“It was fuzzy.”
Derek snorted. “Your brain is fuzzy, mate.”
“Hell.” Dalton paced a few steps back and forth. “Shit, I should’ve—”
“Language,” I said cheerily, sounding like my mother. “Besides, the book might not be stolen.”
Both of them turned to me and all that combined energy caused my throat to dry up. I swallowed carefully. “It might still be somewhere in Baxter’s restaurant. We never got the chance to search the kitchen thoroughly, so I thought I might do it when we go there for dinner tomorrow night. Can you work off the copies until then?”
“I’m going with you,” Dalton said immediately.
I’d lost the train of thought somehow. “Going…where?”
“To dinner. Tomorrow night. I’ll help you search.”
“Um, okay,” I said slowly. “I’ll call my sister and let her know.”
“In other words, you’re not invited,” Derek said, glowering at his brother. “But behave yourself and we might finagle an extra invitation.”
Dalton replied with a grumble, “I’ll behave as long as we can find that damn book.” With that, he sat down at the bar and pored over the copies of the cookbook pages.
I turned to Derek. “I’d better give Tom a call to see if he or one of his crew saw the book while they were cleaning up.”
“Good idea, love.” Derek squeezed my shoulder before giving his brother a sharp look. Then he walked into the bedroom office to finish some work.
I headed for my studio to make the call to Tom, hoping it wasn’t too late in the day. I caught him just as he was leaving.
“Nope, didn’t see anything like you’re describing,” he said after I explained what I wanted.
“Did you clean the entire restaurant or just the kitchen?” I asked.
“We concentrated on the kitchen, of course,” he said. “But I always have my guys go over every inch of floor space in the place because you never know if some material got tracked out by the cops’ shoes. So let’s see, we got the restaurant itself, plus the bathrooms, the private dining room, and that little office near the kitchen.”
“Good to know.” I was glad all over again that Tom was in charge of this kind of stuff. I hadn’t been aware of the little office, either, so I was doubly glad I’d called him. Had Baxter hidden the book in a desk drawer in his office? Had the cops searched that room the other night?
After thanking Tom, I hung up the phone and tried to concentrate on my work. Surveying the mess I’d made earlier of the Jane Eyre, I frowned at the dusty, peeling strips of leather that lay like wounded soldiers around the ragged, stringy text block. I’d been in the midst of pulling out the loose threads when Dalton arrived, so I continued the job for another hour before stopping. I still needed to clean the individual signatures and resew the pages together, but that would have to wait until tomorrow morning. I was too excited about Dalton’s visit to work any more today. I laid a clean white cloth over everything and turned off the lights.
Back in the kitchen, I retrieved three wineglasses from the cupboard and Derek went to the hall storage closet to pick out an extra-nice bottle of wine.
Dalton looked up as I was wiping spots off the glasses. His lips curved in a smile of apology. “I was a clod earlier. Forgive me. Jet lag is hideous, and when I get focused on something, I tend to lose my ability to interact in polite society.”
“Don’t worry about it. Derek told me about your work as a cryptographer. It sounds intriguing.” What could be more fun than spending one’s days solving puzzles? I often did the same thing with the books I worked on. I liked puzzles.
“It can be interesting,” Dalton said amiably, glancing back at me. “But Derek never should’ve mentioned my job to you. No one outside my family knows my true occupation. You seem like a lovely girl, but I have no choice but to kill you now.”
I laughed, but his expression remained impassive, unnerving me. “You’re good at that.”
“Am I?”
“I’m sure you’re kidding, but—”
“Am I?”
I suppressed a groan as I shook my head. Brothers were the same everywhere on the planet. “Fine. On the off chance that you’re serious about killing me, I’ll just mention that I was about to pour us all some really good wine and start dinner.”
His eyes twinkled. “In that case, the killing can wait.”
*
Two hours later, over cheeseburgers, I asked him more questions. “What exactly are you looking for in the cookbook?”
He swallowed the sip of wine he’d taken. “I’m always on the lookout for a new code to break. And from what I can tell, many of the symbols in that book are exactly the same as those used by a number of secret societies in existence during the American Revolutionary War.”
“That’s why I called him,” Derek said to me. “I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist once he saw the point within the circle.”