“And as a bonus, the guy’s gone missing.” Nash let out a long, low whistle.
Nash knew that Sheffield Grayson wasn’t missing. Grayson knew that he knew. “Now Eve’s sniffing around,” Grayson continued, the muscles in his jaw going stone hard. “She knows what happened. Today’s search? Probably courtesy of her.”
Someone had been pulling strings, and Eve had made it clear she wasn’t above playing power games.
“Eve?” Nash repeated. “Your head on straight, Gray?” There wasn’t an ounce of judgment in that question.
There didn’t need to be for Grayson to judge himself. “Isn’t it always?” he replied, his tone a match for his expression—like it had been carved from ice.
“Betrayed by the Girl with the Face of Your Dead Girlfriend: The Grayson Hawthorne Story.” Xander jumped down off the desk.
Grayson felt his eyes turn to slits. “Not now, Alexander.”
“Too fresh?” Xander asked. “Sorry, double sorry, triple, up to and including octuple sorry. You needed someone to get you out of your own head, and Nash keeps telling me that there are times when tackling people is inappropriate.”
“Most times,” Nash said.
Xander was not so convinced. “Personally, I think tackling is a valid love language, but let’s not debate semantics here.” He brought his eyes to rest on Grayson’s. “What do you need?”
Being a Hawthorne meant many things, and the best of those was this. Them. Us. “Got any cookies?” Grayson asked quietly.
“I always have cookies!” Xander disappeared into the suite’s kitchen and came back with a half-empty package of double-stuffed Oreos and the single tallest Oreo that Grayson had ever seen. “Octuple-stuffed Oreo?” Xander offered.
Grayson took it.
“It was made with love,” Xander told him. “Just like I tackle with love.”
“No tackling,” Nash said.
Grayson ate the cookie in silence, and then—and only then—did he speak. “I’m slipping.” His brothers were the only people in the world he could have admitted that to. “Getting too emotionally involved.”
“With Eve?” Xander asked.
Grayson set his jaw. “With Gigi and Savannah—and even with their mother.”
“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?
Unless his father had memorized the code—whatever it was—he would have needed a reference as he was writing.
Grayson closed his eyes, picturing the entire scene: the man, the pen, the journal, a reference of some kind… The box. Grayson’s eyes flew open. He knelt, running his hand over the now-empty compartment. And then he felt a seam.
And another.
Another.
The workmanship was flawless. None of the seams were visible. But they were there, in the shape of a square roughly the size of Grayson’s palm. That was the thing about puzzle boxes. You never really knew when the box’s last secret has been uncovered.
Grayson reached for the double-sided tool—there was no saying a puzzle couldn’t use the same trick twice. He ran the magnet end along the inside of the compartment, directly over the square he’d felt.
It caught.
Grayson pulled, and the square popped out. Turning it over in his hands, he saw two wooden disks, concentric, with a metal brad through the middle.