UNDERWATER CRYPTOGRAPHY

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    I returo my own rooms, my feet moving as slowly as my thoughts. Nothing made sense. Why had John-the-dig died? Because someone had interfered with the safety cat the ladder. It ’t have been the boy. Miss Winter’s stave him a clear alibi: While John and his ladder were tumbling from the balustrade through the empty air to the ground, the boy was eyeing her cigarette, not daring to ask for a drag. Then surely it must have been Emmeline. Except that nothing iory suggests that Emmeline would do such a thing. She was a harmless child, eveer said so. And Miss Winter herself couldn’t have been clearer. No. Not Emmelihen who? Isabelle was dead. Charlie was gone.

    I came to my rooms, went in, stood by the window. It was too dark to see; there was only my refle, a pale shadow you co<s>..</s>uld see the night through. “Who?” I asked it.

    At last I listeo the quiet, persistent voi my head that I had been trying to ignore. Adeline.

    No, I said.

    Yes, it said. Adeline.

    It was not possible. The cries of grief for John-the-dig were still fresh in my mind. No one could mourn a man like that if she had killed him, could she? No one could murder a man she loved enough to cry those tears for?

    But the voi my head reted episode after episode from the story I knew so well. The violen the tarden, each swipe of the shears a blow to John’s heart. The attamelihe hair-pulling, the battering, the biting. The baby removed from the perambulator a carelessly, to die or to be found. One of the twins was not quite right, they said in the village. I remembered and I wondered. Was it possible? Had the tears I had just witnessed been tears of guilt? Tears of remorse? Was it a murderess I had held in my arms and forted? Was this the secret Miss Winter had hidden from the world for so long? An unpleasant suspi revealed itself to me. Was this the point of Miss Winter’s story? To make me sympathize with her, exoe her, five her? I shivered.

    But ohing at least I was sure of. She had loved him. How could it be otherwise? I remembered holding her racked and<s>藏书网</s> tormented body against mine and khat only broken love  cause such despair. I remembered the child Adeline reag into John’s loneliness after the death of the Missus, drawing him back to life by getting him to teach her to pruhe topiary.

    The topiary she had damaged.

    Oh, perhaps I wasn’t sure after all!

    My eyes roamed over the darkness outside the window. Her fabulous garden. Was it her homage to John-the-dig? Her li.９9ｌｉb?feloence for the damage she had wrought?

    I rubbed my tired eyes and knew I ought to go to bed. But I was too tired to sleep. My thoughts, if I did nothing to stop them, would go round in circles all night long. I decided to have a bath.

    While I waited for the tub to fill, I cast about for something to occupy my mind. A ball of paper half visible beh the dressing table caught my attention. I unfolded it, flatte out. A row of phoic script.

    Ihroom, with the water thundering in the background, I made a few short-lived attempts at pig some kind of meaning out of my string of symbols. Always there was that undermining feeling t?. I hadn’t captured Emmeline’s utterance quite accurately. I pictured the moonlit garden, the tortions of the witch hazel, the grotesque, urgent face; I heard again the abruptness of Emmeline’s voice. But however hard I tried, I could not recall the pronou itself.

    I climbed into the bath, leaving the scrap of paper on the edge. The water, warm to my feet, legs, back, felt distinctly cainst the macula on my side. Eyes closed, I slid right uhe surface. Ears, nose, eyes, right to the top of my head. The water rang in my ears, my hair lifted from its roots.

    I came up for air, then instantly plunged uer again. More air, then water.

    In a loose, uer fashion, thoughts began to swim in my mind. I knew enough about twin language to know that it was otally ied. In the case of Emmeline and Adeli would be based on English or French or could tais of both.

    Air. Water.

    Introduced distortions. Ionation, maybe. Or the vowels. And sometimes extra bits, added to camouflage rather than to carry meaning.

    Air. Water.

    A puzzle. A secret code. A cryptograph. It wouldn’t be as hard as the Egyptian hieroglyphs or Myaean Linear B. How would you have to go about it? Take each syllable separately. It could be a word or a part of a word. Remove the intonation first. Play with the stress. Experiment with lengthening, shortening, flattening the vowel sounds. Then what did the syllable suggest in English? In French? And what if you left it out and played with the syllables oher side instead? There would be a vast number of possible binations. Thousands. But not an infinite number. A puting mae could do it. So could a human brain, given a year <q></q>or two.

    The dead go underground.

    What? I sat bolt upright in shock. The words came to me out of nowhere.

    They beat painfully in my chest. It was ridiculous. It couldn’t be!

    Trembling, I reached to the edge of the bath where I had left my jottings, and drew the paper o me. Anxiously I sed it. My notes, my symbols and signs, my squiggles and dots, were gohey had been sitting in a pool of water and had drowned.

    I tried once more to remember the sounds as they had e to me uer. But they were wiped from my memory. All I could remember was her fraught, i fad the five-note sequence she sang as she left.

    The dead go underground. Words that had arrived fully formed in my mind, leaving no trail behind them. Where had they e from? What tricks had my mind been playing to e up with these words out of nowhere?

    I didn’t actually believe that this was what she had said to me, did I?

    e on, be sensible, I told myself.

    I reached for the soap and resolved to put my uer imaginings out of my mind.

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