A Silent Message

Six weeks ago, Nathan Scott took his own life. To this day no one knows where the fourteen-year-old managed to secure a gun considering his parents are strongly against firearms. However, he was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head by his father on a sunny Wednesday afternoon.

“Nathan was the sweetest, happiest boy. He never showed signs of depression, he was happy! He was our boy! All we did was love him!”

Rebecca’s words trailed into sobs and shrieks over the phone before Howard took over.

“Please, we found his diary. Most of it is normal everyday talk. He talks about how he would go to the park with Clarance and Jacob. He talks about how much he loved History class. But the last page… the last page is odd.”

Howard's voice broke. I could hear the sound of pages being flipped in the background over Rebecca's muffled sobs.

“I can’t make sense of it. It's just three lines, but it's not written in English. It’s not written in anything I can make sense of. Please, can you look at it and tell us what it says? We need to know.”

I responded but made sure the Scotts knew it could come to nothing.

“Yes, I can look at it. Send it to my office and please do not remove anything or deface it in any way. The clue to what it says could be somewhere else inside the diary. Mr. Scott, I am sorry for your loss, I will try my best, but please you must understand this is a new area for me.”

Typically, I translate Polish to English. I grew up around the language and have been bilingual my whole life. My grandmother exclusively spoke Polish and never cared to learn English when she fled the war. 

“Ucisz mój lud, nie ucisz mojego języka,” she would say, refusing to be silenced like the Nazis were silencing her people. “Fuck 'em” was how I always took it. 

My jobs usually centered around old letters from loved ones that grandchildren found locked in chests in the attic. Diaries from grandparents that told of love and loss–sometimes second families. Annotations on the back of photos in a photo album telling tiny details about where and when the image was. It was all usually small, easy, and nonetheless inconsequential. 

But this was a different path for me. This was the first job I was taking that was a coded translation and not a Polish one. There’s not much of a market for it these days–but back in the late 60s, holy shit. The Zodiac made cryptic messages a hot commodity for every deranged asshole out there. Today though, not so much. I tend to steer away from jobs like this because you can never guarantee a result. A word in Polish is always a word in English, but a jumbled mess of letters isn’t always something. 

Three days after the call with the Scotts, Nathan’s diary arrived at my office. It was a plain, spiral-bound notebook that every child carries with them in school. It had a purple cover, and about a third of the notebook had been filled with Nathan’s day-to-day activities. He was a normal child it seemed. I turned to the last page and was greeted with three lines of random letters:

FTFIIKBSBOCLODFSBVLR

QEFPFPVLROCXRTQ

JLIBPQLOP

That was it. I knew a fourteen-year-old could not have been working with some unbreakable code if there even was a code. I figured he had to have written the key down somewhere in this notebook, so I once again went through Nathan’s life and found nothing out of the ordinary. He talked about friends and bikes and how much he loved learning about Caesar. He loved learning about Caesar so much he wrote about it for a week straight once.

“He would talk about how much he loved History class.” I could hear Howard saying it over and over again. And then it finally hit me–Nathan had underlined Caesar every time he was mentioned in his diary. I thought it was for emphasis at first, but then I realized, it was the key. 

A Caesar shift is a type of encryption where you simply do what the name says and shift the letters. A four right shift would mean an A is D, a B is E, and so forth. Nathan’s was a three-shift to the left. I cracked it. I was elated, I had the key and this job was done. When I read it, my heart sank. 

IWILLNEVERFORGIVEYOU

THISISYOURFAULT

MOLESTORS

After I stared at the paper for hours, sipping whiskey straight from the bottle, it took me another five days to call the Scott’s back. Howard answered the phone in one ring when I did. 

“Where have you been? We’ve been calling for days! Did you get it?!”

I stared at the page and my voice wouldn’t come out. 

“Hello?!”

“Ah, yes Mr. Scott I have it. It says ‘I will never forget you. I can't stay anymore. I loved you.”

After I shared the false answer all I heard were sobs as the phone hit the floor. Were they crying because they were touched it said what I told them, or glad it didn’t say what it actually does?

I hung up the phone, took one deep, ragged breath, then dialed 911.