The Vanishing Violin (26 page)

I win this round. “Ahhh. These grids with all the letters.”

“Now for the bonus round. How many of the windows have lights on?”

“Nine,” Leigh Ann answers.

“Yep. Nine out of thirty-six. Exactly one-fourth. Now the tricky part. I took a sheet of paper exactly the same size as the grids with the letters and divided it into thirty-six squares, again just like the grids. Then I cut out the squares that correspond to the locations of those windows, like this.” She holds up her own grid with nine square holes.

“And here are the first two grids.”

“Now watch what happens when I set my grid with the holes on top of the first one with the letters, like so.”

“Sophie, read the letters off from left to right and top to bottom. Leigh Ann, do me a favor and write them down as she reads them off. Ready?”

“T-H-E-S-T-R-E-E-T,” I read.

“The street,” Rebecca says. “Now what?”

“Now comes the beautiful part. Leave the grid with the letters alone, but turn the one with the holes a quarter turn clockwise, and you get the next nine letters.”

I read the next nine letters. “A-D-D-R-E-S-S-F-O.”

“And another quarter turn for the next nine,” Margaret says.

“R-A-P-T-T-H-R-E-E.”

“One more turn, and we’ll be done with this letter grid.”

“B-O-N-E-S-S-E-X-S. Got all those, Leigh Ann?”

She spins her paper to show Margaret the full message so far:

Margaret uses a pencil to divide the letters into words.

“Everybody still with me? Good. Now, since the message is longer than thirty-six letters, it continues on the next grid, which has all new letters.”

Leigh Ann is checking out the grid with the holes. “Uh-oh. I forget which side is the top.”

“That’s easy. Just look at the windows in the picture. Turn the grid until it looks just like that. Pretty cool, huh? As long as you have the key, why don’t you take the rest of this one?”

Leigh Ann aligns the two grids and reads off the first set of letters, which Margaret writes down. “T-I-S-N-E-I-T-H-E. Is that right so far?”

Margaret nods and watches with a satisfied smile as Leigh Ann turns the top grid and reads off the next nine letters. “R-T-H-E-H-I-G-H-E. And the next nine are S-T-N-O-R-T-H-E-L. One more turn, and we get O-W-E-S-T-X-X-X-X.”

“Those
X’s
are just fillers at the end of the message,” Margaret says. She takes her pencil to the row of letters and divides them, leaving us with this clue:

“I already solved the other two, but here they are if you want to solve them for yourselves,” Margaret says.

I move the grids around myself to make sure I really understand how it works. “So it uses every letter on the grid exactly once? How is that possible?”

“Funny you should ask that, Sophie. You see, that’s the really amazing part, and the thing that makes this code so hard to crack. The holes have to be arranged in a very special way for the grid to rotate properly.” She opens a beat-up paperback about secret codes to show me a six-by-six grid that is numbered like this:

“See how there are four squares numbered one, four numbered two, all the way up to nine? Well, in order for the whole thing to work, you have to number your grid exactly like this and then cut out one of the ones, one of the twos, one of the threes, and so on.”

“Oh, I see why that works,” I say. “All the fives are in the corners, and the eight is always four spaces from the left in the top row, no matter how you spin the grid. Same with all the numbers.”

Margaret holds up the photo of the building. “All that makes this even more unbelievable. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to Photoshop this picture so the lights would be on in the right nine windows. It boggles the mind.”

“Oh, my mind is boggled, all right,” Becca says.

Margaret’s eyes sparkle mischievously. “Brace yourselves. There’s more.”

One is good with pita bread; the other goes better with a big slice of humble pie