Simply Lies

Chapter 83

“Well, we got everything on our bucket list except the treasure,” noted Francine.

She and Gibson were seated in the latter’s home office. Tommy and Darby were with Gibson’s parents.

“Yeah, but that’s a big one. How is your mom, by the way?”

“I got her into a facility near here, at least temporarily. Dougie is with her right now. He’s decided to cremate Rochelle’s remains and sprinkle them at a lake where they lived for a while and were happy.”

“So they came here looking for Beckett and your father, too?”

“They wanted revenge, but they also wanted the money, like I did.” She looked at Gibson’s twin computer screens. “NFTs. It just doesn’t strike me as something that Harry would dump money into. And it was only five million bucks.”

“I’ve looked at everything a dozen times.”

“So the dig deeper clue. The ‘twenty-first century’ clue. That’s it, right? No other clues left behind?”

“Yeah, that’s...” Gibson looked at her screens. “That’s actually not right.”

“What do you mean?” asked Francine.

“I forgot to tell you. I tracked down a bunch of companies that Langhorne had. If you incorporate you have to have a registered agent in the state of incorporation, so if you get sued, there’s someone in the state to accept service.”

“And the point?” asked Francine impatiently.

“There was one agent I reached out to who got back to me immediately.” She started clicking keys on her computer and pointed at the screen. “Dexter Tremayne from South Dakota. He’s the registered agent for DPE. That’s Daniel Pottinger Enterprises, obviously.”

“What did he say when he got back to you?”

“That Pottinger aka Harry had called him and left a message for Tremayne to give to anyone who contacted him after he was dead. DPE was pretty well buried behind some other shells. It took me some time to dig through.”

“What was the message?”

“ ‘Now you see it, but then you don’t.’ ”

“That’s it?”

“No. He also said to take away the eight. And then to use the leftovers for Sesame Street.”

“That makes no sense at all.”

“Agreed. Now, the usual phrase is slightly different. ‘Now you see it, now you don’t.’ ”

“So Harry had changed ‘now’ to ‘but then’?”

“That’s right. I was going to dig down deeper, but then I got sidetracked with everything else and forgot all about it.”

Francine took a notebook from her purse and flitted through the pages.

“What’s that?” asked Gibson.

“My TREASURE notebook.”

Gibson gave her a funny look.

“I actually have a half dozen devoted just to you. A record for me.”

“Well, I guess I should feel honored somehow. Do you think he just got the phrase wrong?”

“No. He was the most detailed person I’ve ever met.”

Gibson glanced at the notebook and the precise writing on the page she was reading. “You mean sort of like you?”

“I do it so I can have some control over my life. He did it to screw people over.”

“So if he added the ‘but then,’ there was a reason?”

“Most definitely.” She turned another page and tensed. “Wait a minute. You said you found out that my father used secret codes and substitution ciphers to keep his mob account books secret?”

“That’s right.”

“Then maybe this phrase is a substitution code. Do you know how they work?”

“Pretty much. You substitute one alphabet letter for another. The parties trying to communicate have the key, so you know what letter to substitute for another. Dates all the way back to at least Julius Caesar.”

Gibson started clicking keys and increased the font size so the phrase loomed large across the screen.

“So you think each letter represents another letter?” said Francine.

“Possibly. I actually have software that drills down on that, because the debtors I chase use all sorts of stuff, including secret codes.” Gibson opened a program and then plugged the phrase into it. “It works fast, but it’s not always conclusive.”

Five minutes later the program disgorged several possibilities that, to both their minds, seemed nonsensical.

“Harry’s housekeeper told me that he was almost never there,” said Francine. “And Nathan Trask confirmed that.”

“Okay, so where was he the rest of the time?” asked Gibson.

“At another hidey-hole of his, probably. Wait, what if the treasure is at one of those hidey-holes and this code is giving us the location?” suggested Francine.

Gibson glanced at the words with renewed interest. “If it is an address, it would probably be both numbers and letters.”

“Which complicates the unraveling even more, I know,” Francine mused. “Okay, let’s try the simplest first. Let’s take the first letter of each word and give it its alphabetical numerical equivalent. So breaking the phrase down, each first letter is N-Y-S-I-B-T-Y-D. Now give each letter the alphabetical equivalent.”

Gibson executed on this and looked at the line of numbers corresponding to their place in the alphabet: “Fourteen, twenty-five, nineteen, nine, two, twenty, twenty-five, and four. Anything strike you?” she asked.

“Yes, confusion,” said Francine.

“Could it be a hybrid?”

“Meaning?”

Gibson said, “Some substitution of numbers for letters, but then maybe some of the letters actually represent words.”

“Okay, which ones?”

“I don’t have a clue.”

“Let’s take Harry literally. The letters b and t from the words ‘but then’ are represented by the two and the twenty. Is that significant? Since it’s clear he added ‘but’ before ‘then’ to make it ‘but then.’ ”

Gibson looked at her notes. “Wait a minute, we forgot about the ‘take away the eight’ part.”

“Okay, but how do we do that?”

“Well, if we follow the same substitution cipher, eight represents the letter h.”

“So we take away the h in the word ‘then’?”

“So it becomes ‘ten,’ ” said Gibson.

“Which means it now reads, ‘Now you see it, but ten you don’t.’ ” She looked at Gibson. “What the hell does that mean?”

The blood slowly drained from Gibson’s face. “Oh my God.”

“What, what is it?” Francine said quickly.

“It’s all a convoluted mess, really, which I’m sure was intentional. ‘But then’ was really the key. I’m pretty sure that was a shortcut that Harry offered up because the word was so unusual in this context.”

“What word?”

She typed out something and then sat back for Francine to see.

“One ninety-nine Button Road, Yarden, New York. ‘Button’ equals ‘but ten.’ ” She glanced at Francine to see if she was following her logic. “You don’t know?” Gibson said. “It’s not in one of your notebooks?”

“What?”

“This is the address of the house where your father first lived.”