Dust to Dust

coincidence. She was getting a major headache.
    “Why don’t I heat up the leftover pizza?” said Frank. “We’ll have pizza and red wine. You know how you love leftover pizza.”
    “Sounds good,” she said.
    While they waited for the pizza to warm in the oven, Frank boarded up the back door so it wouldn’t open at all.
    “I’ll have it fixed tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll call my partner and tell him I’m taking the day off.”
    “I’m sorry you have to do that.” Diane felt guilty on top of everything else. She had brought this to his house. Maybe it wasn’t her fault, but it was about her.
    “They could have been after me,” said Frank. “After all, had I been here, I probably would have been the one to answer the door. I do have Atlanta connections who might want some revenge.”
    Frank had a strange habit of reading her mind sometimes. But she probably wore her feelings on her face. She was a terrible poker player.
    “Ray-Ray after Marcella; his cousin after you?” She shook her head. “That would be too much of a coincidence.”
    They ate and drank and Diane began to feel better.
    “I finished the diary,” he said.
    “Oh? Was it hard?” asked Diane.
    “Very easy really, once I got to know how Ellie Rose’s mind worked. She must have been a neat kid. Very clever code for a kid.”
    “How did it work?” asked Diane.
    “She had symbols for diphthongs and consonant blends—letter combinations like oo , ou , th , st , ious —that kind of thing. For other letter combinations she drew doodles that represented the sound—like in a rebus puzzle. For example, for air she drew three curled wisps.”
    Frank got a piece of paper and drew the doodle for her.
    “The symbol for the consonant blend of st is a star. So if she wrote the word stair , it would be a star and these little wisps.” He drew it for Diane.
    “If she had to use a letter, she would go two up in the alphabet,” he continued. “So a would be c and z would be b . The consonant blend th is the numeral three. The word the would be written as the numeral three with the letter g immediately following it.” He grinned. “She was a good little doodler.”
    He took several bites of pizza and a sip of wine.
    “There was a little complication, in that sometimes she would change how she wrote a word. For example, the symbol for the suffix er was a drawing of an ear. Mother was sometimes oq , with the numeral three immediately following, and then the drawing of an ear. And sometimes it would be a drawing of a moth and an ear.”
    “That seems like it would take a long time to write,” said Diane.
    “Not really. The drawings were doodles, stylized versions of what they represented. If you’re going up the alphabet only two letters, you can work that out pretty fast,” he said.
    “I’ll call Ross Kingsley tomorrow. He’ll be happy you were able to decode it,” said Diane. “I got the impression he thought it would be impossible.”
    “You know, I kind of got to know her. Not just reading her diary, but seeing the way her mind worked, examining her whimsical creativity.”
    He stopped for a moment and took a drink of wine. Diane thought for a second he was going to tear up. She put a hand on his and he smiled at her.
    “As I said, she was a neat kid,” he said.
    “Anything in her diary that would shed light on anything?” said Diane.
    “Most of it was normal kid stuff. Talk about school, friends, boys she liked, teachers. There are a couple of drawings that occurred several times that I can’t decipher.”
    He drew one for her. It was a triangle over an elongated diamond shape with slightly curving sides and what looked like horns.
    “It looks kind of like a snake with scales and horns,” said Diane.
    “That’s what I thought,” he said. “I can’t come up with a rebus or anything else that makes sense. I think it’s a person, but that’s as far as I got, except that it’s clear she didn’t like him. If I had a list of names of people in her circle, I might be able to decipher it.”
    “What was the context?” asked Diane.
    “Dread seeing ‘blank.’ ‘Blank’ has changed since ‘blank.’ The second blank is the other doodle I can’t figure out.” He drew it for her.
    “These are almost like Rorschach tests. The identification is in the eye of the beholder,” said Diane. She examined the last drawing. “It looks like a ruin or a broken brick wall. What do you think?”
    “I thought it