Beverly Connor - Dead Past

“Yes,” said Frank. “If the keyword is DIANE, on the header row of this table I write the word DIANE over and over again until I have used up all the letters in the message to be encoded.

“Oh, I get it.” Jin jumped up and sat down again. “That’s brilliant. No wonder I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.”

“Explain it to those of us who don’t get it,” said Neva.

“To encrypt ‘The house that Jack built,’ ” said Frank, “I go to the new table and see that the first letter in the message is t and it is under the letter D in the keyword DIANE. I go to the Vigenere square and use it like the coordinates of a map to find the encryption letter I need. Go to D on the left most column and find where it intersects with t in the top row. The letter where the column and row intersect is W . Do the same thing for the second letter. The h is under I in the keyword Diane. Go to the square and we find that I and h intersect at P . Keep going and you can encrypt the whole sentence. You do the reverse process to decode the message.”

“That is so cool,” said Jin. “You’ll have to show me how to decode it the other ways you were talking about.”

“Sure. It’s more time-consuming. As you see, if you have the keyword, it’s a piece of cake.”

“Yeah,” said David, “I’d like to see the computer program. That would be an interesting algorithm.”

“How about our message?” said Diane.

“OK, we’re hoping the keyword is palimpsest .” Frank took the first word in the doll code and tried it out with his square. KVQ = vvf. “ Palimpsest isn’t the keyword,” he said.

“Try papyri, ” said Diane.

“Won’t work,” said Frank. “ Papyri and palimpsest start out with the same two letters. We’ll end up with vv again.”

“So we’re nowhere,” said Neva.

“Or an alternative method for decoding it,” said Jin.

“Maybe the keyword is his name,” said Neva.

“That would be too easy to decode,” said Jin. “If you are going to the trouble to have an elaborate code, you won’t have such an easy keyword.”

The phone rang and Diane answered. She was expecting Garnett, but it was Beth, the museum’s librarian.

“Beth,” said Diane. “You have something for me?”

“Yes, I do. I can bring it to you. I thought you’d like to know that I did find some descendants of Leo Parrish that you might be able to contact. I don’t know where they are now, but I have info on the last-known locations of some of them.”

“Great. Can you come to the crime lab?” Diane asked.

“Yes. I’ll walk right over,” said Beth.

Diane explained to the others that she’d enlisted the help of a genealogist to discover any relatives of Leo Parrish.

“That was clever,” said Frank.

“And fast,” said Diane. “Librarians are much speedier than private detectives.”

It took only a couple of minutes for Beth to cross from the third-floor east wing to the west wing where the crime lab was. David was at the door to let her in. She entered, looking around at all the glass walls and high-tech equipment as though she’d just stepped onto another planet.

“Well,” she said, “this is certainly different from the rest of the museum.” She was carrying a folder, which she held close to her. They all moved to the round table to learn about the family tree of Leo Parrish.

“OK,” Beth said when they were all seated. “I’ll start with the Glendale-Marsh relatives. She pointed to each person on the chart as she named them, going from generation to generation. “Leo Parrish had an uncle, Luther Parrish, who lived in Glendale-Marsh in the thirties. He had two sons, Martin and Owen. Owen Parrish had a son. The son married and had a daughter-Oralia Lee Parrish. They all left Florida when Martin and Owen lost the family land. The daughter, Oralia Lee, married one Burke Rawson. They had no children that I can find a record of.”

“We should be able to locate the Rawsons,” said David.

“The last address I had for them was Ohio fifteen years ago,” said Beth. “Now, you mention that Leo Parrish wrote to someone when he was in the service. That was his sister, Leontine Parrish Richmond. She lived in Upstate New York.”

“Were they twins?” asked Diane.

Beth nodded. “Leontine had a daughter who was eleven years old in 1935.” She pointed to the chart with their names. “The daughter grew up, married, and had a son named Quinn Sebestyen,” said Beth. “He married a woman named Allie Shaw. And they had two children.”

“Christian and Melissa,” said Jin.

He was seated across the table from Beth and they all looked over at him, surprised.

Jin looked as if he had seen a ghost.

All of them stared at Jin who slid the family tree toward him and studied it. “This is amazing,” he said.

“What?” said Neva. “You look like she just uncovered your relatives.”

“Do you know these people?” asked David.

Jin looked at Diane. “Do you remember when”-he snapped his fingers a couple of times-“when Dr. Webber asked me what I was interested in outside of work? It was in the morgue tent.”

Diane thought back to the time in the morgue tent. It seemed so long ago now.

“After Dr. Pilgrim took a break, after you found the fetal bones, and Dr. Rankin talked about how all we could do was pick up the pieces,” Jin said.

Diane remembered. She wondered if that moment was the trigger for Archie Donahue, realizing as Rankin did that they could never make a dent in the drug trade because the money was too great. All they could do was pick up the broken bodies and mourn the broken lives. Was that the thing that pushed Archie to “try to make a difference,” as he had said-if he was indeed the murderer of Blake Stanton and Marcus McNair?

“Yeah,” said Jin. “Remember, I was saying I was interested in strange disappearances. I was talking about that Court TV program about missing people-Judge Crater, Jimmy Hoffa, and some ordinary people who had disappeared mysteriously. Like that whole family that vanished. Their belongings were still in the house and even their car was still in the driveway.”

“What are you saying?” asked Diane.

“This was them-Quinn and Allie Sebestyen and their seven-year-old daughter, Melissa, and their ten-year-old son, Christian.”

“Oh, my, this is getting strange,” said Beth. She looked uneasily around her as if that’s what happened here in the dark side-strange things.

Diane needed a moment for the information to sink in.

“When was this?” she asked.

“About twenty years ago-1987, I think. Yeah, it was 1987,” said Jin. “Nothing was ever heard from them again.”

They all fell silent.

“Why don’t I leave this with you?” said Beth, rising from the table. “Shall I continue looking for information on these people?”

“As long as it doesn’t keep you from your other work,” said Diane.

“All of this was in records that I accessed via the Internet or by calling and asking some willing person to look up a marriage or death certificate,” she said.

“This is excellent work, Beth. Thank you,” said Diane.

David rose, escorted Beth out the door of the crime lab, and returned to the table.

“Nineteen eighty-seven,” said Diane. “The year Juliet was kidnapped. And they had a seven-year-old daughter-the same age as Juliet. She and Juliet could have been playmates.”

“I still feel like I’m missing something,” said David.

“I thought it was just me,” said Neva. “I’ve had a hard time keeping up ever since I got here. First, the code, and now it feels as though I’m missing part of this story.”