Mountain Ice (David Dean Mysteries)

Dean and Fred pretended, without success, to not have heard what Edith was saying while she blushed.

"No problem at all," Cynthia answered. "And there's no charge. Donnie's a nice boy and we're happy to have him." There goes any chance of Mr. and Mrs. Dean doing any hugging and squirming tonight, Dean thought.

Edith Shipton gave a half smile and left. Before Dean could let loose with a torrent of pithy comments, there was another knock on the door and Donnie entered the room. He was carrying his rolled up pajamas and a toothbrush. Wrapped in his nightclothes Dean could see the edge of a Beanie Baby St. Bernard. He looked nervous and uncomfortable.

"Come over here and grab a seat," Fred said. "We need all the help we can get with this here puzzle." The boy complied, with a shy smile, and the group studied the notebook together.

"Reminds me of them crazy characters you get on your computer screen when you mess up real bad," Fred said.

"Well, they sure didn't have a computer a hundred years ago," Cynthia answered.

"It still just looks like jumble of letters and numbers," Dean said as he read the first portion.

"8m2f3km8m7ay7aa297867a88m4gkm38r366v2b7fpb452m4g5av2d4528m2agf am4ra38a..."

Donnie shook his head "no" and began listing the letters as Cynthia had suggested the night before. After some work, they found there were nineteen different letters used, with "E, I, L, O, U, Q, and W" missing. Cynthia then began listing the different numbers that had been utilized.

"I'll bet a mug of hot chocolate there are twenty-six different characters!" she said as she searched the text. She stood up and bowed when she discovered eight different digits appeared, the numbers two through nine.

"See? Twenty-six different-oh, damn!-sorry, Donnie. That's twenty-seven! And I was sure it was going to be simple! I was positive all she did was substitute a different one for each letter in the alphabet."

"I'll take my chocolate with whipped cream," Dean said but his wife made no move toward the kitchen.

Fred suggested that one of the letters might be in error so the group continued to look at the puzzle on the basis Cynthia had first suggested. It was difficult for all of them to work together so Cynthia made two extra copies of a dozen random pages of the ancient text. Donnie sat off by himself with one of the copies. While Fred, and to a lesser extent Cynthia, had solved cryptograms in the newspaper, neither were particularly adept at it. Donnie appeared to be the most talented at the undertaking but he too had little success with this ancient writing. The lack of word separation and punctuation made the task far more difficult. They realized if the text were based on substitution, the more frequently used characters were most likely replacements for more frequently used letters, such as vowels. At first they tested to see if the numbers might be the vowels but that assumption didn't seem to work out. They also looked for double characters, understanding only certain letters doubled with any frequency in English language words. However, as there was almost no break between words, they could never be sure the double characters were in the same words and not the beginning and ending of different words or sentences.