My head snapped up. “Holy shit.”
My mom furrowed her brows, and Carly turned to me. “You said a bad word.”
I winced. “Sorry baby.” I patted her head. “I’m just excited.”
She looked at the jumbled letters. “Is this what we were looking for?” She scrunched up her little face and then looked back at me. “I don’t understand it.”
I laughed. “It’s a code. I’ll teach it to you.” I pulled out a random paper and flipped it over. I wrote the alphabet in two lines, matching the letters on top of each other. A over N and M over Z. “Then you just swap the letters.”
By then, my mom was staring over my shoulder. “That’s it?” She looked down at the code and then back at me. “But that’s child’s play.” She looked at me. “He used that to hide his secret?”
I laughed. “Yep. And it is. It’s the way Rick w
