Page 52 of Untamed Coast

Chilton had filled her machine with messages about “something big” while she was out at the fishing cabin, but she’d tried several times to return his call and he hadn’t answered. Lady Melinda needed some engine work, and Anya had some replacement fishing gear waiting for her in Sitka, so it was a good time to visit the lawyer in person anyway. She figured a couple more days away from Pelican wasn’t a bad idea either. The boardwalk fishing town was small for sure, but since the…accident, it had started to seem downright claustrophobic.

A series of splashes alongside the boat announced a group of Dall’s porpoises arriving to surf the bow wake. Anya held course as the playful mammals ran effortlessly alongside her, splashing and sprinting joyfully ahead, swerving back and forth across her bow.

She opened the pilothouse door. “Hey buddy!” she shouted to a porpoise cruising up the side of the boat. The animal turned sideways and seemed to look up at her.

Pay tenshun when you’re driving the fuckin boat. You tryna kill me?

Pain shot through her shoulder—an old injury. She jumped back to the helm.

He was gone. She could drive the boat as she pleased.

Chilton was a major annoyance. She gave him a simple task—or what should have been for any ordinary lawyer, and he’d turned it into a circus of crazy theories about missing money and absurd land values. On the upside, she hadn’t received a bill from him yet, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was just creating busywork for himself so he could bill her for more hours. Whatever this new emergency was, she decided she’d have a serious sit-down with him and tell him to get back to business.

“We have a ‘Muskeg Message’ for whoever lost a navy blue baby stroller in front of the Russian Bishop’s House. Call the front desk to claim.”

Anya pulled Lady Melinda’s helm to port to avoid a shallow area she remembered that wasn’t well marked on the chart. She gave a wide berth to the field of kelp that indicated the location of the shoal.

The radio crackled “…Anya on fishing vessel Lady Melinda: Please contact John Chilton as soon as possible. It’s urgent.”

Anya jerked the power cord from the boom box, silencing it.

Yeah, urgent. I got that from the twenty phone messages. Thanks.

The wind was starting to pick up, and she worried that the last few miles into Sitka could get rough once she was in less-protected waters. Storm clouds were forming on the horizon ahead of her.

Chapter 40

-.. . -.-. --- -.. .. -. --.

Ford’s Terror—Endicott Arm, AK

2017—Marconi Franco

Marco couldn’t stop himself from yawning. “Hey, Bill, those books will still be here tomorrow. We’ll have some time before we pull up anchor to make our date with the exit.”

The sun had set behind the mountains, preparing for the brief bit of darkness before the 3 a.m. dawn. The gentle wave slap on Radio Flyer’s hull beckoned Marco to retreat to his cabin.

Bill had the two books and a legal pad spread out on the table. “I’ve found something interesting here, Marc.”

Marco leaned over to see what Bill was doing.

“See how these incoming messages are all written out in longhand cursive?” Bill asked. “Nobody takes down Morse code that way on CW. Code guys always take a kind of shorthand, so they can keep up with these transmissions banging out twenty words or more per minute. There is no time to write things out in beautiful cursive like this.”

“Why is that significant?” Marco asked.

“It means our guy wasn’t writing in this journal as he translated the code,” Bill explained. “He was writing it somewhere else, then recopying the messages into the journal in longhand cursive.”

“Maybe he was just trying to be neat?” The only other reason Marco could think of for doing that was if you were going to alter the messages before writing them in the official log.

“Could have been, yeah, but why would he care what it looks like?” Bill said. “Also, the writing in this other book is clearly in his CW shorthand, but in some kind of code. Notice how he writes the little E like a backward 3 so it doesn’t look like a small L? Or the zero with a slash through it so it’s not like an O? Guys did that to avoid errors, so the letters didn’t look like each other.”

Marco was having trouble focusing. A headache was coming on and he couldn’t concentrate on much besides getting in bed.

“I’m convinced this stuff in the coded book is some kind of a simple cipher, but I’m not getting any of the usual clues.” Bill continued. “Normally you can pretty quickly figure out which letters are E, A, and I—and work from there. A and I are one-letter words, and E is at the end of a lot of—”

Marco failed to suppress a yawn. “I’m sure we’ll figure it out. I’m gonna sleep on it.”

Bill seemed undeterred. “Yeah, okay. See—there are way too many one-letter words, and all the sections seem to start with a single E or T, which makes no sense. Maybe some kind of rolling cipher?”