Page 109 of The Brothers Hawthorne

Grayson opened the leather journal.This is what my father’s handwriting looked like.That thought had no place in his mind, so Grayson shoved it to the side and focused not on the writing but on what had been written.

Numbers.

Grayson flipped through the pages—nothing but numbers, and the only ones with recognizable meanings appeared at the beginning of the various entries:dates.

Sheffield Grayson had dated his journal entries. Grayson pictured him doing it. Hesawhis father sitting on the edge of that cheap twin bed in Colin’s room and putting pen to the page. Grayson imagined “Shep” dating a journal entry, and then beginning to write.

Grayson turned all the way to the last entry, just a few pages from the end of the book.Still nothing but numbers.Seemingly endless strings of them.

“A code.” Grayson reached the obvious conclusion.

Xander edged in beside him to get a peek at the pages. “Substitution cipher?”

“Most likely,” Grayson confirmed.

“Monoalphabetic, polyalphabetic, or polygraphic?” Xander rattled off.

Nash leaned back against the wall. “That, little brother, is the question.”

None of the simple ciphers worked. Grayson had tried all twenty-six of them. FirstAas 1,Bas 2,Cas 3 on toZas 26. ThenAas 2,Bas 3, and so on, loopingZback to 1. No matter what base Grayson used, the journal’s translation was gibberish.

Evening turned to late night. Gigi texted when the FBI left. Grayson didn’t text back. His eyes bleary, he refused to back down from the task at hand.

You didn’t use a basic cipher.Grayson didn’t want to be mentally addressing his father, but to solve a puzzle, sometimes you had to think about its maker.

“Let me take a stab,” Xander said, wriggling between Grayson and the journal. “I’ll try to spot common two- and three-item combinations and go from there.”

Grayson didn’t object. Instead, he stopped fighting the mental image that wanted to come: Sheffield Grayson sitting on that twin bed, a pen in his right hand, the journal on a nearby nightstand.Or on the bed? On his lap?The image in Grayson’s mind wavered, changed, and then Grayson asked himself a simple question:Where was his cheat sheet?

Unless his father had memorized the code—whatever it was—he would have needed a reference as he was writing.

Grayson closed his eyes, picturing the entire scene: the man, the pen, the journal, a reference of some kind…The box.Grayson’s eyes flew open. He knelt, running his hand over the now-empty compartment. And then he felt a seam.

And another.

Another.

The workmanship was flawless. None of the seams were visible. But they were there, in the shape of a square roughly the size of Grayson’s palm. That was the thing about puzzle boxes. You never really knew when the box’s last secret has been uncovered.

Grayson reached for the double-sided tool—there was no saying a puzzle couldn’t use the same trick twice. He ran the magnet end along the inside of the compartment, directly over the square he’d felt.

It caught.

Grayson pulled, and the square popped out. Turning it over in his hands, he saw two wooden disks, concentric, with a metal brad through the middle.

“A cipher wheel,” Grayson he told his brothers.

Nash and Xander were on him in an instant. This wasn’t the Hawthorne brothers’ first time encountering a cipher wheel—or even their twentieth—so all three of them knew what to look for. The larger of the two wheels had letters carved around the edge,AthroughZ, plus a handful of common digraphs—Sh,Ch,Th,Wh,Ck,Kn. The inner wheel contained numbers, 1 through 32, but not in order, which explained, along with the inclusion of digraphs, why Grayson’s initial rudimentary attempts hadn’t broken the code.

“All we need to know now,” Xander said buoyantly, “is where to set the inner wheel.”

Going through the options manually was a possibility, but the part of Grayson that had grown upracingto complete those Saturday morning games wouldn’t let him.

Sheffield Grayson had a system. A routine. He retrieved the safe-deposit key and faux USB from his office, then retrieved his fake ID. He went to the bank. He withdrew money and left the slips in the safe-deposit box. He went to his sister’s house.

Grayson skirted thinking about what, besides the slips, had been in that box. Instead, he asked a simple question out loud. “Why save the slips?”

The answer came to him like a lightning strike. He went back to the pile. On each slip, there was a date.The same dates in the journal?That would be easily enough to verify. What he was more interested in right now was the withdrawal amounts.