Page 165 of Buried Too Deep

Cora ran a finger over the album. “I don’t know. He loved us. I remember that. That’s why him leaving was so hard to accept. I remember Grandmother telling Mama that she should throw these albums away. Mama promised she would when she was ready.” Cora looked at the photo of her parents looking so happy together. “I guess she never was ready.”

She opened the album to the first two pages, covered in pictures of her as a newborn with a lot of red hair. Her mother was in about half of the pictures, holding her with a big smile.

“You were a pretty baby,” Phin said quietly, and she smiled at him.

“Thank you.” She flipped to the next page and the next, a thought entering her mind as she noted that so many of the photos had been taken somewhere other than this house. “I don’t think that he liked it here. In the house, I mean. Not New Orleans. He loved New Orleans.”

“Why don’t you think that he liked this house?” Molly asked.

“He loved to go other places, stay in hotels with us. I remember having Christmas morning at the Roosevelt Hotel in the Quarter when I was four. It was the last Christmas before he disappeared.”

“Why?” Phin asked.

“They do such beautiful decorations there. That’s what my mama said when I looked through the albums after he was gone, before she put them away. My grandmother…she didn’t agree. She said that he was too proud for his own good and that she hoped his new wife would support him in the same fashion that my mama had.” Cora winced at the memory, adulthood giving her a different perspective. “My father worked. But he hadn’t come from money. Not that we had a lot by then, but we did have the house. And the Winslow name. That still meant something when I was younger. My grandmother was a good woman, but a little preoccupied with position. She’d always tell Mama that she dodged a bullet with ‘that Jack Elliot.’ That she’d known he’d be a bad fit. That was when Mama would get depressed and cry. I think that he didn’t take any of these photos of us when he left really hurt her. It was like he left and never looked back.”

Because he’d been dead. All this time.

“Your father didn’t feel like he belonged here,” Phin murmured. “Do you think he had plans to leave and take you all away from here?”

“Maybe. Maybe that was the purpose of the Swiss bank account. We might never know.”

“Harry might know,” Molly said.

“I’ll ask him when he gets here.”

Cora went back to the first page and flipped through the photos again. Her father had loved this album. If he’d left behind any message for her mother, it could be here.

The photos were held in place by corner mounts, not glued to the paper, thank goodness. Glue would seep through, destroying the pictures. These photos were still crisp.

I wonder…

Using her phone, she snapped a photo of the first page, aware that both Phin and Molly watched her curiously.

“I want to put them back in the right order,” Cora explained before removing the first photo on the page and turning it over. “It’s an archivist thing.”

Sigh. There was nothing written on the back other than the date, written on a carefully cut piece of paper, the top attached to the photo with a small piece of tape. She wondered why he hadn’t just written on the photo itself. “My father’s handwriting.”

“He made the album?” Phin asked.

“He did.” Cora removed the other three photos on the page. They were the same—dates written on those carefully cut pieces of paper. Disappointed, she replaced the pictures, making sure they went back in the right places.

Molly and Phin continued to watch, saying nothing as Cora snapped a photo of the second page and removed those four photos.

She put them face down on the album page, looking at their backs. Again, all four had dates written on them in her father’s scrawl. But one of the photos—the one of her mother holding her as a newborn—had something else written below it, the characters a brown color versus the black ink used to write the dates.

Cora leaned in to look more closely and gasped. “Oh my God. I think I found it.” She turned the photo around so that they could see. “All those Nancy Drew books came in handy. Lemon juice. Look.”

“Holy shit, Cora,” Molly crowed. “You found it!”

“Mama used to write us notes in lemon juice. Looking back, she probably shouldn’t have let us play with matches to read the secret messages. Luckily, we had the sprinklers. For John Robert and me, it was like a secret adventure. She once told me that my father had written her secret notes in lemon juice. I wonder if she kept them.”

Phin was grinning. “Over time, and in the attic during the summer, it was warm enough to activate the lemon juice. What does it say?”

“It’s numbers. A string of eight numbers. No letters.” She read them aloud, and Molly wrote them down. “What does it mean, though?”

Phin shrugged. “Your dad used a code so that your mother could open the Word document on his computer to find the Swiss bank account number. Maybe this is a code, too.”

Molly was frowning. “Seems a little subtle to me. Even if she thought he hadn’t left her, would she have thought to look for clues or codes?”

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