“I’ve been told a letter is waiting for me,” she said. After receiving her name, the clerk disappeared into a back room and soon returned with an envelope addressed in Gray’s bold handwriting. Its thickness indicated several pages inside. She caught the returning trolley and waited until she was safely aboard to tear open the letter, setting Luke’s aside to read Gray’s letter first.

It wasn’t good. Gray wrote that although the worst of Luke’s pneumonia was gone, he wasn’t rallying as expected. He remained in the American hospital, manacled to the bed and wasting away. The doctors were at a loss as to how to proceed.

The envelope containing Luke’s letter rested in her palm. She laid her hand over it and sent up a single word of prayer. Please.

She’d braced herself for bad news, but what she read was worse than she could have imagined. His penmanship was spindly and lopsided, but more concerning was that only a few sentences were lucid. After asking after her health, his words were confusing and nonsensical.

You can’t trust the Dutch. Their ships are lousy, as the legend of the Flying Dutchman attests. That ship carried treasures beyond imagining, but it has corrupted the captain.

The crew from the north has vanished, and the road to a city of columns is in danger. The trouble comes from the westernmost key.

Please remember, you can always trust a good dancer and the second in command.

You know what to do.

At the bottom of the letter were several lines written in Hebrew that she couldn’t begin to decipher.

“Oh, Luke,” she whispered, for this letter was tangible proof he was breaking down. He’d been imprisoned for more than a year, and his mind was no longer functioning properly. The Flying Dutchman? She vaguely remembered the legend of the ghostly ship doomed to forever sail on the high seas. Laden with silks and spices plundered from the Far East, it was ruined by the greed of the captain, and the ghost ship was condemned to endlessly drift upon the ocean.

She stared at the letter, baffled by the incoherent rambling, but perhaps Luke was trying to tell her something. Trust a good dancer? She and Luke both loved to dance and were good at it. Gray had two left feet and would rather have a tooth pulled than get on a dance floor. Was Luke trying to tell her to trust himself rather than Gray? Was he implying that he was second in command to Gray’s senior position in the family?

She sighed as the trolley drew near the train depot. The letter raised uncomfortable questions, and she feared Luke would not last much longer.