The Killing Code

by Ellie Marney

Genres: YA Historical Fiction

Synopsis

A historical mystery about a girl who risks everything to track down a vicious serial killer, for fans of The Enigma Game and A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder.

Virginia, 1943: World War II is raging in Europe and on the Pacific front when Kit Sutherland is recruited to help the war effort as a codebreaker at Arlington Hall, a former girls’ college now serving as the site of a secret US Signals Intelligence facility in Virginia. But Kit is soon involved in another kind of fight: Government girls are being brutally murdered in Washington DC, and when Kit stumbles onto a bloody homicide scene, she is drawn into the hunt for the killer.
 
To find the man responsible for the gruesome murders and bring him to justice, Kit joins forces with other female codebreakers at Arlington Hall—gossip queen Dottie Crockford, sharp-tongued intelligence maven Moya Kershaw, and cleverly resourceful Violet DuLac from the segregated codebreaking unit. But as the girls begin to work together and develop friendships—and romance—that they never expected, two things begin to come clear: the murderer they’re hunting is closing in on them…and Kit is hiding a dangerous secret.

Release date: September 20, 2022

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 384

Sample

We knew, from our training, about cryptographic continuity—how these new codes were based on old codes, and some of the old elements were bound to show up again.

—BRIGID GLADWELL

June 1942

This is the story of a murderer and about the fast friendship between girls.

Of course, the Great Murderer was the war, in which young men were dashed to pieces while their mothers cried for them back home and millions of innocents were killed by hate in the terrible ovens of Europe. It was not enough merely to love and to hope that the world could be changed by loving. Change would come only with gunshots and battle stations and bomb blasts—love and hope were insufficient.

But it was love and hope that created an immense change of fortune in a third-story room in the mansion schoolhouse of Arlington Hall during the summer of 1942, where Katherine Sutherland lay dying.

Katherine had been dying for most of her life. She had been a sickly infant and a sickly child, sent in her time to more doctors than she could count. Now she was a dying young woman, counting each gasping breath. She’d fought to be allowed to come to this finishing school, where the hunt course and the riding arena and the hockey fields were largely out of her reach. She’d fought to complete her classes in deportment and literature and astronomy and botany and good homemaking. She would never make a good home with some handsome smiling man returned from the war, but it comforted her to know that in a different world, in a different, healthy body, she might have had the option.

Options were the thing. Katherine fought to die in her own way and on her own terms. Mainly that meant fighting to stay where she was happy even at her worst, on the grounds of the school, rather than returning to the clammy embrace of her parents in Pennsylvania, who had long ago realized that nothing they or the doctors did was going to help, that she was never going to make a match or improve the family fortunes. Katherine knew she was a lemon.

Lemon girls, forced to be brave, get to set their own terms.

So Katherine stayed. As the schoolgirls in other rooms packed up for their summer break—a break from which they’d never return, as it happened—she lay on her bed in her nightgown, with the big window open. She looked through it to the cherry trees outside and held the hand of a girl beneath notice because she wore a maid’s uniform. This was Kathleen Hopper, and she was Katherine’s companion.

Companion and nurse and lady’s maid, Kathleen had been hired four years previously because she wasn’t Black (Katherine’s mother had insisted on a white girl). And a sickly girl needed someone to help her dress, read with her, fix and carry her meals, walk at her pace while others ran.

If it was a confinement for Kathleen—a little like she was slowly dying herself—then that was just the price you paid to hold down a good job. With five siblings back in Scott’s Run, she was lucky to have a job. But the daily routine of Katherine’s life had been the entire existence of Kathleen’s for so long that the barriers between employer and domestic had thoroughly broken down, which is why they held hands.

Maybe that wasn’t the only reason they held hands.

Now here they are—two lemon girls, lives and minds so intertwined they can’t imagine one without the other. Kathleen truly believes that Katherine is only alive because of her. Not in a practical sense, but in a soul sense, like she’s easing some of her own energy into Katherine’s body. But things have started to change for the worse. She’s given and she’s given, but it hasn’t been enough, and there’s nothing Kathleen can do about it.

They’ve kept pace with each other over these long summer days, reading Austen and Euclid aloud, talking about the way the stars turn in their glimmering constellations and which horse in the stables has the nicest nose for patting. Kathleen has fed Katherine possets and mopped the floors to keep off the dust, and now the windows are open on a glorious soft afternoon.

Katherine folds both their hands into a tented arch and speaks in her breathless voice. “Did you ever think about it, the way our names are so similar? I mean, the day you first came, I said—”

“I know what you said.” Kathleen adjusts her seat on the bed. “I was there. I remember.”

Katherine isn’t deterred. “I said, Oh my, we’re like name twins. That was the best day.”

Kathleen remembers that day’s terrors: whether her new employers would like her, whether they’d be awful or take advantage, like her mother had told her sometimes happens. Pressed into service at fourteen, Kathleen was dismayed to find herself in charge of the daily care of a girl her own age. At first it had felt as if she and Katherine were gasping for the same air. But then it became normal and easier, like they were breathing together.

Now Kathleen says nothing in reply, and Katherine, who can least afford to speak, goes on.

“Have you thought about what you’re going to do in the fall? When all this is over?”

Kathleen shakes her head, because all this is too big, and she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know what she’s going to do. Katherine is her all this and has been for some time.

“I’ve been thinking,” Katherine says, then pauses to draw breath. Each breath is like shrapnel in her lungs. She leans forward for help with a sip of honey tea, settles her back against the pillows. “I’ve been thinking, and I’ve decided. But you have to decide, too.”

Kathleen, who knows her decisions mostly mean nothing in this world, plays along. “What have you decided? And don’t tell me to start giving away your jewelry again, because you know that’s stupid and I won’t do it.”

Katherine smiles because she can’t laugh, but then her smile sobers. “I’m not talking about the jewelry, Katie.”

Katherine is Katherine and Kathleen is Katie, so other people can keep them straight. But in the night, they are only Kitty and Katie, which is just how it is when you’re cuddled together in solace. Four years, and Kathleen is praying for four more, although she can tell it isn’t going to happen.

“Shut up,” she whispers, but Katherine will not shut up.

“Listen, and listen good.” Katherine’s tone is dangerous now. “When all this is over, they’ll tell you to go back to West Virginia. A girl like you, with a head full of geometry and piano playing and crossword puzzles and the Latin names of plants—”

“—and how to steam iron and lay a tea tray and light a fire in the grate,” Kathleen says, ever practical.

Katherine shakes their joined hands. “You know that’s not enough. It’ll never be enough. Not anymore.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Kathleen says, but her throat is thick.

“This is the last thing, okay?” Katherine looks out the window, looks back. “It’s the best thing I can give you to make up for all the coughing and the bad days.” She waves to the foot of the bed. Her trunks are arranged there, and Kathleen always keeps them neat. “Listen to me—listen. I’ll go, and then everything will need to be packed up. Sent home.”

“No,” Kathleen says.

“That’s right. No.” Katherine has fine blue eyes, and at the moment, they’re clear and hot. She clutches both hands of her best friend in all the world. “I want you to take my big trunk, Katie. It has everything in it you’ll need. Clothes. Papers. References. Not the jewelry, because someone would make a fuss about that, but money, yes, that they don’t know about. Enough to set you on your way. Enough to launch you.”

It’s like she’s talking about a boat setting sail. She’s giving Kathleen a boat. Kathleen’s heart is pounding. What the hell will she do with a boat?

What will she do without one?

“Someone will notice,” Kathleen says, urgent. She doesn’t want to think about this. The idea of going back to her parents’ tiny shack in Scott’s Run—back to copperheads and coal dust and bitter wind whisking up through the plank floor—fills her head with a rushing, panicked sound. But she doesn’t want to think of launching into the unknown, alone.

“Nope.” Katherine shakes her head. “They’ll notice me and what a trouble I am. And they’ll probably take what they can carry—the little trunk, my blue handbag. But the big trunk will need to be packed up, and the rugs and blankets and everything will need to be cleared out, and you’ll be here to do that.”

She coughs again. More honey tea. A respite in her breathing. “I heard from Miss Grey—they’ve sold Arlington Hall. It’s going to the War Department or some such, and you know how muddled everything is with the trains and the gas rations. It could be weeks before anyone notices the trunk has been mislaid. You could take it to Union Station. You could take it anywhere. It’s just dresses to them. No one will care.”

“I will care,” Kathleen says. Her tears are so well trained they stay on her cheeks without falling.

“You’ve always cared,” Katherine says, then gently, “and this is how I can care back. It’s all I can offer, but I give it to you. You can be me to be you. Say you’ll take it, Katie. Say you’ll live, even when I can’t.”

Promises are made and kept between girls all the time, but this one means more. Terrified, Kathleen nods her assent because it seems Katherine won’t rest easy without it. Their two heads bow together. Impossible to know what other words pass between them, and then the moment is gone and it’s evening.

Katherine Sutherland dies in the night, still holding Kathleen’s hand.

Next morning, everything happens exactly as Katherine predicted. Kathleen is numb. Still in her maid’s uniform, she helps wrap the body. She answers questions from the headmistress and accepts a handclasp from Miss Grey. Arrangements are made.

Katherine is taken away, which is the hardest part, but the school is largely empty, and there are no other girls to see the stretcher with the white-wrapped figure carried down the stairs to the mortuary van. The authorities take the blue handbag and the little trunk, all the jewelry in the rosewood box on the dresser.

Of course Kathleen will stay to pack the rest and clear the room; of course she will do this last duty for her mistress. The military trucks are already at the gate, so she will have to make haste. All that remains, the headmistress explains with her gloves in hand, is to finish the last packing, and only a few kitchen staff are left behind. She pats Kathleen’s shoulder before departing. After receiving these final instructions, Kathleen is largely forgotten.

Kathleen closes the door, then walks across the room and opens the window wide on the cherry tree view, clutches the white frame with both hands. She has to decide now whether to step into the boat and sail. But all she feels is a sadness so profound it’s like dying.

Katherine is the one who died, though. She would be telling you not to be a nincompoop. Step into the boat.

Step into the boat, or stand alone at the dock as the boat pushes off. Either way, she is alone.

She can hear Katherine’s voice so clearly. You can be me to be you. Say you’ll live, even when I can’t.

Kathleen remembers her promise. Not allowing herself to think too hard, she steps back from the window and reaches both hands behind her. Cold fingers as she pulls the tie on her apron, unravels the string, slips the apron straps off her shoulders, and eases the garment away. She folds it and lays it on the dresser, because she’s accustomed to folding.

She kneels down on the rug and opens the big trunk.

It’s familiar, in the way of things she’s handled and laid straight a thousand times. But it’s also more than she expected. Among the clothes, a folder of papers—references attesting to Miss Katherine Sutherland’s good character, the quality of her family. A series of grade reports from Arlington Hall and from other schools, assuring her qualifications and abilities in typing and French and so on. Identity documents and—God bless—a birth certificate, all filigreed along the side. An envelope of cash, which Kathleen is too scared to count, but it looks like a lot. It looks like enough.

How did Katherine put all this together, right under her nose? There’s no time to ponder the mystery of it.

Kathleen undoes all the buttons of her black shirtwaist dress and takes off her oxford pumps. She strips off her hose and her brassiere, leaving only her panties. She folds the apron and the dress and everything else into a bundle, which she tucks down inside the trunk.

Then she dresses herself in Katherine’s clothes. First the corselette, tucking herself in with the many hooks and eyes. She draws on Katherine’s stockings and fixes them in place, eases the slip over her head, smooths it over her thighs. She takes out the traveling suit and puts it on: the navy skirt, the patterned blouse, the navy jacket with the peplum waist. Katherine was winnowed by illness and Kathleen by hard work, so they are of a size. She finds the accompanying shoes, with the continental heel.

She puts everything on, everything she used to put on her mistress. Then she turns to the mirror and faces herself, and what she sees… She doesn’t have time for that right now. As she knots the tie of the blouse with shaking fingers, her heartbeat seems very loud.

Her hair is wrong. She unpins her cap and releases her hair out of its tight, tiny bun at the nape of her neck. Brushes it with Katherine’s hairbrush, left in the bowerbird nest on the dresser, along with the other personal items: Katherine’s enamel combs, the hairpins and rats, the compact and lipstick, plus the newspaper folded to the last crossword they worked on together. There’s a photo of Katherine’s family. A dried rose in a bud vase.

Quick, trembling hands as Kathleen rolls and pins her auburn hair in place. Her hair is thick and shorter than is fashionable. She tucks the cap away in the trunk, digs further for another handbag—the soft brown vinyl—and a small brown hat. She pins the hat over her hair, opens the bag, and finds a pair of dark brown gloves. Before she dons the gloves, she powders her face and uses the lipstick. She takes ten dollars—a week’s wages—from the envelope and slips it into an inside pocket of the handbag.

Now, in the mirror, she looks more like the girl she’s pretending to be. The powder does not disguise her freckles, but freckles are fine—lots of girls have them. Freckles do not give her away. Kathleen adjusts the handbag and buttons the jacket. She practices a few short gestures. Hands like this. Posture upright. She is being Katherine, but not Katherine. She has to erase the Katherine she knew, overwrite her with this new version, the version who is herself.

Kathleen closes her eyes for a moment. The whole thing is disorienting and terrifying.

When her eyes open, the detritus on the dresser seems suddenly, impossibly sad. She can’t bear to see it lying there, so she sweeps it all into her handbag—everything but the vase. Then she closes and locks the trunk, clips it upright onto the metal frame with the little wheels, and grabs the handle.

Stepping into the hall makes her breath halt in her throat, but there’s no one around—no one at all. Kathleen tries to walk the way Katherine walked, but she’s not used to her shoes. After a few feet, she realizes she can’t do it like this: She can’t impersonate Katherine. That will give her away. She straightens and walks with her normal gait, which feels better.

The trunk is a heavy weight. She takes it to the dumbwaiter, but it won’t fit. Dammit. She takes it to the stairs and begins the long descent.

On the second floor, a young man.

There is both the shock of seeing someone in the empty corridors and the fact that it’s a man. Typically, the only men on the grounds of the school are the janitor and the groundsman and the kitchen delivery boy.

This man is in uniform, with a rifle on his shoulder.

No, not a rifle. A sawed-off broom handle.

“Can I help you?” Stupid words, servant words. My god, she’s blown it the first time she opened her mouth.

But the young man seems just as shocked as she. Or maybe embarrassed, because of the broom handle. Must be that rifles are in short supply. “Uh, no. No, ma’am. We’re just clearing the building. We were told all the residents had gone.”

It’s his manner, perhaps, that allows her to smile. This boy is a servant, just like her. A servant of the War Department.

“Yes, I think I’m the only one left,” she says brightly.

“Would you like a hand with that trunk, ma’am?”

This is a new concept. “Uh, yes. Thank you, I’d appreciate it.”

He wheels the trunk to the next set of stairs. Kathleen has to prevent herself from snatching it back. Just concentrate on the stairs. Left foot, right foot, gloved hands on the banister. It’s good her hands are gloved—she has the short nails and calluses of a maid.

On the ground floor, the elegant front foyer with the administration desk facing the outside. Parquet under her heels as she directs the soldier to set the trunk just inside the grand entrance door. The door is open, and through it she can see vehicles parked in front of the green hump of the turning circle: vans in wartime drab, plus a black car.

The soldier gives her a brisk salute as he heads back up the stairs.

Now what? She returns to the administration desk and sets her handbag there, pulls out the newspaper and a comb to find the ten dollars. Nervous about losing the money, she slips it into the pocket of her jacket. Then back to the door, to check the clips on the trunk. Sweat on the nape of her neck.

The sound of chatter, and she startles as two young women walk in together from the auditorium off the foyer.

“Oh my. Well, hi there.” The taller of the two, black-haired and, shockingly, wearing pants. “Are you one of the girls from the school?”

“Yes.” Both true and untrue. She has to think quickly now. She cannot be Katherine and she cannot be Kathleen—she must be an amalgamation of both. She extends a hand, the cotton of her glove soaking up the dampness in her palm. “Kit Sutherland, hi.”

“Moya Kershaw.” The young woman’s handshake is warm, firm, not the limp-fingered polite shake of the upper classes. She looks only a year or so older than Kit herself. “And this here is Dottie. Are you waiting on a cab?”

“Yes.” Kit wets her lips. “I mean, I called a cab, but it hasn’t arrived.”

“It might’ve been stopped at the gate,” Dottie suggests. Dottie is sweet-faced, with blond curls and a pleasing round figure.

Kit acts appropriately flummoxed. “There are soldiers at the gate?”

“Afraid so.” Moya leans on the administration desk and takes a cigarette out of a slim pocket case. “The whole building has been appropriated. You didn’t hear?”

“I heard,” Kit says. “But everything… Well, everything has been a bit of a rush.”

“No kidding.” Dottie smiles. “Sorry about the cab. Where are you headed?”

“Union Station.” It’s the first place Kit can think of, and the most obvious. “I guess I’ll walk down to the road and wait for the bus.”

“Do you need some help with your luggage?” Dottie asks.

“Thanks, but I should be okay.” Kit shoulders her handbag and walks to the trunk. She can do this. She can just walk out the door and keep on walking.

“Miss Sutherland?” Moya’s voice. The speculative tone of it turns Kit around.

Her whole face feels stiff. “Yes?”

Moya has lit her cigarette. Her lipstick is fire-engine red. She’s tall for a girl, angular and sharp-cornered at hips, shoulders, cheeks. She’s holding up the folded newspaper in her other hand. “Is this your crossword puzzle?”

Will a crossword puzzle give her away? Kit thinks for a moment, decides she’s being paranoid. “Yes. Sorry, that’s mine.”

Moya exchanges a glance with Dottie, like they’re sharing a secret. “You like puzzles?”

Kit feels perspiration pop at her hairline. But she’s too far in to back out now. “I do them in my spare time.”

“And you studied here.…” Moya cants her head. “What were your favorite subjects?”

The handbag is slipping down Kit’s shoulder, but she doesn’t want to adjust it. Her throat is very dry. “Literature. Botany. French. I liked the astronomy classes, too.” She tries to make it all sound natural. These are the classes she helped Katherine with. “It was better than typing.”

Again, the glance between the two other women.

“Do you have family waiting for you? Or a fiancé?” Dottie’s cheeks are pink.

Kit feels her answering blush. “Family, yes. Fiancé, no.”

Moya steps closer, holding out the folded paper. The red curve of her lipstick is like a lamp in the night. “Miss Sutherland… what would you say if I told you I might be able to offer you a job helping the war effort?”

Kit stands completely still, except for the round O of her mouth.

I’m stepping into the boat, Katherine. God help me, I’m stepping into the boat.

She takes a single, considered pace toward Moya and Dottie. “I’d say tell me more.”

cryptology (n.): secret or occult language; from kruptos (Gr.), “secret, hidden,” and logos (Gr.), “word, reason.” From 1945 as “science of secret characters or codes.”

March 1943

“Comin’ through! More pencils comin’ through! Hey, Kitty-Kat, I’ve got the erasers you said you needed.” Dottie shimmies her way between the rows of chairs and tables in the workroom, a small cardboard box under her arm. She’s a flash of peach sweater under the new fluorescent lights.

Kit doesn’t hear her, too engrossed in the typed numbers on the index cards laid out on the wooden table in front. She holds a pencil, and like every other girl at one of the large tables in Arlington Hall, she is wearing knitted gloves with the fingers cut off and extra socks. Out the window, the grounds of the school look quite lovely in the early spring: The cherry trees that Katherine enjoyed so much have all blossomed. The outside air is getting warmer, a welcome relief after the punishing winter, but the upper floors of the schoolhouse are much cooler than outside, and conditions are close to icebox.

The workroom hums with low conversation, the scratch of pencils, and the clack of typewriters on the next floor down. In her white cotton blouse and blue sweater and warm skirt and socks, Kit sits forward on her hard wooden chair and counts under her breath. “One, two, and three… And one, and two, and… there. Opal, are you seeing that?”

“Show me.” Opal Jenks, who usually sits closer to the window, is sitting beside Kit and peering over her shoulder. “One, and two, and three… I’m not seeing it in the first group.”

“Next line down.” Kit points at a set of numbers on her index card with the pencil’s tip. “Wait, I need an eraser—”

“Got you covered,” Dottie says, grabbing one from the cardboard box and handing it over.

“Thanks, Dot.” Kit’s smile is a flash of gratitude before she returns to the cards and makes the correction. She’s trying not to get excited. “Okay, here. Do you see it? Next line—here again.”

Opal bites her bottom lip, staring at the numbers. “Okay, maybe.”

“I don’t know.” Kit sets down her pencil, leans back, and chafes her fingers together. “Maybe I’m forcing it.”

“Show me.” Brigid Gladwell pushes back her chair and takes up position on Kit’s other side. In every workroom, there is one girl who keeps things running smoothly, and right now, Brigid is it.

Kit angles her cards and points to the number groupings. “Am I imagining things?”

Brigid frowns. “If you are, we’re imagining them together.”

The workroom is packed full of tables and girls: girls in winter coats, girls with victory rolls, girls between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. A few girls with pencils behind their ears get up and move closer to Kit’s table. There’s a frisson as everyone senses that something is happening.

“Write it out again.” Brigid pushes a notepad over. “Do we have the crib? Rose?”

“One second.” Rose, the overlapper, hurries to collect the correct sheet from her table. “Got it!”

“Pass it here.” Kit raises a hand, and a little bucket-brigade of girls sends the crib sheet her way.

Kit is on the third floor of the schoolhouse. It’s the same floor she left in such a hurry in June last year. But since that time, most of the dorm rooms have been transformed: curtains taken down and replaced, beds dismantled, lush carpets rolled. The bathtubs were too hard to remove. They’re all full of intercepts now.

Far away in the Pacific, the Imperial Japanese Army is shooting young American soldiers, with the occasional pause to send a message. Kit works on the messages sent in the pause. Her job is to take a card from the wire basket in front of her, skim each four-digit number, strip out the encryption used by the local operator to forward the numbers to Arlington Hall, then start looking for patterns. Like every other girl in the room, Kit circles four-digit repetitions, two-digit repetitions, subtracts one number group from another, tries a dozen other techniques with slide rule and graph paper to find anything that matches up. Although the numbers on the cards often just look like a garbled string of digits, Kit knows there are words in there somewhere—romanized Japanese words like dan and tuki and maru.

The hum of the radiator by the wall is like a burr inside her brain, the soundtrack of the buzzing intellectual focus that permeates the room.

Kit has become part of a great hive mind.

The work of the hive is breaking enemy codes.

With trembling fingers, she and Opal slide the crib sheet underneath t. . .