“G. Whyte.” Annie breathed a sigh quietly. “It could be Geoffrey, couldn’t it? Does the signature look like the writing in the note?”
She and Mary Beth both leaned over the coffee table, squinting at the precise copperplate letters, comparing them to what was written on the dance card.
“It’s hard to say.” Mary Beth frowned. “That could be the same G, I suppose. Whoever wrote on the dance card looks as if he was in a hurry.”
Annie chuckled. “He’s on there four times. He must have wanted to make sure he got to dance with her.”
Mary Beth laughed too. “I suppose.”
“Look at the ‘h’ and ‘t’ in ‘brought’ in the note. And look at the way they are in ‘Whyte.’ I think they must be written by the same hand. The ‘y’ in both places he wrote ‘you’ look very similar to the ones on the dance card. It must be the same person.”
Mary Beth’s smile turned a little sad. “They must have had a falling out since he’s not the one she married.”
“Yes,” Annie sighed. “Still, we don’t know. The early spring of 1861 was right before the Civil War. Maybe he was killed in battle.”
“Oh, that’s even sadder.”
“We’ll have to see if we can find out something about him. I’ve done a little genealogical research before. You’d be surprised the kind of things they put on the Internet.” Annie finished jotting down the last part on her notepad, adding notes from the dance card. “We can at least solve the puzzle he left behind.”
Mary Beth peered through her reading glasses at the note to Angeline. “I can’t make heads or tails out of it. Do you suppose each line of writing goes with each line of numbers? Maybe each number stands for a letter that spells out a word. Like one equals A, two equals B and so on.”
Annie swiftly counted the lines. “Nope. No such luck. There are eleven lines of word clues and only nine lines of numbers. And each of the number lines only have four numbers in it. Besides, the numbers go way too high to stand for the alphabet.”
Mary Beth frowned. “I don’t seem to be that great with numbers lately anyway.”
Annie kept her eyes on the brittle yellow page. “It’s not easy being in business these days. I’m glad I don’t have to worry about the car dealership anymore.”
“At least you had Wayne to shoulder a lot of the load.”
“Most of it, if you want the truth.” Annie glanced up at her friend. “If I had tried to keep the dealership after he died, I would have had a hard time doing everything on my own. I don’t know how you keep things going at the shop all by yourself.”
“Not very well. Not lately.”
“You have a lot of friends to help you. We’d all be happy to—”
“Don’t be silly. Businesses go through bad patches. That’s just normal. Either they stay afloat or they don’t. That’s normal too.”
“But Mary Beth—”
“I said don’t be silly.” Mary Beth cleared her throat and got that no-nonsense look Annie was very familiar with. “Now we have a puzzle to solve.”
The two of them bandied around ideas for a while over more coffee and some pecan tarts Mary Beth had brought home, left over from the latest church supper. Annie had hoped there would be something else in Mary Beth’s box of family memorabilia that would help them solve the puzzle, but there was nothing.
“It’s probably something obvious,” Mary Beth said, and then an enormous yawn escaped her. “Oh, excuse me. I don’t know where that came from.”
Annie smiled and stood up. “I think that’s my cue to go home and let you get some rest.”
“It’s early. I never go to bed at this hour.”
Annie put her coffee cup and her plate in the sink. “You’ve had a lot on your mind, Mary Beth. Some extra sleep is probably just what you need.”
“But—”
“No buts, now. I’ll take my notes home with me. Maybe something will come to me on the way there. If not, I’ll get Alice to have a look too. She’s bound to have some good ideas.” Annie gave Mary Beth a wink. “Maybe the answer will come to you in a dream.”
Mary Beth laughed. “Then I guess I’d better try to get some sleep.”
****
“Did you find something? Let me see!”
As soon as Annie pulled her classic Malibu into the driveway at Grey Gables, Alice scooted out of the carriage house next door and hurried up the hill to meet her. Alice’s blue eyes were sparkling, obviously eager to know if the little key had actually unlocked some mystery at Mary Beth’s house.