She walked over, woke up her phone and set it up as a hotspot.
Okay, that wasn’t the most helpful. Russian was on there, which was one of the languages he suspected, but he couldn’t match up any letters.
“It’s not Russian, at least, most of the letters don’t look like they could be.”
“What else could it be, then?”
Her tone was exasperated, like she didn’t want any comments until he had the right answer. Which was fine. He continued to search, first scanning, then looking more closely. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
The timer on the oven went off, making him jump. Okay, maybe his nerves were a little on edge today. Erielle pulled out the biscuits and set them on top of the stove, then pulled down a couple of plates.
“Do you want your biscuits smothered, or gravy on the side?”
“On the side,” he said, and watched her sure movements as she served them both, then carried the plates to the table.
Once she sat across from him, she turned the screen her direction so she could look at what he’d been looking at.
“Whoa.”
He cracked open a biscuit and started spreading butter on it. “Right? I thought I’d look at the images, but it’s a lot.”
“Maybe there’s a translator app that could help? Like, isn’t there, when people travel to another country, they take a picture of a sign and there’s an app that translates it?”
That was a good idea. He turned the laptop back to him, opened another tab and searched for translator apps, even though the smell of the food in front of him was driving him a little nuts.
Once the screen filled with suggestions, he pulled out his own phone, opened the App Store, and searched. While the app downloaded, he took a bite of the gravy, and his eyes rolled back in his head.
“You served this in your restaurant?”
She gave a choked laugh. “No. This is purely Gigi’s recipe.”
“Yeah, but this is some good down-home cooking. I would think there’d be a market for that somewhere.”
“The places that might have a market for it probably already have a place with down-home cooking.” She took a bite of her own smothered biscuit.
“I mean, if this is what you can do with the most basic of ingredients…” He let the thought trail off and took another bite, then checked his phone. Still downloading. Of course, this place probably didn’t have the best connectivity. So he dug into his breakfast. The mystery could wait.
Well, maybe it couldn’t. Erielle pulled the laptop toward her and scrolled through the images.
“Everything that looks close doesn’t match up completely.”
“What if it’s a made-up code? Like, steals from different languages?”
“Then there’d maybe be a key somewhere? Like where?”
She pushed out of her chair and flipped the painting over. “There’s something about this painting. Something someone wants us to see.”
She placed two of the napkins on the painting, revealing only a small section of the painting, which she studied before shifting the napkins over and studying another part.
“What are you doing?”
“I think looking at the whole thing is overwhelming, so I am just looking at a small section at a time to see if there are any clues.”
Okay, that was intriguing, and he’d had enough breakfast to be satisfied for a bit, so he rounded the table to sit in the chair beside her. She smelled of butter and the bed they’d shared, and that set off a whole mess of feelings that he shouldn’t be feeling right now. He both wished she could always smell this way, and worried what it meant that he wanted that.
So he forgot to look at the picture a moment. She’d already moved to another section.
“I think we probably need a brighter light. But let’s wait, see what the app turns up.”
