Safe Passage (3 page)

"You're not dating yet, Jules." Angie fixed her with a knowing stare that had always irritated Jules; it was Angie's way of trying to make her feel like she was somehow less and should feel lucky to have Angie's attention. One of the many problems they'd had in their relationship.

Jules shook her head sharply. "No, Angie, we're not dating, period."

"She's into you."

"Pfft. Whatever, stop with the head games, Ange." Before she could listen to her ex's response, Jules stormed out of the faculty room and back to her classroom to pack up her stuff. Because she had to be up with the rowing team at six a.m. every now and then, if she left early on her planning period, the principal didn't care. Those were the perks you got when you coached teams to be state champions. She quickly emailed Gen her address and cell phone number and shut down her computer and quickly drained her cup of coffee. Then she packed some grading in her bag, doubting she'd get to it tonight, and headed out the door. She had to go to the grocery store and get her house in order before she started cooking.

*~*~*

Jules was putting the asparagus into the steamer when the doorbell rang, right at seven. Samson started barking.

"Samson, go to your place," Jules said quickly. The brindle boxer went to his crate and lay down. She walked to the door and opened it. "Hi Gen, come on in." She led Gen inside and locked the door behind her.

Gen looked around the living room, done with a gray paint on the walls that highlighted the white crown molding and baseboards. The brown leather sofa and deep burgundy accents gave the room a warm feel. "Your house is great."

"Thanks. I'd give you a grand tour, but dinner is at a kind of crucial stage." Jules took the pastry box and wine bottle from Gen and led her into the house. "Can I get you anything?"

"No, I don't mind watching you cook if you don't mind the company."

Jules grinned and gestured back into the house. "Sure, follow me to the kitchen."

Gen sat down on one of the bar stools next to the brown marble breakfast bar and looked around the kitchen. Her eyebrows arched in surprise as she took in the sights and smells of the food Jules cooked. "Okay, I had no idea you knew how to cook, much less like this."

"You haven't tasted it yet." Jules smirked as she set the two salmon fillets in the cast iron skillet to blacken. "It could be a disaster."

"I can smell it, Jules, it all smells amazing."

Jules smiled to herself as she kept an eye on the salmon. She reached over to another cabinet, and pulled out two wine glasses and a corkscrew. "Wine?"

"I've got it," Gen said as she took the corkscrew from Jules hand. "You've got enough going on with the fish and the things in the steamer and the—" She saw Jules whisk something in another pot and smiled. "Hollandaise?"

"For the asparagus."

"Okay, do you eat like this every night, because I might have to move in." Gen poured the wine and sipped it, offering the other glass to Jules.

Jules took the glass and laughed. "No, I don't. I just like to cook." She sipped the wine and smiled. "This is very nice."

"Thanks. I owe you an apology, I really thought I'd be looking at takeout boxes."

"Well, I have layers, even if I'm a coach," Jules said, smiling

"No, I didn't mean—" Gen blushed. "I didn't mean it like that, I just ... I can't cook. So I forget that other people ... can"

Jules took the hollandaise off the stove and set it on a trivet. "It's okay, Gen, I was teasing you. My dad taught me to cook."

"Your dad?"

Jules nodded but didn't look up from what she was doing. She was dishing out rice and pouring the sauce into a gravy boat. "Yeah, he's a chef."

Jules waited for Gen to say something figuring she was going to connect the dots in a few more seconds, most people did. "Your dad is Gareth Delacroix?"

Jules glanced over her shoulder to answer Gen but didn't speak. She thought Gen had been watching her back appreciatively. She knew she had a great back-arm-shoulder thing going on from crew, so she showed it off whenever she could. That was the reason she was wearing a tight, black racer back tank top with low slung jeans—to see if she could get a reaction out of Gen. She smirked at Gen, letting her know she was caught, then replied. "Yup. I shouldn't have told you, now you're going to expect it to be as good as his."

"I'm sure it'll be great. Besides, I've never been to his restaurant. I've heard it's amazing though."

"Well, I like it." Jules took the asparagus out of the steamer, split it among the two plates, and drizzled hollandaise on it. She looked at the salmon and nodded, taking it out of the pan and placing it on the plates. "Let me feed Samson, then we can sit down."

Samson had remained in his crate the whole time Jules had been cooking, and he perked up when he heard his name. Gen looked at him and smiled. "He's gorgeous."

Jules filled the dog bowl with three cups of food and put it in the crate with him, closing the crate door. "He's a great dog. Do you have pets?"

"Yes, I have a weimaraner puppy. She's about six months old."

"What's her name?"

"Belle."

Jules shook her head and smiled to herself. "I should have guessed," she said quietly, hoping it was quiet enough for Gen not to hear. She looked over at Gen and grinned wider. "Well, Sam is great with puppies if you ever want to bring her over."

"She's not ready for visits yet, she still has some accidents. But maybe at a dog park—"

"Sure. We go to City Bark at least once a week."

Jules put the two plates on the table, and Gen followed with the wine. Both women sat down. Gen looked at the plate and smiled as she took a bite of the salmon. She hummed appreciatively and swallowed. "Jules, this is amazing."

"Thanks."

Gen looked over at Jules. "So, this afternoon, before we were rudely interrupted by work, you were going to tell me about ciphers."

Jules grinned. "Oh, yeah, ciphers are the oldest codes, created by Julius Caesar. Basically, you set up the alphabet with a shifted alphabet above it. So, for example, if you shifted the alphabet three spaces, then an A becomes a C, a B becomes a D, and so on."

"But, you don't know how many letters the alphabet has been shifted in the letters, do you?"

"No, I don't"

"Then how do you break it?"

Jules leaned back in her chair a little, feeling much more comfortable talking about cryptography than making small talk. "Well, it takes some patience, but you start by finding the letter most often repeated in the message. Then you match that letter up with the most common letter–in English, it's an E–and see if that works. If it doesn't you try the second most common, and so forth, until the message makes sense."

"That sounds ... time consuming and imprecise."

Jules grinned. "It is time consuming, but it is more precise than you think. It generally works extremely well, as long as you have a big enough sample of text."

After they finished eating, Gen took out the letter and handed it to Jules, who began counting the letters in the first sentence and filling information into a chart she'd made on a sheet of graph paper. When she finished, she sighed and looked at something on her computer. "Okay, the most common letter in French is E, so that would make it likely that a J in the code is really an E because there are more J’s than anything else." She carefully wrote down the possible cipher and began plugging the coded message into the cipher. She looked over at Gen. "Does this make sense?' Ces temps-ci, cesontnosrêves qui me portent?"

Her French was halting and her pronunciation, poor, but Gen nodded. "Yes, it does. It means—"

"Don't tell me yet. I don't want to get distracted by the content until I'm done."

Gen nodded, slid into the seat on Jules' right, and took out her own notebook and began to translate the letter into English as Jules decrypted it. When Jules got to the third word in the second sentence, Jules felt Gen's hand on her arm. She looked up, eyes wide and eyebrows arched. "Jules, wait. That's not French."

"Yeah, 'Fardih a fahyi' sounds more like Arabic doesn't it."

"Is it?"

"God I hope not."

"It doesn't seem likely. I mean, that someone writing a letter here in the Thirties would know Arabic."

Jules shook her head and rubbed her eyes. "No, more likely the cipher shifted. Crap. The letter uses a different cipher every sentence."

"So you have to start over every sentence?"

"Maybe, but there'll probably be a pattern to the shifts in the cipher. I mean this letter had to be read, right?"

"True."

Gen sipped her wine while Jules meticulously counted letters again and set up another cipher on her notes. Jules looked from one cipher to the other and laughed. "Oh, that's awesome."

"What?"

"Look at the two ciphers."

Gen looked at them and furrowed her brows. "If there's a pattern, I don't see it."

"The first sentence is the code alphabet shifted six spaces, right?" Gen nodded. "The second one is shifted twenty-one spaces, or, if you look at it another way, it's the opposite of the first cipher. In the first cipher an A is an F. In the second cipher, an F is an A. Do you see?"

"Yes. So that makes it easier, right?"

"Oh yeah. I hope so. My guess is, that each sentence switches back and forth between the two ciphers." Jules kept working and when she got to the end of the paragraph she glanced over at Gen. "It's all French?"

Gen nodded.

"And it makes sense? It's not saying trippy things like, 'The horse will dance with the badger on my hat,' or something?"

Gen laughed. "Actually, that's exactly what it says, your French is fantastic."

Jules rolled her eyes and kept decrypting, starting with the next paragraph.

"Wait," Gen said. "That stopped being French."

"Yeah, I kinda figured, let me try the other cipher." Jules wrote down a few words and glanced at Gen. "That's worse?"

She nodded and Jules sighed and raked her fingers through her hair. "Okay, looks like a new cipher and it’s a reflection for every paragraph. This is complex—is it spy stuff?"

Gen shook her head. "Definitely not."

"No, probably not with the horse and the hat."

They continued to decrypt the letter and finally Jules put her pen down, waiting for Gen to finish the translation. She looked at the last word.

JMD
.

"Shit," Jules hissed.

"What?"

"JMD."

"Yes, I assume that's her initials."

Jules looked at Gen critically. "How do you know it's a woman?"

"Content," Gen replied with a shrug.

"JMD is probably Julianna Marie Delacroix."

"Oh, your initials?"

"Mine and my auntie's. She must have written the letter."

"So it would seem. Are you ready to read it?"

Jules nodded and Gen handed her the notebook. "This is the best I can do, some of the vocabulary was a bit antiquated so I tried to reflect that in the tone of the writing in English."

Jules looked at the letter written in Gen's precise script.

December 15, 1939

My Dearest E,

I know I am writing you only hours before I will be coming home from this dreaded finishing school, but I don't know when I will see you—I don't know when it will be safe. I don't even know when I will be able to send this, but I hope I can send one of the girls from the house as soon as I arrive.

Our dreams are what sustain me these days. Going to Paris with you and opening a restaurant will be the mantra I repeat to myself when Mother takes me with her on calls. I think we will have what we need to get away in the next few days.

I am worried; however, about how things are in Europe. The news I overhear the mistresses at school discussing is not good. We might have to stay in New York for a while before we can go. Perhaps I am worried for nothing
–
surely the Germans will not move into France. I know you will tell me that I can't worry about something until I know it's real, but I want to make sure we can get away from my father, so I worry. We have to leave soon though, the thought of returning to that school and going months without seeing you again is abhorrent.

I will be glad to be back, if only because I will find a way to see you. We need to be careful, though, I think Father suspects something. Either way, he is pushing me to keep company with Vincent Bartier when I return. You need not worry. Even if I were not already in love with you, Vincent Bartier is so far from my tastes that I laugh at the thought.

I count the hours until I am with you again.

Love,

Your J

P.S. (Added December 23, 1939) I was unable to get someone to send this until now, but this is worth the wait. I have the last thing we need. We can make our escape as soon as the twenty-sixth. I think we should wait until New Year's Eve. Mother and Father will be distracted by preparations for their party and we will be away before they know to look. I will see you, my darling, at the riverboat launch at noon on December 31. -JMD

Jules looked over the letter and shook her head.

Gen touched Jules shoulder gently. "She wrote beautifully, your auntie."

Jules kept staring at the letter, her mouth open, but her eyes were no longer focused on the text.

"I'm guessing from your surprise that E was not your great uncle," Gen said. Jules shook her head slowly then cleared her throat.

"She never married. Whoever E was, he didn't leave with her. She never left the city after 1939. She stayed in this house after my great grandfather died. She taught art."

"So she never mentioned someone with a name beginning with E?"

"I don't think so. But if it was in 1939, then she probably had given up hope."

"Not to mention it was a secret she had to keep from her family."

Jules nodded. "Maybe he was poor."

"Or he was black."

"We have to figure out who E is. Then we can figure things out further. Maybe he's still alive."

"Do you mind if I keep helping you with this. I'm kind of invested in it now."