“Which brings me to this.” Bailey picked up a small book inside a plastic bag. “This is a collection of Keats’s poetry. It’s marked up with colored highlighters and ballpoint pens. Almost every page has highlighting and things written in the margin.”

Bailey removed the book from the bag and flipped the pages to show the others. “It’s got literally hundreds of handwritten things—comments, cross-references to other poems, and lots of questions. See—here she highlighted the line ‘awake for ever in a sweet unrest,’ and she’s written next to it: ‘What makes it sweet?’”

Mahler turned several pages. “Anything else stand out?”

“Yeah, this.” Bailey pointed to one page. “See that number written in red? In eight places throughout the book, different numbers appear.”

“Some kind of code?”

Bailey smiled and looked into the darkness at Eden. “Maybe. Eden helped me with this. Each number is next to a line of poetry about the same subject—death. See? ‘For if thou diest, my Love, I know not where to go.’ And, ‘I have been half in love with easeful Death.’ Not surprising. Keats was apparently obsessed with death.”

“Is there any pattern?”

“First we copied out the lines and put them in numerical order to see if they meant something. But they didn’t make sense—they were just random lines. We tried isolating the first letter in each line, low number to high number, high to low. Then we thought of something. Actually, it was Eden’s idea. You should tell them.”

Eden rose slowly and joined the others at the table. “I don’t know if it means anything or if it’s right. But I thought the victim was a young woman who was probably not familiar with sophisticated encryption. Maybe it’s something simple. At boarding school, we used a code where each letter in the alphabet is numbered. A is one, B is two, and so on. We used it to write numerical messages to each other in class.”

Bailey laughed. “My friends and I did the same thing. Must be a middle-school-girl thing. Anyway, if you take the eight numbers in the order that they appear in the margins of the book and match them to the corresponding letters, you get a word: thackrey.”

Mahler looked at her. “So what’s that?”

Bailey shook her head. “We don’t know. It could be a place—there’s a small town in Canada with that name. Or a thing. A ‘thack’ is part of a roof.”