While the grill heated, he returned to the kitchen to find Ava bent over the puzzle. She held the last piece in her hand. A tear dripped from her lashes to splash on the puzzle. She wiped it away and sniffed. “Sarah left this one for me to finish it.”
“Seems fitting.”
With a nod and deep sigh, she placed the piece in its home, then rested both hands on top of the finally completed puzzle.
“Well?” He walked over to stand beside her. “Does it mean anything to you?”
“Yes, so many things. I’m not sure if there’s supposed to be a message in here or if it’s just a collage of different places where we’ve been and he thought it would be fun for me to walk down memory lane.” Her finger traced the foreign symbols. “But after learning all we’ve learned over the past few days, the Russian makes me wonder . . .”
Him too. “Okay. While you’re studying, I’m going to be making the steaks. If I remember correctly, you like yours medium rare?”
“Uh-huh. Thanks.”
He smiled. Her absent-minded response said she was in full concentration mode, and he wished he could see inside her brain just to get a glimpse of the way it worked. “I’ll put these steaks on the grill.”
“Hmm.”
He shook his head, amused she could fall that deeply into thought so fast.
For the next twenty minutes, he cooked and she never moved. When he set the plate in front of her, she looked up and blinked. Then gasped. “Oh, Caden, I’m so sorry. I got so immersed in thinking about the pictures on this thing that I . . .” She shrugged.
“Zoned out?”
“Something like that.” Ava looked at the food and an audible rumble came from her stomach. She flushed and he laughed.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You should.”
He blessed it and she cut a bite out of her steak. After chewing and swallowing, she closed her eyes and nodded. “Yep. You’re hired.”
“What?”
“As my personal chef.”
He laughed. “I’d be happy to cook for you anytime, Ava.”
Her eyes widened a fraction and then she smiled. “Well, thanks. I may take you up on that.” Then she sobered and her eyes went back to the puzzle. “As crazy as it sounds, I think I may know the password.”
He stilled. “Okay.”
Ava noted his reaction and picked up her fork. “I’ll try it after we finish eating. I want to enjoy your efforts.”
Twenty minutes later, she pushed her plate to the side. “I don’t think I can wait any longer.”
He huffed a short laugh. “I thought you’d never finish. Go, please.”
While Caden watched, she went to the laptop and typed in the password. Her heart thudded and expectation hummed.
Caden’s statement that he’d be happy to cook for her anytime resonated with her. She was almost tempted to analyze it and see if she could find a hidden message in his words. Then decided she was being silly. Not everything had a hidden message. Some messages were loud and clear. He was interested but wouldn’t push her. And he’d cook for her if she’d let him. She would.
The password screen opened to the desktop and she let out a low laugh of disbelief. “Seriously, Dad?”
“You’re in?”
“I’m in.”
“How’d you know?”
“Every place on the puzzle is a location where we actually did a puzzle.”
Caden frowned. She picked up the laptop and carried it to the table, sitting next to him so he could see. “Okay.”
“And every time he presented me with a new puzzle, he had a phrase.”
“Ah, and the password was the phrase.”
“It was. I’vegotapuzzleforyou,Ava-girl. In Russian. Complete with punctuation.” She shook her head. “It got so that when he walked in the door with a puzzle in hand, I’d try to beat him to the saying. We’d wind up saying it together and have a good laugh. Right up until about a month before he was . . . before he . . . died.” Dead, but no body to bury. She frowned and shook her head. He was gone.
Wasn’t he?
“So,” Caden said, “what about the other things on the puzzle? Even I can recognize that the letters are part of the Russian alphabet, but no clue what they mean. And what about the blueprint?”
“I think the letters were to let me know if I figured out the password, I had to enter it using the Russian keyboard. The blueprint is familiar, but I can’t place it.”
“It’s a house,” he said, “but not the one you grew up in.”
“No. It’s definitely a different floor plan. And it’s not the one he had in Virginia either.”
He sat back. “All right, you ready to see what’s on the laptop? Maybe that will answer some of the questions.”
She drew in a deep breath and nodded. “Sure.”
She ran her finger over the trackpad to wake up the screen and pulled up the password box once more, entered the phrase, and stared at the desktop. “Okay, Dad,” she whispered, “what am I looking for?”
“He’s got folders all labeled in Russian,” Caden said. “My skills are rusty, can you interpret?”
“Rusty?”
“Okay, nonexistent. Can you help me out?”
She moved the cursor over the first little blue file icon in the right-hand corner of the screen. “Why don’t we just start clicking through them?”
“Perfect.”
For the next twenty minutes, she continued to click while her mind raced. “Okay, this is getting us nowhere,” she muttered. “Let’s try something else.”
“Is it just me or is there not a lot on there.”
She checked the hard drive space. “Good observation. While it doesn’t look like there’s a lot from this vantage point, the storage meter says there’s quite a bit. I just have to find it.” She yawned and took a sip of her Coke. “Sorry.”
“Should we try again after you get some rest?”
“No way. We’ve come this far, I’m not stopping now.”
“I’m going to check in with Daria and see if we’ve got anything on the mask or the face.”
Ava nodded and kept her attention on the screen. When she moved on to the search history, she straightened. Her father knew to clear the history and how to do a good job of it so no one would be able to find it. But Ava found quite a few websites that sparked her interest.
Scuba diving equipment?
A wet suit?
Air tank?
She sucked in a sharp breath and scooted back. “He’s not dead,” she said. “Caden, he’s not dead.”
“Hold on, Daria.” Caden looked over at Ava. “What?”
“My father. He’s alive and I think he wanted me to figure that out.”
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
The complete lack of color in Ava’s face worried him. “Hang on a sec, Daria.” He walked over to Ava and sat beside her to place a hand on her shoulder. “Ava? You okay?”
She swallowed, her eyes wide, still on the laptop screen. “He’s not dead. He’s really alive.” A tear slid down her cheek and she swiped it away.