Read Online The 39 Clues [Cahills vs. Vespers] 05 - Trust No One by Linda Sue Park - Free Book Online Page B

racing or anything like that.”
    “Anyway, I typed all the numbers into a document,” Atticus said. “We thought it might help us figure out what they are. But so far, no luck.”
    “Bible verses?” Dan said.
    “That’s what I thought, too,” Atticus said. “But without the names of the books?”
    “They look like ratios,” Jake said.
    “What about longitude and latitude?” Amy wondered.
    Dan shook his head. “That’s usually commas, not colons,” he said. “I’m sure both Dr. Siffright and your mom knew that.”
    Amy frowned, thinking hard. “Read them aloud,” she said.
    “The whole list?” Atticus asked.
    “Not the numbers. The e-mails.”
    “I’ll do it,” Jake said. He read the first one, slowly and clearly.
    Amy closed her eyes in concentration. Jake finished reading; she opened her eyes to see him staring at her. She felt a tiny thrill and blinked rapidly to banish it.
    “I get it,” he said. “It’s weird, right? Is that what you’re thinking?”
    Well, not exactly.
But she nodded and furrowed her brow, bringing her mind back on task. “The ‘How are you?’ seems out of place, for one thing,” she said.
    “And why would you write about a vacation without saying where you’re going?” Jake pointed out.
    “Did you find anything where your mom requested numbers from her?” Amy asked.
    “No, nothing like that,” Atticus said. “She was already sick by then — in bed most of the time, and she couldn’t do any work. She never replied to either of these. Besides, look at the time stamp.” He tapped back and forth between the two messages. “Dr. Siffright sent the second one right after the first.”
    “What about e-mails before those ones?” Dan asked.
    “There’s a few from when they went to see the Voynich,” Atticus said. “Just normal stuff, like what time they should meet. And one more — after Yale, Dr. Siffright went to Italy and wrote that she was poking around in old monasteries there. And that’s all. If there was anything else from her, Mom didn’t save it.”
    “Okay,” Dan said and took a breath. “I’m guessing that the two e-mails are, like, related. In some kind of code.”
    “Yeah, I could see that,” Atticus said. “So what have we got? The first number in each pair is almost always bigger. But the second number —”
    “All single digits,” Dan said. “And random. Or at least, they look random.”
    Atticus dragged the two e-mails so they were side by side on the screen. He passed the laptop around, and each of them studied the screen in turn.
    “I think we should concentrate on the first e-mail,” Amy said. “There’s more to work with. We have to figure out why it’s so weird — why she wrote it the way she did.”
    Jake stared at her, but this time, she could tell that he wasn’t seeing her. He took the laptop and his gaze flicked between the two e-mails.
    “What is it?” she asked.
    “I was wondering . . . what Dan said. If the numbers have some kind of relationship to the words.”
    “That’s it!” Atticus almost shouted. “The numbers go with the e-mail!”
    “How?” All three of the others spoke at once.
    Atticus laced his fingers together and stretched out his arms, cracking his knuckles. “Prepare to be amazed, people,” he said. “Paper and pencil, please? Or, Dan, your laptop.”
    Looking at the two e-mails, Atticus called out letters that Dan typed into a new document.
    “I get it now!” Dan exclaimed. “The first number is the word, and the second number is the letter!”
    “Elementary, my dear Cahill,” Atticus said gleefully.
    1:2. First word, second letter. I.
    5:1: Fifth word, first letter. G.
    When they finished, Dan had a string of letters on his screen:
    I G U A Z U V O Y F A L L S P O O L S
    And a few clicks later, Atticus looked up from
his
screen. “Anyone speak Portuguese?” he said. “Next stop, Brazil!”

The text message had been brief in the extreme:
    AS DISCUSSED.
    It meant that the