Spy in a Little Black Dress - By Maxine Kenneth Page 0,92
weight pressing down on her so hard that she could barely breathe. Somehow she managed to croak out, “This is so damned unfair. Just when we think we’ve gotten somewhere, it turns out we’re really nowhere at all.”
“It’s called running a Red Queen’s race.”
Jackie fixed Emiliano with a brave smile. “Leave it to you to quote Lewis Carroll at a moment like this.”
“He’s not a bad example, you know. He taught mathematics, and Alice in Wonderland is really an essay in logic disguised as a book for children.”
“You think we need to apply logic to this problem?”
“It’s all we have left.”
“Spoken like a true lawyer.” With a sigh, Jackie reached into a pocket and removed the note she had scribbled to herself, ensuring that she remembered the words printed on the map. Once again she examined the puzzle left behind by James Metzger:
LEPROSARIA
CAMPO SANTO
57
AD
“Okay,” she said, “this is a leper colony of sorts, so we’re obviously in the right place. And this is the cemetery attached to the leper colony, so we’ve got that right too.”
She looked up at Emiliano. “Agreed so far?”
“Agreed.”
“Now let’s look at this date again—fifty-seven, the year when Metzger and Maria Consuela arrived here in Cuba.” She stopped and thought. “But wait. What if it isn’t a date?”
“But it has to be,” Emiliano pointed out. “Look at the AD underneath it.”
“You know, that’s always bothered me. They obviously didn’t land in fifty-seven BC. So why bother to put the AD there at all?”
As though in answer to her own question, Jackie said breathlessly, “But wait a minute. What if AD doesn’t stand for ‘anno Domini,’ the year of our Lord? What if it means something else entirely?”
“Like what?” Emiliano asked, sounding as if his renewed sense of hope was catching fire from hers.
“I don’t know. Let me think.” She looked up from the piece of paper to the orderly rows of graves facing them. There was something about those rows, their regularity, that seemed familiar to her, but at the same time their meaning remained frustratingly out of her reach. She thought about the basic cryptography course she had taken at the Farm. She had been shown a pad used for enciphering and deciphering messages, really just a piece of paper made up of printed rows of empty boxes waiting to be filled in with transposed letters. For some reason that made her think about playing Scrabble at home with her family. And then it hit her.
“Across and down,” she said.
“What?” asked Emiliano.
“AD stands for ‘across and down,’ ” said Jackie with rising enthusiasm in her voice. “Like the rows of graves here. They’re orderly, regimented, like a Scrabble board or a crossword puzzle. I bet the grave we’re looking for is the one where row five across meets row seven down.”
Emiliano looked at Jackie with amazement. “I think you’re right,” he said. “If he were here, Lewis Carroll would be very proud of you.”
“Well, let’s hope that when we dig up the grave, it leads to more than just a rabbit hole.”
It took about an hour for Emiliano to dig down into the grave found at the intersection of the fifth row across and the seventh row down. This one had a wooden cross that seemed no different from the others. But he and Jackie were probably now only minutes from discovering whether her hunch was right and the grave would give up Walker’s treasure instead of just another coffin or, more probably, a decomposing corpse in the remains of a shroud. Jackie hoped that they wouldn’t be forced to defile any more graves. Seeing the disinterred bones of Hidalgo Walter had been chastening enough for one lifetime.
Once again, Jackie and Emiliano heard the sound of the shovel striking something hard, and once again, Emiliano shoveled the dirt out of the way until what was underneath was laid bare.
Jackie mouthed a silent “Thank God” when she saw that it wasn’t the lid of a coffin. Instead, it appeared to be the slightly rounded top of a chest. A treasure chest, she wondered to herself. With the melody for “gold doubloons and pieces of eight” playing in her head, Jackie tried to restrain herself until Emiliano had put down the shovel, then used both his hands to lift up the chest and push it up over the rim of the grave. Jackie knelt to inspect it and saw that the chest was made of dark wood held together with brass fixtures. A sea chest most probably.