“I’ve looked at everything a dozen times.”
“So the dig deeper clue. The ‘twenty-first century’ clue. That’s it, right? No other clues left behind?”
“Yeah, that’s...” Gibson looked at her screens. “That’s actually not right.”
“What do you mean?” asked Francine.
“I forgot to tell you. I tracked down a bunch of companies that Langhorne had. If you incorporate you have to have a registered agent in the state of incorporation, so if you get sued, there’s someone in the state to accept service.”
“And the point?” asked Francine impatiently.
“There was one agent I reached out to who got back to me immediately.” She started clicking keys on her computer and pointed at the screen. “Dexter Tremayne from South Dakota. He’s the registered agent for DPE. That’s Daniel Pottinger Enterprises, obviously.”
“What did he say when he got back to you?”
“That Pottinger aka Harry had called him and left a message for Tremayne to give to anyone who contacted him after he was dead. DPE was pretty well buried behind some other shells. It took me some time to dig through.”
“What was the message?”
“ ‘Now you see it, but then you don’t.’ ”
“That’s it?”
“No. He also said to take away the eight. And then to use the leftovers for Sesame Street.”
“That makes no sense at all.”
“Agreed. Now, the usual phrase is slightly different. ‘Now you see it, now you don’t.’ ”
“So Harry had changed ‘now’ to ‘but then’?”
“That’s right. I was going to dig down deeper, but then I got sidetracked with everything else and forgot all about it.”
Francine took a notebook from her purse and flitted through the pages.
“What’s that?” asked Gibson.
“My TREASURE notebook.”
Gibson gave her a funny look.
“I actually have a half dozen devoted just to you. A record for me.”
“Well, I guess I should feel honored somehow. Do you think he just got the phrase wrong?”
“No. He was the most detailed person I’ve ever met.”
Gibson glanced at the notebook and the precise writing on the page she was reading. “You mean sort of like you?”
“I do it so I can have some control over my life. He did it to screw people over.”
“So if he added the ‘but then,’ there was a reason?”
“Most definitely.” She turned another page and tensed. “Wait a minute. You said you found out that my father used secret codes and substitution ciphers to keep his mob account books secret?”
“That’s right.”
“Then maybe this phrase is a substitution code. Do you know how they work?”
“Pretty much. You substitute one alphabet letter for another. The parties trying to communicate have the key, so you know what letter to substitute for another. Dates all the way back to at least Julius Caesar.”
Gibson started clicking keys and increased the font size so the phrase loomed large across the screen.
“So you think each letter represents another letter?” said Francine.
“Possibly. I actually have software that drills down on that, because the debtors I chase use all sorts of stuff, including secret codes.” Gibson opened a program and then plugged the phrase into it. “It works fast, but it’s not always conclusive.”
Five minutes later the program disgorged several possibilities that, to both their minds, seemed nonsensical.
“Harry’s housekeeper told me that he was almost never there,” said Francine. “And Nathan Trask confirmed that.”
“Okay, so where was he the rest of the time?” asked Gibson.
“At another hidey-hole of his, probably. Wait, what if the treasure is at one of those hidey-holes and this code is giving us the location?” suggested Francine.
Gibson glanced at the words with renewed interest. “If it is an address, it would probably be both numbers and letters.”
“Which complicates the unraveling even more, I know,” Francine mused. “Okay, let’s try the simplest first. Let’s take the first letter of each word and give it its alphabetical numerical equivalent. So breaking the phrase down, each first letter is N-Y-S-I-B-T-Y-D. Now give each letter the alphabetical equivalent.”
Gibson executed on this and looked at the line of numbers corresponding to their place in the alphabet: “Fourteen, twenty-five, nineteen, nine, two, twenty, twenty-five, and four. Anything strike you?” she asked.
“Yes, confusion,” said Francine.
“Could it be a hybrid?”
“Meaning?”
Gibson said, “Some substitution of numbers for letters, but then maybe some of the letters actually represent words.”
“Okay, which ones?”
“I don’t have a clue.”
“Let’s take Harry literally. The letters b and t from the words ‘but then’ are represented by the two and the twenty. Is that significant? Since it’s clear he added ‘but’ before ‘then’ to make it ‘but then.’ ”
Gibson looked at her notes. “Wait a minute, we forgot about the ‘take away the eight’ part.”
“Okay, but how do we do that?”
“Well, if we follow the same substitution cipher, eight represents the letter h.”
“So we take away the h in the word ‘then’?”
“So it becomes ‘ten,’ ” said Gibson.
“Which means it now reads, ‘Now you see it, but ten you don’t.’ ” She looked at Gibson. “What the hell does that mean?”
The blood slowly drained from Gibson’s face. “Oh my God.”
“What, what is it?” Francine said quickly.
“It’s all a convoluted mess, really, which I’m sure was intentional. ‘But then’ was really the key. I’m pretty sure that was a shortcut that Harry offered up because the word was so unusual in this context.”
“What word?”
She typed out something and then sat back for Francine to see.
“One ninety-nine Button Road, Yarden, New York. ‘Button’ equals ‘but ten.’ ” She glanced at Francine to see if she was following her logic. “You don’t know?” Gibson said. “It’s not in one of your notebooks?”
“What?”
“This is the address of the house where your father first lived.”
Chapter 84
Gibson steered the rental car down the street in Yarden, New York.
She and Francine had flown in and were now pulling up in front of the small house that Harry Langhorne had lived in as a child.
It looked exactly like the picture that Gibson had earlier pulled up on Google Maps.
A car was parked in front. Flowers were in the flower beds. Everything looked neat and trim. There were four other homes on the street. They all looked the same. Cars in front, flowers in the beds.
But what Gibson had subsequently found out was that each of these homes was owned by one corporation that she had finally tracked to one of Daniel Pottinger’s companies. And she had also found out that a management service had been hired to keep the outside of the homes in good order and to look after the vehicles. And that there was a housekeeping service to look after the interiors of the other homes. But they had not been given access to 199. No one apparently went in there.
They got out of the car and approached the house.
There was an alarm pad next to the front door.