We work through each number set, with me reading them aloud and Terrance jotting the results on the legal pad. It’s the middle of the night and tedious work, but we’re both electric with excitement.
When we finish two hours later, we stare at the neatly printed columns of letters, but there’s still no obvious pattern. They appear random, containing no more logic than they had in number form. For a few minutes, we’re both dead silent, aware only of each other’s breathing.
“It’s almost five a.m.,” Terrance says.
I look at the clock on my phone. “Jesus,” I say.
He looks at me as he sits down in front of his computer. “You should go,” he says. “I’m going to keep working on this.”
“Terrance—I can’t even say how much this means.”
“You’ll be in school tomorrow?”
School. My last day at Danton. Tell him now? “I guess.”
“Meet me for lunch. The diner with the orange awning.” He looks at me as I slip into my jacket. “Whatever this is, I’ll have it figured out.”
I hover over him at the desk, kiss his scalp just above his ear. “Thank you.”
*
Georgina is waiting for me, livid. Not that I can blame her. She lets out something between a gasp and a shriek as I come through the door. “Do you have any idea, Gwendolyn, any idea what I went through, what thoughts went through my head?” she shouts, eyes red from exhaustion and tears. “I wanted to call the police, but I woke up Bela and he said not to. Said you were a big girl who knew what she was doing. What in living hell were you doing, by the way?”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I went to a friend’s house.”
“Oh, a friend’s house, a friend’s house,” she says. “Is this friend a boy?”
“He is.”
She throws up her arms. “This, this shit you just pulled, will not happen again. Do you hear me?”
“We’re leaving Sunday. So obviously it won’t happen again. I just—needed to see him.”
She seethes for a moment, then goes quiet and wipes her eyes. “Come here,” she says softly.
She holds me, and I hold her. It feels good, mom-like, mom-ish. It feels right. But my mind is lost. What do I do now? My schoolgirl sleuthing has turned up the key. The very thing to cancel out this entire mind-fuck hell.
“Why don’t you go to sleep,” Georgina says. “I’ll call the school, tell them you’re sick.”
“No,” I say. “I’ll be fine.”
*
Somehow I make it through the classes before lunch. Then I dash out the door and around the corner to the diner with the orange awning. It’s crowded with Danton kids who turn and watch me as I make my way to the booth where Terrance is sitting in the back. When I slide into the seat across from him, I expect a collective gasp and the pulling out of phones and snapping of a hundred pictures. #pretentioussnobhookup
He slides a file folder across the table, and I open it discreetly, just peeking beneath the cover. Three sheets of paper: the original number sets, the page from the legal pad, and a new sheet with seven rows, each 21 characters long.
“At first, the letters seemed random,” Terrance says quietly. “But—here, look.” He points to the second paper. “The first two characters were CH. Skip ahead twenty-two characters, and you see CH again. Then twenty-two characters later, we have LI.”
I look at him. “I don’t get it. So what?”
“So if you break down the sets into strings twenty-one characters long, every string begins with either a CH or LI. What do those letters mean?”
I think for a moment, considering the letters in isolation. Something there just beneath the surface of my memory rises up: The way European countries are sometimes abbreviated. FR for France. SK for Slovakia. “Switzerland and Liechtenstein,” I say.
“And what happens in both those countries?”
“Banking,” I say. “Money laundering.”
He gives me a proud smirk, then taps the file folder. “They’re bank accounts, Gwen,” he whispers. “Translate the letters besides CH and LI back into numbers, 1 for A, 2 for B, et cetera—fucking bank accounts.”
My skin goes cold. “You’re sure.”
“Yes. No question.” He looks around, making sure no one’s too close. “So, the five Swiss accounts are held by a very private bank in Zurich. We’re talking founded three hundred years ago. Still run by the same family. The two in Liechtenstein, same thing.”
“So whose are they?”
“I can’t tell.” He shrugs. “That’s all the info I’ve got.”
“You’re a genius, Terrance,” I say. “My God, this—I can’t thank you enough.”
His face turns serious. “I have to know, Gwen. What are you going to do with this?”
The waiter appears, greasy apron, little notepad and a stubby pencil.
“Nothing for me, thanks.” I look at Terrance, my mouth open, not knowing what to say. “Look, I—Terrance, I’m sorry” is all I can manage.
I leave the diner and gasp out loud. No more school, not for me, not today; I’ve learned enough. So instead I head in the direction of the apartment and every once in a while touch the pocket where I tucked the papers Terrance gave me to make sure they’re still there. This, it seems to me, is not just another piece of the puzzle, but maybe the whole puzzle. This is the reason he disappeared. And this is what Carlisle was looking for in our apartment.
Terrance and I are the only two people with this information. We are the only two people who can do anything about it. The obvious course, maybe even the right course, is to turn it over to Carlisle, despite what I have to assume were my dad’s wishes. Turn it over to Carlisle, and be done with it. Head to Texas and hope for the best and pretend this information doesn’t exist. But that will not happen. Cannot. He is my father. He is my only father. You do not throw that away.
I reach our building and pull out my keys to head upstairs. But I know Georgina’s waiting for me there, full of bright teeth and earnest hugs and a Crock-Pot full of sympathy, warm and bottomless.
So instead, I press the doorbell of the stationery shop.
*
Bela leans back in the office chair behind his desk stacked with papers and an old-fashioned accounts ledger, green pages, handwritten entries, columns of numbers. But he’s studying the numbers Terrance has given me, eyes moving back and forth from one page to the other and back again. “I should never have let you have the book.”
“But you did,” I say. “So what do you think?”
“Very clever,” Bela says. “Your friend Terrance, he should do this for a living.”
“No. About the account numbers. They’re why my dad went missing, right? He didn’t just walk away? Someone kidnapped him because they wanted these.”
“All things are possible, of course,” he says.
“So you think he’s been kidnapped?”
“I said it’s possible.”
I rise from my chair, walk through the cluttered storeroom of the shop. “I can find him, Bela. I know where he disappeared from. Who he was meeting with. I can track him down. Go to war, like you did.”
“Mm,” he says, dropping the sheets onto the desk. “That easy.”
“No. But I have to try. I have to.”
He gives a little cough. “Do you know violence, Red Shoes?”