Page 81 of Buried Too Deep

Val grinned. “Yep. Too bad about the fish allergy. It’s supposed to be good for braininess.”

“That’s not a word,” Antoine complained.

Molly held out her phone. “It is. It’s right here in Merriam-Webster.” She put the phone away and picked up a marker. “We’ve made some notes while you were gone. Just the case basics.”

Organizing what they did and didn’t know was Molly’s strength. Phin took the chair on the other side of Cora and studied the whiteboard. What they already knew was organized by category.

There were the highlights of the receipts Molly had logged in, the information Antoine had gathered on Jack Elliot’s CPA practice, and everything they knew about Alice Bergeron VanPatten.

Then something new caught Phin’s eye. “What are those numbers in the lower right corner?”

Antoine looked pleased with himself. “I found your father’s old computer in the attic while you guys were driving to Baton Rouge. Your mother had buried the computer in a box with sheets and blankets, probably so that the machine didn’t get damaged. I plugged it in and voilà.” He gestured to the numbers Phin had asked about.

Cora slowly lowered her fork on the plate, frowning at the whiteboard. “Are those bank account numbers?”

Antoine held out his hand and Burke slapped a twenty onto his palm with a sigh. “You were right,” Burke grumbled.

“I bet Burke you’d recognize the numbers as bank accounts,” Antoine explained, tucking the twenty-dollar bill into his shirt pocket. “But they’re not just any numbers. They’re Swiss bank account numbers.”

Cora sat back in her chair, expression dazed. “What?”

Antoine nodded. “There was a Word document on the computer with your mother’s name as the title. I thought it was odd, because the rest of the files were named in a consistent format—a subject with the date in European style. Day, month, year. This document is a poem, though.” He passed the document to a frowning Cora.

“A poem?” She scanned the piece, her frown growing. “It’s from ‘The Courtship of Miles Standish’ by Longfellow. John Alden loves Priscilla Mullins, but she’s being courted by Standish. Why would he leave my mother this poem?”

Burke held out his palm and Antoine pouted as he gave Burke the same twenty he’d taken earlier. “Burke bet you’d recognize the poem. We had to google it. It’s not the poem itself that’s important. It’s the way the paragraphs are lined up. They’re grouped oddly, not like the way the original poem was written.”

“It was a cipher,” Molly explained. “The first letters of each paragraph make up the password to a section of the hard drive your father had partitioned off.”

Cora rubbed her forehead. “Partitioned off?”

“A hard disk partition is a way to split up a hard drive,” Phin told her. “You can store different documents in different sections and password-protect each section individually.”

“Like my password-protected folders,” Cora said.

Phin lifted a shoulder. “Kind of. But it also allows the use of different operating systems on the same computer. It’s more efficient and makes the machine more productive.”

Antoine’s brows shot up. “Where did you pick that up?”

“A product of my misspent youth,” Phin confessed. “I partitioned the computer I had to share with my brothers and sister. It was the only way to have privacy. I…” He grimaced, feeling his cheeks heat in embarrassment. “I journaled.”

Antoine coughed. “That’s your deep secret? You were a journaler?”

Phin shook his head. “It’s what I wrote in the journal. I had issues with anxiety and anger even before I went into the army. Journaling was the best way I knew to keep my head level. But it wasn’t anything that I wanted my family to read. They would have worried about me more than they already did.”

Cora reached under the table and squeezed his hand. “I journaled, too. It helped. I needed a therapist to recommend it, though, so you were ahead of me.”

He wasn’t sure what to say, so he squeezed her hand in return, touched at the support.

Antoine had sobered. “I get it. Well, the partitions your father created, Cora, are password-protected remarkably well. I can’t get into any of the others. Only the one with the password from the poem. It has a document with the Swiss bank account numbers.”

Cora blew out a breath. “If my mother saw this, I never knew about it. Maybe she did, but she was so hurt by his leaving that she didn’t notice that it was a code. We might never know. Do you know which bank the account is in?”

Antoine nodded. “It’s a Swiss bank, but they have a branch downtown. I can’t do more without you. Well, not quickly.”

“And because it’s a Swiss account, it hasn’t been closed out,” she said. “About ten years ago, the Swiss set a sixty-two-year deadline for account owners to claim their funds. At least we have a little time,” she added dryly.

“Librarian trivia?” Phin asked, earning him a real smile.

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