the words in any combination even close to the sentence she heard. She clicked on her bookmark of the Gutenberg project and searched the offerings. Nothing.
So, it didn’t seem to be a common quotation. Then who in the library said it? She closed her eyes and tried to remember the voice. Female? That’s what she thought she remembered.
It seemed to stretch the imagination that it could be the same person who had said it in Florida twenty years ago, here now—in the university library. But it was quite a coincidence. Her thoughts were interrupted by her intercom.
“Sorry, Dr. Fallon. It’s David. I thought you might want to talk with him.”
“Thank you, Andie. Put him through.”
“Diane, I did the search in Arizona and Florida and found no such murders. I increased the dates and increased the area of search—still nothing that fit your criteria. Sorry.”
“Thanks, David. If I get any more variables, I may ask you to search again.”
“Sure.”
She hung up the phone.
“Well, damn,” she said out loud. “I was so sure.”
She picked up the doll again and looked into its dark eyes. So this doll has a secret? To Diane, that meant one thing. She lifted the dress and examined the stitching.
Chapter 41
When they were children, Diane’s sister had collected Madame Alexander dolls, pushed baby dolls around in strollers, and dressed and undressed her extensive assemblage of Barbie dolls. Diane, on the other hand, had played with hers in a wholly different manner. Her dolls were couriers, adventurers, and spies. She often used them to carry secret messages. A message might be hidden in their clothes, inside the hole of a dislocated arm or leg, or sewn up in their torso.
Diane examined the stitching of Juliet’s doll with a magnifying glass. No sign of the legs being detached and reattached, nor were there any repaired tears in the torso. She carefully undressed the doll and checked the arm attachments. Nothing at the right arm, but the left arm had been restitched by hand. Diane smiled with delight as she took fingernail scissors and snipped the thread.
She pulled the stuffing from the arm. The result was a pile of fluffy white fill on her desk, but nothing else. She stuffed the fill back into the arm with a pencil eraser and turned her attention to the torso. She began pulling the fill out of the armhole. This produced quite a large pile. The doll was now flattened in the middle. She saw nothing but stuffing. She pulled it apart to see if there was something in it she missed when she was taking it out. She hadn’t.
She really hoped that Juliet and her grandmother did not come to her office right now.
With a penlight from her desk drawer she looked inside the empty sack that was the torso of the doll. Still nothing. She stuck the tip of her little finger up in the doll’s head.
There it was.
It felt like a slip of paper. Diane grinned broadly. There is nothing like the thrill of discovering a hidden message. She managed to tease the edge of the paper through the opening in the doll’s head far enough that she could grasp it with her fingertips and pull it out.
It was a piece of newsprint, yellowed with age, rolled up when it was put inside the doll, and now lying in a loose coil. She unrolled the strip of paper on her desktop. After all the trouble she had gone to, she expected it to say something like Inspected by #12. But it did not.
Printed on the paper was a series of capital letters in groups, like words in an enigmatic foreign language.
It looked like a code if Diane had ever seen one. She was so gleeful she laughed out loud. OK, it was a code. Was it child’s play, as hers were? Someone could take apart a few of her old dolls today and find notes still inside them containing lines of scribbled letters and numbers that stood for nothing more or less than a child’s adventurous imagination at work. This could be like that . . . or it could mean something important. No way to tell at the moment.
Jin liked to do puzzles and ciphers. He frequently contributed his logic puzzles and cryptograms to puzzle magazines. This would be a job for him.