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Chapter 127: Patience
I finished the seventh notebook on Monday, a little after dawn.I hadn't meant to read through the night. Sophia had gone home at midnight, reluctantly, with the half-decoded pages folded in her bag and a promise that she'd be back by eight. I'd sent Bishop away too, at ten, with the copies. I told myself I would only look at one more entry, the one I hadn't been able to bring myself to open the night before.*I have spoken to him today.*I'd stared at that line for the better part of a day. I'd carried it from room to room, in my head, the way you carry a stone. Nine years after the funeral, a man who had written nothing but private accounts of his silence had finally spoken. I had pictured it a hundred ways. A door slammed. A voice raised. A grandfather in a rage, with a drawer of proof under his hand, and a man across a table going white.It wasn't like that. It wasn't like that at all.I turned the page and read it, with the first grey light coming flat through the library windows
Chapter 126: My Own House
After the first sentence, it went faster.Sophia said that was the way with every lock. The first turn took all the strength you had, and once it gave, the rest came easily. She'd written the word *DANIEL* out on a strip of card and cut it into six squares, one letter apiece, and we laid them in a row on the table and slid them along beneath each line of cipher. She read the letters off the grid. I wrote them down. We swapped every half hour, because by then our eyes had started to swim.The words came out in capitals, packed together with no space between them. Sophia drew a small stroke after each one as it resolved. By two o'clock we had a page. By four we had five. It was slow work, and I'd never been so glad of anything.I should say what it was like to read it.I'd read my father's ledger, in his tight, upright figures. I had read my grandfather's plain books, written in ink for a reader he hoped would one day come. But this was different. The twelfth notebook was not for any re
Chapter 125: Five Letters at a Time
Sophia came on Sunday morning with her sleeves already pushed to the elbow.I'd asked her the night before, on the telephone, in as few words as I could manage. I told her I'd found a drawer. I told her what was in it. I told her about the twelfth book, and the grey rain of capitals, and that I thought I could not read it alone. She'd been quiet for a moment, and then she'd said, *What time?*She stood now in the doorway of the room by the long table, with her coat over her arm and her hair pinned back tightly, looking at the notebook I'd laid open on the wood. Bishop had left it with me. The other eleven he had taken to be copied and sealed. This one, he'd said, I ought to keep within reach.She came and stood beside me, and for a long minute she didn't speak."Groups of five," she said."Yes.""No spaces between words. No punctuation." She leaned closer. "Whoever wrote this wanted to make certain no one could guess where a word began.""He was a careful man.""So I'm learning." She
Chapter 124: Not Yet
It was past ten when I put the seventh notebook down.I hadn't finished it. I had read a page and a half, the first lines of an entry that began *I have spoken to him today*, and then I'd closed the cover on my thumb and sat very still. I could not read it yet. I knew that as one knows one cannot lift something. It was not fear, or not only. It was the sense that if I went on, I should go on all night, and in the morning I would be a different person from the one who'd come through the door.Bishop had not moved from the shelves. He'd taken off his coat at some point and folded it over a chair. In the lamplight his face looked older than I'd ever seen it, a long, lined, patient face, with the eyes sunk deep."You should rest," he said."I can't.""Then you should eat.""I can't do that either." I rubbed my eyes with the heel of my hand. "Not yet."I heard what I'd said, and I almost laughed. It sounded like a thing my grandfather would say.---I'd been trying, for an hour, to put int
Chapter 123: The Long Quiet
I read until the light went.Bishop had drawn the curtains back when the afternoon began to fail, and then, without a word, lit the lamp on the desk and set it at my elbow. Later he brought a tray from somewhere, a cup of tea I didn't touch, a plate I didn't look at. I heard him come and go. I did not look up.The first notebook took nearly two hours. It was not long. It was small and dense, written in a hand that grew smaller as it went, as if the writer were saving paper, or saving himself. I read it as one reads a letter from the dead, slowly, line by line, trying to hear the voice under the words.It wasn't what I'd expected.I had expected grief, and there was grief, though not in the way I'd imagined. It was held in, flattened, folded away between the lines like a pressed flower. What came through was something else. It was a mind at work. Calm and exact and tireless. The mind of a man who had decided that if he could do nothing else for his son, he could at least understand.--
Chapter 122: What Was Locked
Bishop opened it himself.I'd expected to send for someone. I'd said as much, kneeling on the carpet with the useless key in my fist, and he'd given me a long, mild, considering look and asked whether I trusted him with a pair of tools. I said that I did. He went out to the car and came back with a small flat leather roll, the sort a watchmaker might carry, and laid it on the blotter and untied it.I didn't ask where he'd learned. He didn't offer.He worked with the torch propped against the desk leg and his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, bent almost double, breathing slowly through his nose. The tools were thin as hat pins. He slid the first into the dust-packed keyhole and drew it out grey, and wiped it on a handkerchief, and slid it in again. I stood over him and found I was holding my breath."It's a good lock," he murmured. "Better than the drawer deserves. Someone paid for it.""Richard.""I should think so." He tilted his head, listening to something I couldn't hear. "Ol
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