The Tavernier Stones

Chapter 24

John peered out his front window and watched Sarah arrive for a visit after what must have been, for her, a harrowing drive through the country.

She parked David's VW Beetle in the only remaining place it would fit on Nouveau Street and stepped daintily out of the car, as if merely brushing against the air of the neighborhood would soil her. Her apprehension about leaving Philadelphia for the sticks was obvious.

To be fair, Lancaster contained more than just crickets and rednecks. But John had heard city people say it before: there were two kinds of flying insects in central Pennsylvania, those small enough to penetrate the screen and those big enough to open the door.

Sarah stretched her skirt down as far as she could toward her knees and took short, choppy steps on the sidewalk in her high heels. The city people had a point: nothing about "Nouveau" Street was the least bit new. The row houses were some of the town's oldest. And none was complete without a rickety porch furnished with a lawn chair occupied by a potbellied man. The potbellied man's grungy tank top stretched torturously across his abdomen, and its low, U-shaped neckline granted canopy space to his sprouting chest hairs. The potbellied man didn't do anything. He didn't even read. He sat in his lawn chair and watched pedestrians, the blank expression on his face a symptom of intellectual paralysis.

Sarah shuddered visibly and hurried out of range of their hollow stares. John was glad he kept his interior tidy, and relieved he wouldn't be serving Hamburger Helper again.

"Nice neighborhood," Sarah said, when he greeted her at the door.

"It's affordable."

"You the only skinny guy in it?"

"Nah. There's another one four blocks down."

"What's cooking? Smells like spaghetti."

"Spaghetti."

She kissed him on the cheek, then went sighing into the living room and sat on the couch.

John predicted that working with Sarah would make it hard to concentrate. He'd been in a high state of agitation all morning. Fifteen minutes in front of the mirror was, for him, about fourteen minutes and fifty-five seconds longer than usual. After deciphering the code, he had spent two days digesting the message that emerged, then had finally—hesitantly—called David and Sarah to share his success with them.

David, however, was in jail again, this time for shoplifting in a museum, of all places. Sarah admitted as well that their progress on the treasure hunt had reached a standstill; that she and David had been spending their discretionary time not on sleuthing, rather on casing jewelry stores.

"Casing them ... to buy something?" John asked.

"No. Casing them ... to borrow something."

"Oh." He spread his work out on the coffee table and handed her a copy of the cipher.

          Extend in the vltimate prone position
          From the foote of the elevation (Extend in
          the vltimate prone) basketh in fairie lighte
          Of Apollos resplendent apogee
          On the festivall of his highest aproche
          Then drink from the Sieve of Eratosthenes
          Sing more songes than Solomon
          And descend to treasvre
          For the gates of Hell shall not prevayle

"The line breaks are mine," John explained, "and might be a little arbitrary. The text was all run together. This part here, in parentheses, is the repeated string I mentioned on the phone."

"I don't want to be a party pooper, but none of this makes any sense to me."

"It didn't to me, either, the first time I read it."