The Secret of Red Gate Farm - Carolyn Keene [7]
“I suppose I’ll be getting the bills in a few days,” her father remarked teasingly.
“It wasn’t just the shopping, Dad,” Nancy returned gravely.
Nancy now plunged into the story of the Oriental shop and the dropped perfume bottle, of her encounter with the stranger on the train, and the strange fact of having seen him a short while ago in a foreign-make car.
“What do you make of it?” she questioned.
Mr. Drew shrugged. “What did he look like?”
“The man seemed very polite, but he had a cruel look in his eyes.” Nancy gave a brief description of him.
“Hm,” Mr. Drew mused, “I can’t say I like the sound of this.”
“I wouldn’t wonder about it,” said Nancy, “except that the girl in the shop seemed so reluctant to sell the perfume. Why do you suppose she cared whether someone bought it?”
“Maybe she was instructed to save it for special customers,” Mr. Drew suggested.
“Dad, you may have something there!” Nancy exclaimed.
She told her father about Joanne Byrd and described the office which they had visited together. She ended by showing him the figures which she had copied.
“This was almost all of the message,” she explained. “I didn’t have time to copy the rest. Can you figure it out?”
Carson Drew studied the sheet of paper. “I’m not an expert on codes,” he said finally, “but I suspect this might be one, since the man lied in saying these figures are market quotations.”
“Can you decipher it?” Nancy asked eagerly.
“I wish I could, but it looks like a complicated one. It would probably take me days to figure out what these numbers stand for. Why don’t you work on it yourself?”
“I don’t know too much about codes,” Nancy declared, “but perhaps I can learn!”
“I have a book you might use,” her father offered. “It may not help much, since every code is different. Still, all codes have some features in common. For instance, in any language certain words are repeated more frequently than others. If you can figure out a frequency table, then look for certain numbers to appear more often than others, you may get somewhere.”
“I’d like to try,” Nancy said eagerly.
“This will be a good test for your sleuthing mind,” her father said teasingly. “If you don’t figure out the code, you can always turn this paper over to an expert.”
“Not until I’ve had a fighting chance at it myself,” Nancy answered with spirit.
“I’d really like to help you with this mystery,” her father said, “but I’m so tied up with this Clifton case I just can’t tackle anything else right now.”
Immediately after dinner Mr. Drew retired to his second-floor study to work on his law case. Nancy went to her bedroom to read the book on codes. When she finished, the girl detective took out the sheet on which she had copied the numbers and studied the figures intently.
“I’m sure the numbers stand for letters of the alphabet,” Nancy told herself. “They must have been arranged in some pattern.”
For over two hours Nancy tried combination after combination and applied it to the code. Nothing showed up until she hit upon the plan of four letters of the alphabet in sequence by number, the next four in reverse. Alternating in this manner and leaving two in the end bracket, Nancy scrutinized what she had worked out:
“I’ve hit it!” she thought excitedly.
CHAPTER IV
A Switch in Jobs
The numbers with the marks above or below them stymied Nancy completely. Most of the others fell neatly into place and spelled:
“Calling meeting,” Nancy repeated. “But where? And by whom?” She yawned, weary from her long concentration. “My brain’s too fogged to figure out anything more,” she told herself. “I’ll tackle this another time.”
The next morning Nancy and her father enjoyed a leisurely breakfast. He praised her for hitting upon the key to the code but agreed that solving the rest of it would be difficult.
“Keep at it,” he advised, smiling fondly at his daughter. “By the way, I won’t be home to lunch or dinner today because of this Clifton case.”
“I thought I’d visit Joanne and try to cheer her up,” Nancy said. “Do