“Usual stuff. Someone said there was a commotion in Fish?” she said.
“News travels fast. It was nothing. I’m going to be in my office for a while.”
“MOF?” asked Andie.
MOF was Andie’s abbreviation for Museum On Fire, which meant she would only disturb Diane in a dire emergency.
“Not that drastic, but field everything you can,” said Diane.
She sat down at her desk and looked at the package a moment before she unwrapped it. The doll was in almost-new condition. It was a pretty doll with a porcelain head, feet, and hands, and a soft body. It had a head full of black finger curls and an ornate green satin bonnet and satin green dress trimmed in white fur. Her feet were covered in high-top patent leather shoes and white stockings. She carried a white fur muff in one hand, attached by a piece of elastic sewn into the muff and looped over the wrist. It was a nice doll, but not an expensive one. Diane’s sister collected dolls, so Diane had a passing familiarity with them.
Diane leaned back in her chair and focused her eyes on the table fountain and the water running over the rocks. The making of palimpsests was possible even with papyri. That was such an odd phrase. What exactly did it mean-other than the obvious literal meaning? Diane knew what a palimpsest was, but she grabbed her Webster’s dictionary anyway and looked it up: Palimpsest: writing material as a parchment or tablet used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased.
Diane knew that it was a practice in ancient times to erase the work of an earlier author and reuse the parchment to pen another piece of work. Sometimes the earlier work can still be deciphered. Korey Jordan, her head conservator, had revealed the earlier writing on a medieval parchment that was a palimpsest.
Why would a kidnapper or killer use a sentence like that? What was the meaning in that context?
But the more important mystery in her mind was why had she heard it in the library-apparently the exact sentence. Was it actually more common than she thought? She got on her computer and flipped over to the Internet and Googled the sentence with quotations. No hits whatsoever. She removed the quotations and tried again. She got a lot of hits, but none that contained the words in any combination even close to the sentence she heard. She clicked on her bookmark of the Gutenberg project and searched the offerings. Nothing.
So, it didn’t seem to be a common quotation. Then who in the library said it? She closed her eyes and tried to remember the voice. Female? That’s what she thought she remembered.
It seemed to stretch the imagination that it could be the same person who had said it in Florida twenty years ago, here now-in the university library. But it was quite a coincidence. Her thoughts were interrupted by her intercom.
“Sorry, Dr. Fallon. It’s David. I thought you might want to talk with him.”
“Thank you, Andie. Put him through.”
“Diane, I did the search in Arizona and Florida and found no such murders. I increased the dates and increased the area of search-still nothing that fit your criteria. Sorry.”
“Thanks, David. If I get any more variables, I may ask you to search again.”
“Sure.”
She hung up the phone.
“Well, damn,” she said out loud. “I was so sure.”
She picked up the doll again and looked into its dark eyes. So this doll has a secret? To Diane, that meant one thing. She lifted the dress and examined the stitching.
Chapter 41
When they were children, Diane’s sister had collected Madame Alexander dolls, pushed baby dolls around in strollers, and dressed and undressed her extensive assemblage of Barbie dolls. Diane, on the other hand, had played with hers in a wholly different manner. Her dolls were couriers, adventurers, and spies. She often used them to carry secret messages. A message might be hidden in their clothes, inside the hole of a dislocated arm or leg, or sewn up in their torso.
Diane examined the stitching of Juliet’s doll with a magnifying glass. No sign of the legs being detached and reattached, nor were there any repaired tears in the torso. She carefully undressed the doll and checked the arm attachments. Nothing at the right arm, but the left arm had been restitched by hand. Diane smiled with delight as she took fingernail scissors and snipped the thread.
She pulled the stuffing from the arm. The result was a pile of fluffy white fill on her desk, but nothing else. She stuffed the fill back into the arm with a pencil eraser and turned her attention to the torso. She began pulling the fill out of the armhole. This produced quite a large pile. The doll was now flattened in the middle. She saw nothing but stuffing. She pulled it apart to see if there was something in it she missed when she was taking it out. She hadn’t.
She really hoped that Juliet and her grandmother did not come to her office right now.
With a penlight from her desk drawer she looked inside the empty sack that was the torso of the doll. Still nothing. She stuck the tip of her little finger up in the doll’s head.
There it was.
It felt like a slip of paper. Diane grinned broadly. There is nothing like the thrill of discovering a hidden message. She managed to tease the edge of the paper through the opening in the doll’s head far enough that she could grasp it with her fingertips and pull it out.
It was a piece of newsprint, yellowed with age, rolled up when it was put inside the doll, and now lying in a loose coil. She unrolled the strip of paper on her desktop. After all the trouble she had gone to, she expected it to say something like Inspected by #12. But it did not.
Printed on the paper was a series of capital letters in groups, like words in an enigmatic foreign language.
KVQ PEZJMTR WOYIYP QQMRKSDY BW XMMRJ JMNA CZQWRCZKN VE HTE PZHK OS XZQNQRZQMNIGT FYFFUDN KVDER WSQT HERQR GYS TENUGFOAV CR LRRBPEE CZQWRCZKN
It looked like a code if Diane had ever seen one. She was so gleeful she laughed out loud. OK, it was a code. Was it child’s play, as hers were? Someone could take apart a few of her old dolls today and find notes still inside them containing lines of scribbled letters and numbers that stood for nothing more or less than a child’s adventurous imagination at work. This could be like that… or it could mean something important. No way to tell at the moment.
Jin liked to do puzzles and ciphers. He frequently contributed his logic puzzles and cryptograms to puzzle magazines. This would be a job for him.
She keyed the lines of code into her word processing program, double-checked it, and saved it under a password-then immediately felt utterly silly. She was a kid again playing games with dolls. She cut a thin piece off the scrap of paper and put it in a vial, then locked the code-or whatever it was-in her safe.
When the fill was back in the torso, she took a needle and thread from a small emergency sewing kit in her desk drawer and reattached the arm with fine stitches. That done, she redressed the doll. Thank goodness, it looked as good as new. She wrapped it in the paper Mrs. Torkel brought it in and put it in her drawer. Just as she closed the drawer, there was a knock on her door.
“Come in,” she called, and Kendel entered her office.
“Hi. Andie said you wanted to see me. Sorry I’m late, I was up talking to Korey about courses he wants to teach.”
“That’s fine. I have something I need you to find.”
“Oh, a new acquisition?” Kendel smiled, showing a bright white set of teeth.
“No, this is something different and will surely test your abilities,” said Diane.
“OK, I’m intrigued,” said Kendel.
Diane turned to her computer, typed in the palimpsest phrase, printed it out, and gave it to Kendel.