Thirteen Diamonds

immediately. You know how they worry about old people. I've got to call and tell them some sort of story.”
    “Why not tell them the truth for once?  That you're visiting me?”
    Sometimes Tess is the smartest person I know. That's exactly what I did. I told them I'd be back about 5:30. At five o'clock Tess and I walked through the inside passageways to the front desk of Silver Acres. Tess wouldn't let me go alone. The gentleman who had been there had left and the lobby area was deserted.
    I opened the desk drawer of the receptionist and pulled out the ring of keys. I was becoming an expert at clandestine operations. The outside door leading in to the lobby was locked, so Tess posted herself as a sentry where she could watch the inside corridors. She signaled an all clear.
    I walked swiftly over to the door of Carol's office while searching for her door key. I missed it my first time through the keys on the ring so I repeated the process. I still couldn't spot it. Cursing myself for my degenerating eyesight, I started to examine the keys carefully, one at a time.
    I glanced at Tess. She subtly but frantically signaled to me. Someone approached. I quickly moved the few steps to the reception desk and tossed the key ring and the notebook into the drawer, just as Harriet walked into view.
    Tess greeted Harriet, effusively, standing so that Harriet had her back to me, but I was too noisy; she turned and saw me, just as I shut the drawer.
    “Hi, Harriet,” I said, trying to appear nonchalant. “I guess I'll see you Wednesday at the bridge club.”
    I immediately launched into an explanation of why I was still in the bridge club.
    “Excuse my ignorance,” Harriet said, “but why wouldn't you still be in the bridge club?”
    It took us a few sentences to sort out the fact that Harriet didn't even know I had been evicted from Silver Acres. I thought the whole world knew.
    “I'm looking for stamps,” Harriet said, after we cleared that up. “I need to mail a letter, but the gift shop is closed and I hoped they would have stamps at the front desk.”
    “I have a stamp,” I said, reaching for my purse. I always carry two or three with me. I fumbled in my purse, finally came up with a stamp and gave it to her. I refused payment and soon she departed back along the corridor.
    “I hope she doesn't tell Carol what she saw,” Tess said, worriedly.
    “Well, since I made a fool of myself,” I said, “thinking the whole world knew about my martyrdom, who knows what she'll do? And by the way, I couldn't find the key to Carol's office.”
    Tess helped me check the key ring and after some serious searching it finally dawned on me that the key was no longer there.
    “Carol wants to make sure you don't get into her office again,” Tess said.
    “So what do I do with her notebook?”
    Tess opened drawers of the receptionist's desk until she found a large manila envelope. She slid the notebook inside, fastened the envelope with the metal clips provided and wrote “Carol” on the outside. Then she shoved the envelope into Carol's mail slot on top of the desk and said, “There.”
    “She won't know who found it or where.”
    “Do you want to put 'From Lillian, with love,' on the envelope?
    “No.”
    “Then this will become one of the mysteries of her life.”

CHAPTER 23
     
    I took a walk with King down Albert's road first thing Monday morning. At least that custom didn't have to change. Then I struggled with Carol's code during the time when I would have been taking the water aerobics class, had I still been at Silver Acres.
    Actually, before I tried to break the code I re-read The Gold-Bug , by Edgar Allan Poe, because it contains a beautiful example of how to decode a cipher, as Poe called it. Fortunately, I had anticipated the need for Poe's story; one of the books I had checked out of the library contained his works.
    Unfortunately, it didn't help me very much. Carol's code consisted of 10 lines of letters. In each line there were 14 letters, with spaces after the fourth and ninth letters. The top line looked like this:
    PBJS SXPVA JPBSX
    The lines were suspiciously similar to each other so I decided to disregard the spaces. Each line couldn't possibly consist of one four-letter word followed by two five-letter words.
    Like Poe's treasure hunter, I counted how often each character appeared. The counts ranged from seven to 20, but only ten different characters were used, not the 17 or 18 that I would expect in a