On the way home from school, I did a search of my own. The fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine was a legal rule that said that evidence obtained illegally was inadmissible in court.
“You’re thinking.” Jameson was beside me in the car. Some days, he and Xander caught a ride in my bulletproof SUV. Other days, they didn’t.
Xander wasn’t there now.
“I’m always thinking,” I replied.
“That’s what I love about you, Heiress.” Jameson had a habit of tossing out words that should matter like they didn’t at all. “Care to share those thoughts?”
“And tip my hand?” I shot back. “So you can get there first and double-cross me?”
Jameson smiled. It was his slow, dangerous, heady smile, designed to elicit a reaction. I didn’t give him one.
When we got to Hawthorne House, I retreated to my wing and waited fifteen minutes before I locked my hand around a candlestick on my fireplace mantel and pulled. That motion released a latch, and the back of the stone fireplace popped up just enough that I could fit my hands underneath and lift it upward. Oren had disabled this passageway back when there was a threat on the estate, but after that threat was resolved, it hadn’t stayed disabled for long.
I stepped into the secret passageway to find Jameson waiting for me.
“Fancy meeting you here, Heiress.”
“You,” I told him, “are the most annoying person on the face of the planet.”
His lips quirked upward on one side. “I try. Headed back to Toby’s wing?”
I could have lied, but he would have known I was lying, and I didn’t
want to wait. “Just try not to get caught by the Laughlins,” I told him.
“Don’t you know by now, Heiress? I never get caught.”
Taking a deep breath, I stepped past the brick debris and made a beeline for Toby’s study. I ran my fingers along the edges of the books, going through them shelf by shelf.
We’d checked every volume in here, but only for hidden compartments.
“Care to tell me what you’re looking for?” Jameson asked.
The day before, I’d noticed the variety of books Toby Hawthorne read.
Comic books and pulp horror. Greek philosophy and law volumes. Without a word to Jameson, I pulled one of the legal books off the shelf.
It took Jameson less than a minute to figure out why. “Fruit of the poisonous tree,” he murmured behind me. “Brilliant.”
I wasn’t sure if he was talking about me—or Toby.
The book’s index directed me to the entry for the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine. As I reached the page in question, my heart sped up. There it was.
Certain letters in certain words were blacked out. The notations went on for pages. Every once in a while, there would be a punctuation mark that had been struck through—a comma, a question mark. I didn’t have a pen or paper, so I used my phone to record the letters, painstakingly typing them in one by one.
The result was a string of consonants and vowels with no meaning. For now.
“You’re thinking.” Jameson paused. “You know something.”
I was going to deny it, but I didn’t, for one simple reason. “I found a cipher disk yesterday,” I admitted, “but it was set at neutral. I don’t know the code.”
“Numbers.” Jameson’s reply was immediate and electric. “We need numbers, Heiress. Where did you find the cipher?”
My breath caught in my throat. I walked over to the clock, the one I’d taken apart the day before. I turned it over and stared at its face: the hour hand frozen at twelve and the minute hand at five.
“The fifth letter of the alphabet is E,” Jameson said behind me. “The twelfth is L.”
Without another word to him, I ran for the cipher disk in my room.
