Treasure Hunters: Book of Secrets

Chapter Five: Innocent or Guilty?

"'Ben's assistant'? Really?" mumbled Riley under his breath. Alex patted him on the arm. He was still bothered by this. He sighed and removed his glasses. "Okay, we've been looking at this page for hours."

"It's been half an hour," corrected Ben, still analyzing the page intently on the screen.

"There's nothing there," argued Riley.

"Riley's right Ben," agreed Abigail. "I really don't think we're going to find anything."

"Look at it this way, in a hundred years, no one's going to remember anyone involved in the Lincoln assassination besides Booth," Riley said in an attempt to be comforting.

"That's not true," argued Ben. "Have you ever heard the expression 'his name is mud'?"

"Yeah..."

"Do you know the origin of the expression?"

"Does anyone but you?"

"Doctor Samuel Mudd was convicted of being a co-conspirator in Lincoln's assassination," piped up Alex. "The evidence was circumstantial and he was later pardoned."

"But it didn't matter," continued Ben. "Mudd's name still lives in infamy. I will not let Thomas's name be mud."

"Okay, but everyone else other than you two..."

"You're missing the point Riley. This is one of the darkest times in our history and I refuse to believe that my ancestor played a part in it."

"Guys-" Abigail spoke up then, eyeing the screen intently. "Look at this." She pointed to a brown smudge on the page.

"Oh-" Ben leaned in closer for a better look. "Oh well that's quite something..."

"Yeah, it says smudge," said Riley.

Alex smacked his arm for his sarcasm but laughed.

"I think its residual ink from the facing page. Flip it," said Ben. Abigail did so. "The letters are backwards - it's a cipher."

"Yes, it is." Now Abigail was smiling.

"See how the letters are coupled," said Ben, pointing. "Playfair ciphers encode letters in pairs. This could prove his story!"

"Unless you decode the cipher this doesn't prove a theory," Abigail reminded him.

"That's okay, that's okay. All we need is a five-letter keyword."

"Okay," said Riley, getting into it now. "What's the keyword?"

"I don't know yet..."

"Alright... Well there's a billion words in the English language-"

"Look out, here comes the writer." Alex grinned.

"There's got to be a logical way to do this. Let's start at the beginning. A. Aardvark - hey maybe we should write these down..."

Abigail printed out a copy of the page for Ben. "You know, I don't want to rain on your parade here Ben, but I don't think this is going to stop Doctor Nichols from announcing the discovery of the page tomorrow."

"No, no, wait, can't you ask him to wait until we prove Thomas's innocence?" They were so close now.

Abigail sighed and turned to him. "What if he isn't?"

(Ooooo! Haha hope you enjoyed, thanks so much for reading and for the 200+ reads! And sorry for the delay - university is fun but busy!)