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“I have no idea. I’ve been telling myself that Anya is nonviolent, that she’s some kind of benevolent spirit, but that’s just a guess. All I really know is that she was brutally murdered. Someone dragged her body through a forest and dumped her in a ditch. Maybe she’s pissed off and wants revenge against everybody who lives in Spring Brook. And Mitzi’s the first person she went after.”
“Okay, but why now? Mitzi’s lived here seventy years. Why did Anya wait all this time to go on her rampage?”
It’s a fair question. I have no idea. Adrian chews on the tip of his pencil and returns his attention to the jumble of letters, like they might have answers to all our questions. At the house next door, the circus is slowly winding down. The fire department is gone and all the neighbors have wandered away. There are just a few cops left, and the last thing they do is seal the back door with two long strips of yellow DO NOT CROSS tape. They intersect in the middle, forming a giant X, a barrier between the house and the outside world.
Then I glance down at Mitzi’s notes, and the solution is suddenly obvious.
“The Xs,” I tell Adrian. “They’re not Xs.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Anya knew we didn’t speak her language. So she put Xs between the words. Like barriers. They’re spaces, not letters.”
“Where?”
I take the pencil from him and recopy the letters, placing each word on its own line.
“Now that looks like a language,” I tell him. “Something Slavic. Russian? Maybe Polish?”
Adrian opens his phone and inputs the first word into Google Translate. The results are instantaneous: Igen is the Hungarian word for “yes.” From there, it’s easy to translate the entire message: YES X BEWARE X THIEF X HELP X FLOWER.
“Help Flower?” Adrian asks. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.” I think back to the drawings that I pulled from the recycling bin—wasn’t there a page of flowers in bloom? “But this definitely explains why she’s using pictures. Her native language is Hungarian.”
Adrian opens his phone and takes a snapshot. “You need to text this to Caroline. It’s proof you’re not making things up.”
I wish I had his confidence. “This doesn’t prove anything. It’s just a bunch of letters that anyone could have written on paper. She’ll accuse me of buying a Hungarian dictionary.”
But Adrian is undaunted. He keeps rereading the words, like he’s hoping to find some deeper secondary meaning to them. “You need to be careful, you need to beware of the thief. But who’s the thief? What did he steal?”
There are so many pieces to the puzzle, my head is starting to hurt. I feel like we’re trying to jam a square peg into a round hole—or to force a very easy solution on a very complicated problem. I’m trying so hard to focus and think, I’m annoyed when my cell phone starts to ring, shattering my concentration.
But then I see the name on the caller ID.
The Rest Haven Retirement Community in Akron, Ohio.
24
“Is that Mallory?”
“Yes?”
“Hi, this is Jalissa Bell at Rest Haven Akron. You called here yesterday for Mrs. Campbell?”
“Right, can I speak with her?”
“Well, it’s complicated. I could put Mrs. Campbell on the phone, but you wouldn’t have much of a conversation. She has late-stage dementia. I’ve been her caregiver three years and most mornings she won’t recognize me. I really doubt she can answer your questions.”
“I just need some basic information. Is there a chance you know her mother’s name?”
“I’m sorry, hon, I don’t. But even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to tell you.”
“Has she ever mentioned an inheritance? Receiving a large sum of money from an Aunt Jean?”
She laughs. “Now that’s something I definitely couldn’t tell you. There’s privacy laws! I’d lose my job.”
“Of course. I’m sorry.”
