“She received a series of emails,” I prompted.
“Yes, yes, that’s the whole point,” Daley said. “I’m embarrassed to say I swiped her cell phone when she was asleep. We were at my place, we’d had some wine, and I was pushing her, a little, about why she was unhappy. She insisted there was nothing. But I—well, I got into her mail. I searched to see if anything had arrived around the time she first got upset. I found some . . . strange ones. I couldn’t decide whether if I forwarded them to myself she could tell I’d done that—”
Watson looked up from her computer screen. “She could.”
“Good thing I didn’t, then. Instead I grabbed my own cell and snapped photos.” He held up his cell as if to show me. “Want to see one?”
“Will you email it to Watson?” I asked. “And Watson, will you print it out?” Nothing like a good old piece of paper.
Our little printer whirred.
“Could you tell who sent it?” I asked. I stood, as the printer was just out of reach. It ejected one sheet of paper, on which the sender and Ms. Moran’s address were clearly apparent. Would this be that simple? No. “It says ‘no one at no one dot com.’ Did you try to contact them?”
“How could I?” Daley asked. “That’d show I’d taken her phone. And—” He shrugged. “What would I say?”
“Too bad,” Watson said, tapping her keyboard. “It’s easy enough to create an anonymous email address. Even with that, I might be able to track the sender down, but not without the actual phone.”
I studied the page again, frowning. There were no words. Only tiny pictures. An apple. A smiley-face. A heart. Then a sun, a moon, and some wavy lines, like the television meteorologists use to indicate wind.
“Did you ask her about this?”
“How could I?” Mr. Daley said again. “She’d know I looked at her email, something I’d never do. Even though I did. I had to, right?”
“What’s done is done,” I said. “And we shall go from there.” I thought about the emoticons we’d just seen, and the relationship between this heartbroken young dancing instructor and his mysterious—if she was—fiancée.
“An apple. For the teacher, perhaps?” I theorized. “Someone loves the teacher, and wants to marry them, and live happily ever after.” I tried to come up with a meaning for the wind. “Somewhere windy?”
“Good one,” Watson said. “Or someone named McIntosh, like the apple, you know? Is happy that his heart operation went well, he’ll now live through many days and nights unless the wind changes.”
“Possible,” I replied, simply to be polite. Watson is sometimes cavalier about details. “But we must be wrong, for why could either of those be upsetting to Ms. Moran?”
I picked up a paperweight from my desk. The durable chunk of native granite, a legacy from my father, was speckled with potassium feldspar, quartz, and biotite. A “thinking rock,” he called it. I turned its smooth weight in my hand, over, and over, and over. Why do people use symbols instead of words? Sometimes, in emails, to save time. In shorthand, to write more quickly. In the Bayeux Tapestry, or Sistine Chapel, or Guernica, to be artistic, or to preserve history. Other times—because they only want specific people to understand their meaning.
“It’s a code,” I said.
Daley narrowed his eyes. “You think?”
“And Miss Moran obviously understands it. I think we may conclude that the message it sends—whether about apples or true love or a subject we have not considered—is clear to her. Unhappily clear, it seems.”
“So? You’re the detective.” Daley looked hopeful for the first time since he’d walked in. “Can you figure it out?”
“That, I fear, is impossible.” I had to admit it. “Even for me.”
“But—” His body deflated, and he sank, morose, into the swivel chair. It creaked again in protest.
“There simply aren’t sufficient exemplars,” I explained, putting down my granite. “A substitution cipher—”
“Where one letter or number stands for a certain letter of the alphabet,” Watson interjected. “We used them in the . . . anyway. You were saying.”
I cleared my throat. I appreciate Watson’s enthusiasm, but when I have the floor, I have the floor. “A substitution cipher, to put it the simplest way, substitutes one thing for a letter. It can be a different letter of the alphabet, or a number, or even a symbol. Some have used stick figures, others foreign alphabets. Random squiggles might be employed, certainly, because such a code only requires the sender and receiver know the system. The most elementary of codes are easily broken, in English at least, by applying the well-understood Etaoin Shrdlu analysis, which proves—”