Henry leaned forward with interest. “Code.”

I turned to look at him. “You sure about that?”

“Of course. It’s alphanumeric and not terribly sophisticated. If I’m correct, he assigned a number to each letter of the alphabet and then grouped the letters in fours to make it trickier to crack.”

“How’d you come up with that?” Ruthie asked.

“I play word games. Cryptograms, anagrams, word scrambles. You see ’em in the paper every day. Haven’t you ever done one?”

“Not me. Pete loved that stuff. Most days I feel dumb enough as it is, which is why I don’t do crossword puzzles.” She pointed at the page. “So translate. I’d love to hear this.”

“I can’t off the top of my head. I’d have to work with it. Let me take a look.” He picked up the paper and let his eye run down the columns from left to right. “This is actually a cipher as opposed to a code. In a true code, each word is replaced by a specific word, which means you have to have a big awkward code book to accompany your secret messages. No respectable spy does that in this day and age.”

“Plain English please. I’m not following,” Ruthie said.

“It’s not difficult. In a cipher, each letter is replaced by a different letter or symbol. This looks like a simple number substitution. If he’d stuck to ordinary English, we could start breaking it down by looking for single letters, which are almost always ‘I’ or ‘A.’”

“What else?” Ruthie asked, chin on her palm.

Really, I could have done without her moony-eyed look at him.

Henry tapped the paper. “A two-letter word usually has one vowel and one consonant: ‘of,’ ‘to,’ ‘in,’ ‘it,’ and so forth. Or you might start with short words: ‘was,’ ‘the,’ ‘for,’ and ‘and.’ ‘E’ is the most commonly used letter in the English language, followed by ‘T,’ ‘A,’ and then ‘O.’”

I said, “I figured the zeroes were placeholders.”

“That would be my guess; rounding out the grid,” he said. “A block of numbers has an elegant look, as opposed to ragtag lines of different lengths.”

“Wonder why he went to so much trouble?” I said.

“He must have worried someone would read his notes,” he said. “Where did you find this?”

“He’d slipped it between the pages of a document, a lawsuit dating back to the old Byrd-Shine days.”

“You think the two are related?” Henry asked.

“No clue,” I said. “Ruthie warned me about his habit of hiding papers, so I was turning files upside down, riffling pages when it fell out. If he hid this, the information must have been sensitive.”

I took a few minutes to describe the compartment at the bottom of the box and then detailed what I’d found in the padded mailing pouch: the Mother’s Day card, the two photographs, the birthday card, the rosary, and the Bible embossed with Lenore Redfern’s name.

“A regular treasure trove,” Henry remarked. “Wonder how it ended up in Pete’s possession.”