Holliday stepped out of the office. Ms. Branch, the secretary, was sitting at her desk. A large purse stood waiting beside her computer screen, now shrouded with a plastic cover. She was reading a pale green hardcover book. It looked very old; Holliday couldn’t see the title. Ms. Branch looked up, closing the volume, her index finger inserted to keep her place.
Holliday saw the cover. There was a picture of a beautiful young woman with long auburn hair inset into the fabric. The title was stamped beneath it in faded gold: Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery. Surprise, surprise; it seemed there was still a romantic little girl hidden inside the secretary’s arid soul. The book looked as though it might have come straight off Uncle Henry’s shelf of children’s books.
“Yes?” Ms. Branch said.
“According to his passport my uncle traveled to Canada a few months ago.”
“That’s right, in March.”
She didn’t even have to consult a day book. Interesting.
“Do you know where he went?”
“Toronto.”
“Do you know why?”
“Yes,” said Ms. Branch. “He went to see a colleague at the Centre for Medieval Studies. The University of Toronto. Dr. Braintree.”
“And then he went on to England and Frankfurt?”
“Yes.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Certainly,” said Ms. Branch, her tone crisp. “The Master’s Lunch.”
“The Master’s Lunch?”
“Balliol College, Oxford. They have a lunch for the senior Old Members every two or three years.”
“He went to England to have lunch?” Holliday asked.
“He had a great many friends at Oxford,” said Ms. Branch.
“Any in particular?”
“I wouldn’t know.” Icy.
“What about Frankfurt?”
“Are you asking me if I know why the professor went to Germany?”
“Yes.”
“I have no idea,” said Ms. Branch. She stiffened in her ergonomically designed chair. “And I’m not sure I like being interrogated.”
“I’m sorry,” said Holliday. “I didn’t mean it to sound that way.”
“I’m afraid it did.”
Holliday paused. Something was nibbling at his subconscious. More than a year ago Henry had been diagnosed with early-stage macular degeneration: his eyes were failing. He’d voluntarily stopped driving. He tried to visualize his uncle riding the Greyhound. Somehow it didn’t compute.
“How did he get to Toronto?”
“I drove him to Buffalo,” said Ms. Branch. “He caught the afternoon train.”
A little bit of color flushed her cheeks. Her eyelashes fluttered slightly. She clutched the book in her lap like a drowning sailor. She looked almost demure-Bambi caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. Years peeled away in an instant. Suddenly, Holliday got it. Curtains parted, the fog lifted, the veil dropped from before his eyes, and all was revealed.
Of course.
The old copy of Anne of Green Gables probably had come from Uncle Henry’s shelves. They were lovers, or had been once upon a time.
It seemed strange now-and maybe high on Peggy’s ee-uw scale-but not so strange if you went back forty-three years to young Caroline Branch’s arrival in Fredonia, hormones freshly released from the all-girl confines of the Albany Academy.
Holliday did the math: the mid-sixties, the Playboy Philosophy, the Summer of Love, and all that malar key; she would have been nineteen or twenty and fresh as a daisy. Uncle Henry would have been in his forties, very much the pipe-smoking debonair professor, maybe even a little bit of distinguished gray at the temples. Hugh Hefner with an education.
Teacher and student for as long as it lasted and maybe longer than that. It wouldn’t be the first time in academia that a professor had bedded a coed. Henry had never married and, according to the nameplate on her desk, neither had Ms. Branch. Maybe it really was an old-fashioned love story. He stared at the secretary with fresh eyes.
“Do you have any other questions?” Ms. Branch asked stiffly, perhaps reading his mind a little.
“Not right now.”
“It really is getting quite late,” she prompted baldly.
“We won’t be much longer.”
Holliday turned on his heel and went back into the office, shutting the door behind him. Peggy was sitting in front of Henry’s computer, trying passwords.
“Try Caroline,” said Holliday, keeping his voice low.
“What?” Peggy asked, brow wrinkling.
“The password. Try Caroline.”
“But…”
“Later. Just try it.”
Peggy gave him a look, but she typed the name into the slot and hit return.
“Nothing,” she said. She sounded almost relieved.
“Try Caroline Branch, all one word,” he instructed. She typed. She stared at the screen.
“I’ll be damned,” she whispered. “It worked.”
“I think they were lovers back in the day,” explained Holliday quietly.
Peggy snorted. “Grandpa, you old dog!”
“What kind of files do you see?”
“The usual stuff. Looks like a lot of old lectures in his ‘My Documents’ files. One called ‘Letters,’ another labeled ‘Expenses.’ ‘Graduate students.’ ‘Tutorials.’ Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing about a sword anyway.” She glanced up at Holliday. “Presumably that’s what we’re looking for.”
“Is there an e-mail account?”
“Grandpa Henry using e-mail? Come on, now.”
“Grandpa Henry having a love affair with Ms. Branch?” Holliday grinned.
“Point taken,” said Peggy. “I’ll check.” She tapped a few keys. “You’re right. There’s a Hotmail account: medievalscholar99@hotmail.com.”
“What’s the last message he sent?”
“It’s to medievalscholar123@hotmail.com,” said Peggy. “Sent a week ago.”
“What’s the subject line?”
“It’s a thank-you for a reply from the 123 person. The subject line for the original message is ‘QUERY.’ ”
“What does it say?”
“It says: ‘Dear Henry, as I suggested to you on your visit it looks like you have some early combination of a Book/Masonic-Pigpen/Elian problem going on, but without the key I’m afraid it’s probably indecipherable. There’s no mention of it anywhere in the literature that I can find. There’s a fellow in Jerusalem named Raffi Wanounou who knows a lot about crusader castles; maybe he can point you in the right direction. He works at the Institute. Sorry I can’t be more help. It was nice seeing you in March. Hope things went well with Donald. Keep in touch.’ It’s signed Steven Braintree.” Peggy made a face. “There’s such a name as Braintree?”
“It’s part of Metropolitan Boston. John Quincy Adams was born there,” said Holliday. “Apparently this particular Braintree is a professor at the University of Toronto.”
“What’s all this ‘Book/Masonic-Pigpen/Elian’ stuff?” Peggy frowned. “It’s all gobbledygook.”
“I think he’s talking about codes,” answered Holliday. “You ever read a book called The Key to Rebecca by Ken Follett? They did a TV movie of it back in the eighties with Cliff Robertson.”
“Not my era.”
“It was about a code based on a Daphne du Maurier novel called Rebecca.”
“Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. 1940. Alfred Hitchcock.”
“The forties is your era?”
“Absolutely.” She grinned. “All that noir stuff. Great lighting, everybody smoking cigarettes.”
“I thought you quit.”
“I did. Sort of.”
Holliday sighed. Peggy was going off on one of her tangents. He headed her off at the pass.
“Anyway, the book was used as the key for the code. I think that’s what the e-mail means when Braintree refers to ‘book.’ Pigpen is sometimes called the Masonic Code, which sort of fits in with the sword. I have no idea what ‘Elian’ refers to.”
“Did Grandpa have some particular interest in codes?”
“Not that I knew of,” said Holliday, shaking his head.
They spent another few minutes browsing through Uncle Henry’s files without success, then gave it up, retreating under the barrages of psychic artillery coming through the closed door from Ms. Branch’s direction. They drove back to the Hart Street house and spent the next two hours going through Uncle Henry’s study and anywhere else they could think of, looking for anything else that might shed some light on the sword wrapped in the flag and Henry’s reasons for hiding it away so carefully, including a close look at the file of correspondence in the old man’s desk. The only thing they came up with of any interest at all was Henry’s invitation to the Balliol College Old Master’s Lunch with an obscure message scrawled on the back: