“Asking the wrong guy,” Ralph replied. “But I can say that teen girls tend to have a love-hate relationship with their dads. Stepfamilies just add another monkey wrench to the works.”

“Hey, by the way, you wouldn’t by any chance know what a dotterel is?”

“That’s cheating,” Tessa told me.

“They’re kinda like sandpipers,” he said. “Shore birds, you know. I think they stay mostly in coastal areas, sandy beaches, that sort of thing.”

Ah. That’s why a group of them is called a “trip.” Because you would trip over them. Tessa was right—that was a big clue.

“Why?” he asked.

“Oh, it’s . . . I was just curious.”

“Anyway,” he said, “I gotta go. I’ll see you in the morning at the Field Office.”

“Sounds good.”

After the call, I told Tessa, “So, dotterels are shore birds similar to sandpipers. I think they’re usually found in coastal areas and on sandy beaches.”

“That was too easy. You just asked your friend.”

“If I can’t use the Internet, I need some source of information. Ralph works.”

“Ralph. Is that Agent Hawkins?”

“Yes.”

“Is he the guy who looks like he just might decide to eat you for dinner?”

“He does a good job of hiding it, but there’s a teddy bear nestled in there somewhere under that Kodiak fur. By the way, you ever hear of zedonks?”

She eyeball-rolled me. “I heard your whole side of the conversation.”

“Oh. Right. A chiwawabra—ever hear of that?”

“An annoying miniature dog and a zebra.”

“Very good.”

“Uh-huh.”

As she passed by to get a glass of water from the kitchen, I folded up my laptop so she wouldn’t see the images of the suicide video I’d been watching. However, the cryptogram was still beside me on the table and it caught her attention.

“What’s that?” She pointed to the words that I’d scrawled on the top of the page. “‘Remember death’?”

“Oh, it has to do with—”

“Memento mori.”

“What?”

“It’s this saying in Latin. Means ‘Remember that you have to die.’ So ‘Remember death’ would just be another way to translate it.”

“How do you know all that?”

“You’re always asking me how I know stuff. I just do. I learn something and then I remember it. It’s not that hard.”

“Gotcha. Sorry. So what else do you know about Memento mori?”

“The ascetics especially would use the phrase to remind themselves of the brevity of life and to help them refocus on the stuff that really mattered. Kind of like Carpe diem. You know, ‘Seize the day,’ except from the opposite perspective.” She pointed at the photocopy of Mannie’s cryptogram. “What’s the rest of that?”

“Some sort of cipher.”

“You don’t know how to decode it?”

“Not yet. No.”

“So . . . ‘Remember death,’” she said reflectively, “and you’ve got this code?”

“Yeah. Why? Does that mean something to you?”