Dead Past

has a secret? To Diane, that meant one thing. She lifted the dress and examined the stitching.

Chapter 41

    When they were children, Diane’s sister had collected Madame Alexander dolls, pushed baby dolls around in strollers, and dressed and undressed her extensive assemblage of Barbie dolls. Diane, on the other hand, had played with hers in a wholly different manner. Her dolls were couriers, adventurers, and spies. She often used them to carry secret messages. A message might be hidden in their clothes, inside the hole of a dislocated arm or leg, or sewn up in their torso.
    Diane examined the stitching of Juliet’s doll with a magnifying glass. No sign of the legs being detached and reattached, nor were there any repaired tears in the torso. She carefully undressed the doll and checked the arm attachments. Nothing at the right arm, but the left arm had been restitched by hand. Diane smiled with delight as she took fingernail scissors and snipped the thread.
    She pulled the stuffing from the arm. The result was a pile of fluffy white fill on her desk, but nothing else. She stuffed the fill back into the arm with a pencil eraser and turned her attention to the torso. She began pulling the fill out of the armhole. This produced quite a large pile. The doll was now flattened in the middle. She saw nothing but stuffing. She pulled it apart to see if there was something in it she missed when she was taking it out. She hadn’t.
    She really hoped that Juliet and her grandmother did not come to her office right now.
    With a penlight from her desk drawer she looked inside the empty sack that was the torso of the doll. Still nothing. She stuck the tip of her little finger up in the doll’s head.
    There it was.
    It felt like a slip of paper. Diane grinned broadly. There is nothing like the thrill of discovering a hidden message. She managed to tease the edge of the paper through the opening in the doll’s head far enough that she could grasp it with her fingertips and pull it out.
    It was a piece of newsprint, yellowed with age, rolled up when it was put inside the doll, and now lying in a loose coil. She unrolled the strip of paper on her desktop. After all the trouble she had gone to, she expected it to say something like Inspected by #12. But it did not.
    Printed on the paper was a series of capital letters in groups, like words in an enigmatic foreign language.
KVQ PEZJMTR WOYIYP QQMRKSDY BW XMMRJ JMNA CZQWRCZKN VE HTE PZHK OS XZQNQRZQMNIGT FYFFUDN KVDER WSQT HERQR GYS TENUGFOAV CR LRRBPEE CZQWRCZKN
    It looked like a code if Diane had ever seen one. She was so gleeful she laughed out loud. OK, it was a code. Was it child’s play, as hers were? Someone could take apart a few of her old dolls today and find notes still inside them containing lines of scribbled letters and numbers that stood for nothing more or less than a child’s adventurous imagination at work. This could be like that . . . or it could mean something important. No way to tell at the moment.
    Jin liked to do puzzles and ciphers. He frequently contributed his logic puzzles and cryptograms to puzzle magazines. This would be a job for him.
    She keyed the lines of code into her word processing program, double-checked it, and saved it under a password—then immediately felt utterly silly. She was a kid again playing games with dolls. She cut a thin piece off the scrap of paper and put it in a vial, then locked the code—or whatever it was—in her safe.
    When the fill was back in the torso, she took a needle and thread from a small emergency sewing kit in her desk drawer and reattached the arm with fine stitches. That done, she redressed the doll. Thank goodness, it looked as good as new. She wrapped it in the paper Mrs. Torkel brought it in and put it in her drawer. Just as she closed the drawer, there was a knock on her door.
    “Come in,” she called, and Kendel entered her office.
    “Hi. Andie said you wanted to see me. Sorry I’m late, I was up talking to Korey about courses he wants to teach.”
    “That’s fine. I have something I need you to find.”
    “Oh, a new acquisition?” Kendel smiled, showing a bright white set of teeth.
    “No, this is something different and will surely test your abilities,” said Diane.
    “OK, I’m intrigued,” said Kendel.
    Diane turned to her computer, typed in the palimpsest phrase, printed it out, and gave it to Kendel.
    “The making of palimpsests was possible even with papyri,” she read, then looked