Angela was a crossword buff and had read a number of books on codes and ciphers. She was sure that what she held in her hand was a cipher grille. The grille would be placed over a blank sheet of paper. The message would be written in the holes by letter. Innocent-looking sentences would be built around the letters. The person on the receiving end would place an identical grille over the message and the words would pop out.

She tried the grille on a number of pages, but all she got was gibberish. She suspected that there was another level of encryption that was far beyond her amateur skill to decipher. She turned her attention to the parchment with the wavy lines and Xs. She stared at the words accompanying the strange markings and then called up a lexicon site on her computer. She sometimes went to the research site as a cheat to find obscure words that were used in the crossword puzzles.

Angela typed the words from the parchment onto the site’s search function and hit the ENTER key. There was no immediate translation, but the site referred her to its ancient-language section. She requested a translation once more and this time the program responded with an answer that both startled and puzzled her.

She ran off a printout and copied it, along with the Jefferson material. Leaving the copies in her drawer, she gathered up the original files and walked down the hallway to her supervisor’s office.

Angela’s boss was a middle-aged professional named Helen Woolsey. She looked up from her desk and smiled when she saw her younger protégée.

“Working late?” she said.

“Not exactly. I came across something unusual and thought you might be interested.” She handed the packet over.

As the librarian examined the papers, Angela explained her theory about its authorship.

The librarian let out a low whistle. “It gives me a thrill just to touch something that Jefferson held in his hand. This is an incredible find.”

“I think it is,” Angela said. “I’m just guessing that Jefferson encoded a message in those papers. Jefferson was an accomplished cryptographer. Some of the systems he devised were used decades after he died.”

“Obviously, it was sensitive material he didn’t want made public.”

“There’s more,” Angela said. She handed over the printout from the language website.

The librarian studied the sheet for a moment. “Is this website reliable?” she said.

“I’ve always found it to be,” Angela said.

The librarian tapped the Jefferson packet with her long fingernail. “Does your writer friend know the significance of this material?”

“He knows the Jefferson connection,” Angela said. “But he thinks it’s what it seems to be, a manual on how to grow artichokes.”