Page 65 of The Marriage Deal
"That's it!" Wyatt's voice was becoming shriller the longer he spoke. His face reddening. "She could have burned me, and all she has to do is apologize!" He turned to the HR manager. "What do you have to say for this?"
The HR manager began to him and haw, but that only made Wyatt angrier. "Oh, come on!" he shouted, standing up, pushing the chair away so hard it fell to the floor. Thompson jumped up. "You will hear from my lawyers!" he said, wagging his finger at Thompson. "This is preposterous!" He got out, banged the door, blowing our eardrums as he left.
We sat in silence for a good minute, and then I said, "Anything else?"
Thompson shook his head. "You're free to go. And, uh," he leaned conspiratorially, "can you talk to him friend to friend? Calm him down."
I gave Thompson a tight smile, took Elle's hand, and left the office. When we were in the hallway, Elle snatched her hand away from mine.
"Thanks," she said. We strolled down the corridor, side by side. My hand was itching to touch hers, so I thrust it in my pockets so I wouldn't grab her. Elle glanced at me and continued to walk, her head straight ahead. "But I am pretty sure your friend is going to sue the entire school because of this."
"Why does everyone think we're friends?"
"Aren't you?"
I shook my head."We used to be. But we haven't been for a long time."
"Why?" Elle sounded curious enough to want the truth, so I told her.
"Because of you."
She stopped in her tracks. I did the same and faced her. She was so pretty today in a cute yellow blouse and black pants. I desperately wanted to touch her. Kiss her. She would not like that, though. She might do worse than throw a cup of lukewarm tea at me, and I would deserve it.We were in the courtyard now, and a few people passing by, but I didn't care.
Elle looked around us. "You can't just drop bombs like that. At work, of all places."
I shrugged. "What did I say except the truth?"
She crossed her arms. "So are you saying I ruined your relationship? Is that it?"
Oh shit. "I didn't mean it like that. I meant—"
"Whatever, Levi."
She marched past me. Not to our office but in the direction of the library. Probably going to work on her thesis. Yeah. I wasn't going to see her for the rest of the day.I doubt she was even working on the letters anymore.How was I fumbling this so badly? Ever since we came back from the wedding, Elle had been acting cold. Not just then, but even during the wedding. Something changed after we came back from that serene little cottage. I thought we were finally turning into a real relationship, only to find out that I was completely wrong on that account. Not only did she not want that, it turned out, she was only using me. I was angry at first. I might have lashed out somewhat, and that only further degraded the little that was between us. When we came back, I didn't want to speak to her.But the separation did not help. I wanted her more than ever, and she was pushing me away.
I went back to my office dejected. The research had become an uncontrollable alien. Its paper limbs filling and stretching into every part of the room. I stepped over a stack of papers, stumbled over a pile of books, on my way to the desk. A psychiatrist might say it was a sign of how stressed and lost I was in this project.
I opened my laptop to check my emails. I was expecting one from Beth. Beth and the MMQ society had begun to help as well. Providing books that could not be found here, but at places like Oxford and Cambridge. The society was full of academics and amateur historians like Beth. The kind of people who had time on their hands and the stubbornness of a dog with a bone. Even so, all that help was not enough to decipher the letters. The good thing was that we seemed to have narrowed down the ones we thought might contain the information we needed.
Beth: I found nothing :(
That was all she sent. Damn. I was hoping her research at the Bodleian would give us more clues about the code. A dark cloud settled above me. Maybe we will never find it. Maybe this quest was useless. For all I knew, the letters were about Johnson's mundane daily routine. How anticlimactic that would be. What a waste of money that would have been.
My phone beeped. A text.
Elle: Come to the library.
I got up at the speed of light. The library was quite a distance from my office, but I covered it in record time. When I reached the door, another text came in with the section she was in. I marched over there, my shoes echoing in the quiet, almost empty building. She was upstairs, alone, between two shelves,her desk cluttered with books and scripts. She didn't see me come in. Her gaze was on her laptop.
"I've solved it," she whispered without looking up. Maybe she did see me. I drew a chair next to her and sank into it. "Or at least I think I did," she said and slid the laptop to me and got up, stretching her limbs. I watched her stroll behind the bookshelves. My gaze went back to the laptop. I could not believe it. She was right. She had solved it. The code was so simple now that we knew what it was. Comically simple. The solution involved simply numbering the letters backward, then selecting the middle letter as the first, and so on. When he got to the end, the first letter became the fourteenth letter. That's it. That was the code. We attempted all these sophisticated ways of decoding, and it was simple as fuck.
What made the code a little hard to break was Johnson's spelling. It was inconsistent and at times deliberately meant to deceive. Sometimes he would spell them phonetically, and sometimes he would use a different, more complicated spelling.
The code was solved. She had done it. I read the letters. Almost crying as I did so. It was right there. The evidence was right there. He even mentioned the burial site where they put the two boys. If possible, we could dig the place up. And if we were lucky, we could solve a five hundred-year-old cold case. Elle had just solved a five hundred-year-old case!
I could not believe it. I was possibly the happiest man on the planet right now. My eyes scanned the library searching for her. She had gone down several bookshelves further away from where I was sitting. I got up and went to her. She was casually perusing books like she had just finished a homework assignment and not just solved one of the most famous and oldest cold cases of all time. I had so much to say to her, but words failed me. "Do you know what you've just done?" I said.
"Are you sure that's the code? I could be incorrect. I've been wrong before."
