a thousand square feet.
“Maybe he doesn’t have an angle,” Max said.
My eyes narrowed. “He’s Jameson Hawthorne. He always has an angle.”
A sharp knock at the door cut off whatever Max would have said in reply. I went to answer it, annoyed that a part of me couldn’t think about Jameson without thinking about the way it felt when his lips brushed lightly against my neck.
I opened the door to find someone holding a tall stack of fluffy white towels. The towels blocked the person’s face, and my mind went to the bloodied heart that someone—likely a staff member—had left in my room. I took a step back. My heart rate jumped. Then Eli stepped into view. “She’s clear,” he told me.