Page 166 of Buried Too Deep

“I don’t know. Maybe he left her a letter telling her to look. Maybe we just haven’t found it yet.”

“Let’s come back to that once we know if we have anything,” Phin said wisely. “Do any of the other photos have secret messages on the back?”

Cora’s heart raced at the very thought. “Let’s find out.”

“I’m texting the others,” Molly said. “Burke can’t get back, but Antoine and Val need to get over here.”

“I’m texting Stone and Delores, too,” Phin said. “If this is a real thing, it’s going to make their day.”

Cora wanted to rip all the photos from the album, but she forced herself to be methodical, taking pictures of each page before removing the photos and examining their backs.

Not every page had a photo with a string of numbers. And not every photo had only numbers. Two had combinations of letters and numbers.

“Twenty,” she said finally, when they’d looked through the entire album. “Eighteen with single letters or numbers and two with letter/number combos.”

She looked at the people sitting around her table. Time had flown by as she’d worked, the others joining them one by one. By then Antoine, Val, Stone, and Delores had joined them. Burke had been halfway to Houma by the time Molly had texted him, but he listened in by cell phone.

“What do we do with this?” Cora asked.

Antoine was frowning at the list. “The two with letter and number combos are some kind of password.”

Hope surged and Cora barely kept her voice level. “To get into the hard drive?”

“Maybe.” Antoine still frowned. “I can use it to get into the drive, but I probably won’t be able to decrypt whatever’s stored there without the encryption password. That could be what the eighteen single characters are—an encryption password. The problem is, we don’t know what order the characters go in. They’re all mixed together. There are too many combinations.”

Delores waved to Antoine’s three laptops. “You can’t just set them up and make your computers…y’know, figure it out?”

Antoine made a face. “I can, but it will take a while. I don’t know how long. Could be hours or even days. I won’t know until I get there.”

Cora understood the dilemma and it was daunting. “I helped a kid with a problem like this once. It’s a statistical thing. Eighteen combinations of individual characters? It would be a lot. Trillions.”

“Six quadrillion,” Val corrected, looking up from her phone. She turned it around and there were so many numbers that Cora’s eyes crossed.

“Shit,” Burke drawled through the speakerphone. “There has to be a way to know the correct order.”

Phin made a humming noise as he studied the photos on the table. “Twenty pictures.”

Cora turned to him. “What are you thinking?”

His eyes were dark and intense, sending a shiver down her spine. “I’m thinking about that bag of twenty-sided dice you keep in your nightstand drawer,” he said.

“Nightstand drawer?” Stone asked, brows high. “Why were you in her nightstand drawer?”

Cora blushed as Delores elbowed her husband. “Hush, Stone. Cora, why do you keep a bag of twenty-sided dice in your drawer?”

“They were my mother’s. She and my father played D&D in college and she taught John Robert and me how to play. It was our Friday night family thing. We played games and did puzzles.”

Phin was nodding. “And each side of a D&D die is numbered one through twenty.”

Cora assessed the photos on the table. Each one was familiar. Each one she’d loved to look at, once upon a time when she’d sat on her father’s knee at his desk. But not in this album.

She looked up at Phin, her heart beginning to race. “The custom-made twenty-sided photo cube up in the attic.”

“It’s not a cube if it’s twenty sides,” Antoine said.

“Antoine,” Molly hissed at him.

“What do you mean?” Phin asked, ignoring Antoine and Molly.

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