Excerpt: Paper Lily

Ofeibea tugged on the black silk ribbon that marked her progress, and the book popped open. She pulled the graphite stub from the hollow of the binding and prepared herself for a long, boring session of reading and deciphering. As she worked, the tip of her tongue often peeped out from between her thin lips, and occasionally she talked - to herself, to the notebook, to the erstwhile Diamond Griggs - just to break the interminable silence that filled the room after the medical personnel abandoned her to her own devices.

"All right," she murmured, beginning to scribble translations of Diamond Griggs's painfully obvious code in the spaces around and beneath his own impossibly precise handwriting. He was nearly as fastidious in regards to his handwriting as he had been to his grooming. "What do you have to tell me today, William? 'Rec'ved t-gram fr RS Subterfuje.'" She assumed he referred to the Reliance settlement known as "Subterfuge;" he never had been good at spelling. "'Request cap ass't for expanshin of soler convershin exps.'"

Ofeibea tapped the graphite against her lips and considered what this meant. While she had cracked Diamond Griggs's code easily enough, his often dizzying array of abbreviations, combined with his abysmal spelling, was much more difficult to work through. In the blank space he'd left beneath this note, she wrote, "Received telegram from Reliance Settlement Subterfuge. Request capital assistance for expansion of solar conversion experiments."

Ofeibea frowned and shook her head. Diamond Griggs erroneously fancied himself an entrepreneur, a pioneer, even, in his most self-aggrandizing moments, an artiste. One of the things he thought all of that meant was combining his various roles - bribesman, con artist, and gambler, in various ways to meet his needs. It appeared that he had combined his gambler and bribesman role several times in the service of Reliance. The settlers would front him a sum of money; he would take that sum to the casino and, theoretically, increase it on their behalf.

She could not begin to imagine how more than one community had taken advantage of this "service": for all his bragging and bravado, he was one of the worst gamblers she had ever had the misfortune to know. And, unsurprisingly, Diamond Griggs's next two notes confirmed her experience in this: 'Rec'ved $500 wire fr A. Owens, Subterfuje. Will take to Fronteir Gateway Wed.' Frontier Springs she guessed to be a gambling saloon in the vicinity of Subterfuge. And three days later: 'Ret'ned $432 to Subterfuje.' That wasn't all losings; Ofeibea assumed he collected a twenty-five dollar commission on every transaction, the same way he did with bribes. Still, a negative forty-three dollar return on investment could hardly have been what the settlers at Subterfuge were hoping for when they entrusted their savings with renowned gambler Diamond Griggs (she remembered that this is how he liked to refer to himself. He always conveniently omitted the part about being renowned for his arrogant lack of skill and rotten bad luck).