“That’s not slipping, Gray.” Nash had a way of going quiet just when the things he was saying mattered most. “That’s living.”
Inexplicably, Grayson thought—again—about that damn ring. “I need to focus.”
“On opening the puzzle box?” Xander guessed.
“Opening it. Going through its contents.” Grayson came to stand directly over the puzzle box. “Removing anything that could tie Sheffield Grayson to the attacks on Avery and anything that suggests he didn’t just disappear. Then I’ll reassemble a harmless version of the box and its contents to give back to the girls.”
“Are you okay with that?” Xander asked.
Grayson thought of the way his sisters had come to stand between him and their aunt. Protecting him. He thought about Acacia, squeezing his hand.
Are you okay with that?
Grayson knelt and fit the not-a-USB into the box. “I have to be.”
CHAPTER 74
GRAYSON
Grayson turned the lock. There was an audible click. A release. He kept his grip on the faux USB and pulled. The entire panel came off the box, revealing a compartment underneath. With steady hands, Grayson turned the panel over. He wasn’t surprised to see a collection of glass vials affixed to the underside. Break the box, break the vials. Break the vials, mix the liquids. Mix the liquids, destroy the contents of the box. Specifically…
Grayson turned his attention to the compartment he’d revealed. There were two and only two things inside: a Montblanc pen and a leather-bound journal.
“He kept records.” To Grayson, that was obvious.
“Records of what?” Nash zeroed in on the key question—the only one that mattered right now.
If there was record of Sheffield Grayson’s last acts before he “disappeared,” if this journal could tie the man to Avery or the Hawthorne family… it had to be destroyed.
There was a comfort in certainty.
“Can I see the pen?” Xander asked. Grayson handed it to him, and the youngest Hawthorne brother immediately began his inspection, dismantling the pen.
Some parts of a riddle hold meaning, Grayson could hear the old man saying, and others are nothing but distraction. In a Hawthorne game, the pen would have been the clue, not the journal. But Sheffield Grayson was not Tobias Hawthorne, and this wasn’t a game. There were no clues, just the extreme steps a paranoid dead man had taken to secure his secrets.
Grayson opened the leather journal. This is what my father’s handwriting looked like. That thought had no place in his mind, so Grayson shoved it to the side and focused not on the writing but on what had been written.
Numbers.
Grayson flipped through the pages—nothing but numbers, and the only ones with recognizable meanings appeared at the beginning of the various entries: dates.
Sheffield Grayson had dated his journal entries. Grayson pictured him doing it. He saw his father sitting on the edge of that cheap twin bed in Colin’s room and putting pen to the page. Grayson imagined “Shep” dating a journal entry, and then beginning to write.
Grayson turned all the way to the last entry, just a few pages from the end of the book. Still nothing but numbers. Seemingly endless strings of them.
“A code.” Grayson reached the obvious conclusion.
Xander edged in beside him to get a peek at the pages. “Substitution cipher?”
“Most likely,” Grayson confirmed.
“Monoalphabetic, polyalphabetic, or polygraphic?” Xander rattled off.
Nash leaned back against the wall. “That, little brother, is the question.”
None of the simple ciphers worked. Grayson had tried all twenty-six of them. First A as 1, B as 2, C as 3 on to Z as 26. Then A as 2, B as 3, and so on, looping Z back to 1. No matter what base Grayson used, the journal’s translation was gibberish.
Evening turned to late night. Gigi texted when the FBI left. Grayson didn’t text back. His eyes bleary, he refused to back down from the task at hand.
You didn’t use a basic cipher. Grayson didn’t want to be mentally addressing his father, but to solve a puzzle, sometimes you had to think about its maker.
“Let me take a stab,” Xander said, wriggling between Grayson and the journal. “I’ll try to spot common two-and three-item combinations and go from there.”
Grayson didn’t object. Instead, he stopped fighting the mental image that wanted to come: Sheffield Grayson sitting on that twin bed, a pen in his right hand, the journal on a nearby nightstand. Or on the bed? On his lap? The image in Grayson’s mind wavered, changed, and then Grayson asked himself a simple question: Where was his cheat sheet?