Page 26 of Cross & Crown

the story. Maybe Kelly could read himself to sleep and he

wouldn’t risk waking Nick with the sound of the TV.

When he opened the book, though, a sheet of paper fell

out. Kelly scrambled for it before it could flutter to the floor or disappear into the couch cushions. It was the same kind

of paper as in the Moleskine notepad Nick carried around.

It had obviously been torn away, and on it were two grids,

like tic-tac-toe boards, and two Xs, all with symbols in each

empty space. A pigpen cipher: a simple substitution cipher

that usually used dots instead of symbols. Kelly had taught

the kids at the camp he worked at in Colorado how to do

these, trying to get them interested in linguistics.

Kelly had his thumb in the pages the note had been stuck

between, and on them he found the same sort of cipher, this

time with the correct series of dots, and notes explaining how

it was used. Not that Nick needed to look up a pigpen cipher;

he was the one who’d taught Kelly how to do them.

Kelly flipped through the rest of the book. It wasn’t a

novel after al , but a book about secret societies, specifically one called the Rosicrucians. Kelly had never heard of them.

“What are you up to, Nicko?”

After a few more minutes of contemplating the cipher,

which he couldn’t figure out because the symbols were foreign

to him, it occurred to him that this might have to do with a

case Nick was working on. He slipped the paper into the book

and set it back where he’d found it.

26

A yawn caught him off guard, and he clicked the lamp off

and made his way carefully below to the main cabin. Nick was

still and silent, his nightmares no longer plaguing him. It was a relief to slide under the covers beside him and have him curl almost immediately around Kelly.

Nick’s hand was warm on Kelly’s bare stomach, his fingers

curling against Kelly’s abs. Kelly carefully placed his hand

---