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He tips the book so I can see what he’s pointing at. Sure enough, there is a faint line beneath the page number.
“Yeah.” My breathing deepens. A simple line, and it feels like Ben is talking to me. “That probably means something.”
Liam gets up and grabs a notebook and pen, writing the number down. A couple more minutes pass, and Gage chirps that he found one, too, followed quickly by Rex. And not long after that, I discover one in mine. Liam logs them all while Gage peruses the final book until he locates one there.
I look over the list of numbers we have.
397
104
98
256
17
“I have no idea what this is supposed to mean,” I groan.
“Address? Phone number?” Rex mumbles, half to himself as he stares at the numbers like the rest of us.
“Could be a combination or an account number,” Gage offers, but looking over the paper, neither fits.
The suggestions are valid, but Ben wouldn’t leave me a message so obscure. It should mean something to me.
Liam opens each book to the designated pages, laying them all out for us to inspect.
I point to one of the markings. “The line gets thicker between the nine and the seven.”
“It’s a dot,” Liam mumbles. “Decimal point.” He pops up, dragging all the books closer to him, his eyes wild. “Coordinates.”
With that one word, it all starts to click. A choppy breath tumbles from my lips. “He used to take me geocaching when I was a kid.”
Rex smiles. “I remember that. You always came home excited about some tiny souvenir.”
“Yeah.” The word puffs out as it all swarms me. The feel. The joy. The smells—musty earth and pine and fresh crystal waters.
Ben loved taking me on adventures. It wasn’t all scuba diving and racing cars though. Sometimes, it was quiet hiking.
I let myself slip inside the coziness of those memories and share it with them. “We’d get geographic coordinates from a geocaching website, where people posted the caches they’d hidden, and hunt one down. Each cache was different, but always filled with a log to sign our names and a treasure trove of silly trinkets—key chains, trolls, harmonicas. We’d take one and leave something we’d brought. It was one of my most cherished activities with him.”
Liam breaks from whatever he’s frantically searching for in the books and palms my head. No words are offered, but the kiss in my hair says enough. He recognizes the anguish.
Swallowing the ache ripping through me, I pore over one of the open books. “We need north or south and east or west though. Right?”
“Exactly,” Liam says as his hand rubs over my back. “Nothing on this page.” He pushes one book out of the way and studies another one.
Rex taps on a page number. “Here’s another decimal. After the four.”
That one is harder to note because it’s at the end, but he’s right. Still, I don’t see anything denoting direction on any of the pages. But maybe that makes sense.
“Ben wouldn’t have put all the information on the same page. He’d want it to be hard for anyone to decipher. Shut the books,” I tell them, and to my surprise, all three men close the books immediately. Suddenly, I understand Wells on a much deeper level. There’s something about an entire group of people doing what you demand that’s exhilarating.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy is in front of me, so I trace my finger over it, noting the texture difference on the N. “North,” I declare.
Liam takes it from me, confirming the variance and sifting through the book to find the correct page. “Two fifty-six north. Good work, Ace. That’s part of it. Let’s find the other cardinal direction and try to piece it all together.”
It takes a few long beats of us rubbing our fingers over the covers, but Gage finds that the W in George Orwell for 1984 is also different. That puts the W after seventeen if we’re doing this correctly.
