The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK TM(11)

                Susan sat at the large table we had in the center of the room. I handed her the sheet of paper.

                “What’s this?” she asked.

                “I don’t honestly know,” I said. “Tell me if you can read it.”

                I poured us some coffee from the pot we kept on the stove.

                “It’s an idiosyncratic form of shorthand, and it uses some symbols that are pretty old,” Susan said. “But I think I can read it. Something about a—this can’t be right.”

                “What?” I asked.

                She shook her head. “Can you get me a legal pad?”

                “Sure,” I said.

                I went out to the front office, and grabbed a legal pad from the stack I kept in one of the desks. I brought it and a pad back to Susan. She translated the shorthand into English, pausing over a couple of words, shaking her head the entire time.

                “This can’t be right,” she said again.

                She didn’t say that as if something in the text bothered her, but as if something in her translation did.



                             “Show me,” I said as I sat beside her.

                “Okay.” She tapped her pen against the legal sheet. “It starts in the middle of a sentence. Usually when someone takes shorthand, she skips the articles—‘a’ ‘the’—and that’s happening here.”

                She slid the paper to me. Her handwriting was clear.

                …tortured family relationships. Rumors he had fathered his stepdaughter’s bastard child. Z denies. Paternity test would prove nothing since Z & stepdaughter share blood type. Other accusations…



                “What is this?” she asked me.

                “I’m not sure,” I said. “I have more. What couldn’t you translate?”

                She tapped her pen on the word “stepdaughter.”

                “I guessed.” Then she slid the paper to me and used the top of the pen to make an invisible circle around an area. “That means daughter. But the word in front of it—that’s odd. It might mean ‘only,’ but there’s a different way to write that. It might mean ‘half.’ It might mean something else. It’s a symbol I don’t really know.”

                “Why did you settle on ‘step’?” I asked.

                “It’s the only thing that would make sense,” she said. “I mean what kind of man fathers a child on his own daughter?”

                Then she blanched. She had heard enough at the hot line to know there were men capable of that.

                “I have reams of this stuff,” I said. “Can you translate it for me?”

                “I’m not sure I want to,” she said. “I’m not the only one who knows shorthand here.”

                I nodded. “But I trust you.”

                “You trust the others,” she said, still looking at that paper.

                At that moment, Louise came into the kitchen. She was covered in grayish dust. When she wiped a hand over her forehead, she only managed to smear everything.