Page 6 of Death is Familiar

I let myself be tired. I was tired. So tired. I had been tired before the unexpected visit to FBI headquarters. Before the Muffin Man interrupted my plans.

Now, I was home. My home. In my bed. Lawrence’s letter smooth and cool beneath my fingertips. Like I had a piece of him with me.

I fell asleep knowing I wasn’t alone. And what a comforting thought that was.

†

The next few days were a blur.

I rarely ventured from my bed. I slept like it was my job. I ate from the packaged and instant foods Jack and Todd had stocked in my pantry. I didn’t leave the apartment. I didn’t get dressed. I was the physical embodiment of the seventh deadly sin—sloth.

But even in my sloth-like state, there were things I managed to do. Like tending to my wounds, including the tulip brand between my thumb and pointer finger. I showered. I moisturized my split lip into oblivion. And despite how counterintuitive it was, I figured out that eating, especially candy, somehow kept my escalating waves of nausea at bay.

I also opened the letter from Lawrence. Though I waited an entire day before I worked up the courage.

The idea of what he might have said was almost better than knowing. Unopened, the letter could be anything I wanted it to be. Kind words. A favorite memory. An inside joke. Naming the people responsible for killing him so I could get revenge on his behalf...

But I should have known better than to expect a direct heartfelt letter with his last words. Words of encouragement. Love. Something feel-good mixed in with the coded language Mads warned me about.

Instead, I got a series of numbers written in short lines:

11121314131521

142412121343444215332512

221214332534331543121513

1513343312

14321511121532144344153112

1444431513135434454243

151313325413345112

1315524212332312

24344542445234343312

2542142424143321343212

And that was it. Nothing else. No quick little note in plain language, just for me. Apparently, nothing in my world was allowed to be easy. Everything had barriers, hurdles, riddles, locks, or obstacles that I needed to overcome. And while I did like games, I would have appreciated something simple, just this once.

Fortunately, the code looked familiar. With five being the highest digit, and each line an even grouping of numbers, Lawrence had used a Polybius square to encode the text. Something we’d used semi-frequently. More so when we were kids, passing letters to each other about our parents when we didn’t want them to find out what we were saying.

The Polybius squares we made were essentially five-by-five grids, where each pair of numbers corresponded with a letter. 11, for example, represented the letter placed in the first square, and if there wasn’t further coding, that letter would typically be A. 55, on the other hand, would represent Z.

Polybius squares were also occasionally helpful with our Leslie’s Pies work. But we’d agree on a key beforehand. A random word or phrase to change the alphabet to further prevent our messages from being decoded if they were intercepted by anyone other than us. Perennial favorites were birds with five letter names, like robin, finch, heron, crane, raven, or quail.

But when I translated the first and second line using any of our frequently used keys, I got pure gibberish. Like ROBIBNA / IEOOBSTTCNKFO or CRANAEB / NGRRASTTDELHR.

Decoding was time consuming. And frustrating.

I felt like my mind was working through a fog. Like there was something obvious I couldn’t see, which only irritated me further. I went so far as to translate the entirety of the message with an assortment of the usual suspects just so I could read the message backwards. Then I tried aligning the letters vertically like he had written in his letter.

But nothing.

There was something I was missing. If I could just figure out what it was…