At least it kept Mae from going mad until the sky cleared for the night. If it did. There were pages of notes cluttering the entire table and empty dishes stacked to the sides as they worked to break the code. “Maybe if you brought down the codes your grandfather gave you, they would help us figure this out,” Chuffy suggested, from where he stood with his jacket off and his hair fingered back into uneven peaks.Fiona glared at him. Mairead began rocking again. “It’s not the same. It’s not the same at all.”“It isn’t,” Fiona assured him. She wanted to tell him that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with Mairead if he pushed. She wanted to tell him that those puzzles were long lost, but even that might set Mairead off.So she counted repeated letters and matched them with Ts, As, and Os, the next most frequently used letters after the now missing E. There were patterns emerging, except that each message followed a different pattern. In one, the letter that matched the usual frequency for As was an I.
