Then he entered.
He hadn’t seen the cabin since all the treasures had been photographed, fingerprinted, catalogued and taken away.
He paused at the deep burgundy stain on the plank floor.
Then he walked round the simple room. He could call this place home, he knew, if it had only one precious thing. Reine-Marie.
Two chairs for friendship.
As he stood quietly, the cabin slowly filled with glittering antiques and antiquities and first editions. And with a haunting Celtic melody. The Chief Inspector again saw young Morin turn the violin into a fiddle, his loose limbs taut, made for this purpose.
Then he saw the Hermit Jakob, alone, whittling by the fire. Thoreau on the inlaid table. The violin leaning against the river rock of the hearth. This man who was his own age, but appeared so much older. Worn down by dread. And something else. The thing that even the Mountain feared.
He remembered the two carvings hidden by the Hermit. Somehow different from the rest. Distinguished by the mysterious code beneath. He’d really thought the key to breaking the Caesar’s Shift had been Charlotte. Then he’d been sure the key was seventeen. That would explain those odd numbers over the door.
But the Caesar’s Shift remained unbroken. A mystery.
Gamache paused in his thinking. Caesar’s Shift. How had Jérôme Brunel explained it? What had Julius Caesar done with his very first code? He hadn’t used a key word, but a number. He’d shifted the alphabet over by three letters.
Gamache walked to the mantelpiece and reaching into his breast pocket he withdrew a notebook and pen. Then he wrote. First the alphabet, then beneath it he counted spaces. That was the key. Not the word sixteen but the number. 16.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J
Carefully, not wanting to make a mistake in haste, he checked the letters. The Hermit had printed MRKBVYDDO under the carving of the people on the shore. C, H, A, R . . . Gamache concentrated even harder, forcing himself to slow down. L, O, T, T, E.
A long sigh escaped, and with it the word. Charlotte.