Hidden Pictures(69)
“Okay, but why now? Mitzi’s lived here seventy years. Why did Anya wait all this time to go on her rampage?”
It’s a fair question. I have no idea. Adrian chews on the tip of his pencil and returns his attention to the jumble of letters, like they might have answers to all our questions. At the house next door, the circus is slowly winding down. The fire department is gone and all the neighbors have wandered away. There are just a few cops left, and the last thing they do is seal the back door with two long strips of yellow DO NOT CROSS tape. They intersect in the middle, forming a giant X, a barrier between the house and the outside world.
Then I glance down at Mitzi’s notes, and the solution is suddenly obvious.
“The Xs,” I tell Adrian. “They’re not Xs.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Anya knew we didn’t speak her language. So she put Xs between the words. Like barriers. They’re spaces, not letters.”
“Where?”
I take the pencil from him and recopy the letters, placing each word on its own line.
“Now that looks like a language,” I tell him. “Something Slavic. Russian? Maybe Polish?”
Adrian opens his phone and inputs the first word into Google Translate. The results are instantaneous: Igen is the Hungarian word for “yes.” From there, it’s easy to translate the entire message: YES X BEWARE X THIEF X HELP X FLOWER.
“Help Flower?” Adrian asks. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.” I think back to the drawings that I pulled from the recycling bin—wasn’t there a page of flowers in bloom? “But this definitely explains why she’s using pictures. Her native language is Hungarian.”
Adrian opens his phone and takes a snapshot. “You need to text this to Caroline. It’s proof you’re not making things up.”
I wish I had his confidence. “This doesn’t prove anything. It’s just a bunch of letters that anyone could have written on paper. She’ll accuse me of buying a Hungarian dictionary.”
But Adrian is undaunted. He keeps rereading the words, like he’s hoping to find some deeper secondary meaning to them. “You need to be careful, you need to beware of the thief. But who’s the thief? What did he steal?”
There are so many pieces to the puzzle, my head is starting to hurt. I feel like we’re trying to jam a square peg into a round hole—or to force a very easy solution on a very complicated problem. I’m trying so hard to focus and think, I’m annoyed when my cell phone starts to ring, shattering my concentration.
But then I see the name on the caller ID.
The Rest Haven Retirement Community in Akron, Ohio.
24
“Is that Mallory?”
“Yes?”
“Hi, this is Jalissa Bell at Rest Haven Akron. You called here yesterday for Mrs. Campbell?”
“Right, can I speak with her?”
“Well, it’s complicated. I could put Mrs. Campbell on the phone, but you wouldn’t have much of a conversation. She has late-stage dementia. I’ve been her caregiver three years and most mornings she won’t recognize me. I really doubt she can answer your questions.”
“I just need some basic information. Is there a chance you know her mother’s name?”
“I’m sorry, hon, I don’t. But even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to tell you.”
“Has she ever mentioned an inheritance? Receiving a large sum of money from an Aunt Jean?”
She laughs. “Now that’s something I definitely couldn’t tell you. There’s privacy laws! I’d lose my job.”
“Of course. I’m sorry.”
I guess she can hear the desperation in my voice, because she offers a compromise: “We have visiting hours tomorrow, noon to four. If you really want to talk to Mrs. Campbell, you can stop by, and I’ll introduce you. Visitors are good for the patients. It keeps their brains active, gets those neurons firing. Just don’t come with high expectations, okay?”
I thank her for her time and hang up. Akron is a good six hours away and I only have tonight and tomorrow to convince the Maxwells that I’m telling the truth. I explain everything to Adrian and he agrees that I shouldn’t waste any time chasing down long shots.
If there’s a solution to my problem, I’m going to have to find it right here in Spring Brook.
* * *
At the end of the day, we walk into town to the Bistro, a small sit-down restaurant that serves all the same food that you’d get in a good Jersey diner, but there’s soft interior lighting, a full bar, and a jazz trio, so everything costs twice as much as you’d expect. And then after dinner we walk aimlessly around the neighborhood because neither of us is ready to call it a night. Adrian insists he’ll come visit me in Norristown, and he says of course I’m welcome to hang out in Spring Brook as much as I want. But I know it’s going to feel different without the job—I’ll feel like an outsider, like I don’t belong here anymore. I just wish there was some way to convince the Maxwells I was telling the truth.
Adrian takes my hand and squeezes it.
“Maybe there will be new pictures when we get back to the cottage,” he says. “New clues to help us make sense of everything.”