Something Wilder(88)

She paused. “What?”

“What is that?” he asked, pointing to her hand. “What is that rhythm you always do? Is it a song?”

She looked down, almost like she didn’t realize she was doing it.

“No. It’s just my dad’s knock,” she said. “It was our secret knock. From when I was younger. He would be gone a lot, and I was alone here. It’s how I knew it was Duke at the door. Of course, he could have just used his key like a normal person, but he always did like to make an entrance.”

Leo stared at her, heart thundering in protective anger… and understanding. “Do it again.”

They did it together once, and then again, and he jogged to the desk, finding a piece of paper and a pen to write it down as she repeated it: short, long, short, short, short, short.

On a hunch, he opened his phone browser, typing in a search.

“It’s Morse code,” he said.

“What does it spell?” She came up beside him, staring down at the piece of paper.

L I L I L I L I… Lili.

“Lily,” he said. “But with an I, not a Y. Just a repeat of Lili over and over.”

“Do you think it’s important?”

“Maybe? It’s how Liliana is spelled… But maybe not. It’s not a location,” he said. “Not a spatial cue or direction.”

He looked over at her, but her attention had been snagged by something. She was staring up at the wall.

The wall—the walls—covered in nails.

He saw it now. The nails weren’t haphazard; they were in patterns, patterns everywhere. Single nails, or careful lines of three of them in a row. Dots and dashes everywhere.

Words literally hammered into every inch of the cabin.

“Have these always been here?”

She shook her head. “He did it the year after my mom left. I figured he’d finally lost it or was just working through something.” Lily let out a quiet cry, cupping her hand over her mouth and then speaking behind it. “My name. After his stroke, it was all he could say. Do you think he was—”

“Trying to tell you something?” Leo asked, voice tight with excitement. “Saying Lily over and over?” He gaped at her. “Given that his secret knock was your name, and he couldn’t speak after his stroke except to say your name? Yeah. I think he was.”

She pressed a hand to her forehead. “Oh my God. The riddle.”

“What?”

She recited the section from memory: “You hate to go, but you will. Leo, Duke knew I hated going into Ely. When I was a kid, there was never anyone there to hang out with; Duke would take me with him and spend hours at the bar, talking with the locals who all worshipped him, and I would be at the jukebox dropping quarters in, picking from the same selection of songs over and over.” She lifted a hand, fingers shaking against her temple. “And You’ll need to go, but never there. The photograph was in the men’s room—I’d use the ladies’ room.” Her expression froze in shock as she stared at Leo. “That riddle was only for me to solve. Duke left this for me. This all ends with my name.”

They stood in stunned silence for two beats before exploding apart and rushing to opposite walls, scanning wildly for Lili in the nails, feeling along logs, calling out patterns.

They didn’t need to have Morse code memorized, just needed to find it in the patterns of nail heads—two rounds of a dot, a dash, and four more dots. She pulled a dining chair to the wall in the living room, standing on it so she could see near the ceiling, meticulously scanning. Leo did the same at the front of the house, from ceiling to floorboard, working his way from the fireplace to the front door to the shorter logs under the window where Duke liked to look out at the mountains, and there

beneath a coat hook, under her winter coat and scarf, about halfway down at waist height, was a log that was just a tiny bit crooked, sticking out a bit more than the others, and on it, the telltale pattern hammered in.

Dot, dash, dot, dot, dot, dot. Dot, dash, dot, dot, dot, dot.

“Lily!”

She ran over, tracing her fingers along the string of small iron nail heads. “That’s it,” she whispered.

He stepped forward and felt along the entire length. This log was at the juncture between the front door and the wall, and only about three feet long. “It’s been cut,” she said, looking at him, awestruck. “The face was carefully cut away. See the seam?” Lily bent, looking closer. “I never knew this was here.”

“Nobody would.”

His heart had turned into a wild animal, throwing itself against the confinement of his breastbone. The hammering pulse echoed the code of her name all the way down his arms. He ran his hand up her back, needing grounding. “Does the log come out?”

She curved her fingertips around it, looking for a good place to grip. When she rocked her hand forward and back, the front gave a little. Lily pried it harder, pulling down on the very upper lip where the curve met the seam just above, and with a quiet pop, the front came off, revealing a hollowed-out space inside.

Lily gasped, looking into the darkness before reaching in. “I don’t see any—oh.” She pulled her arm back, fingers clutching an old, wrinkled envelope. On the front, written in handwriting Leo recognized as her father’s, were the words: