"They couldn't tell which, from your accent?"
"Apparently not; it appears I spoke a sort of hybrid dialect."
"Maybe you're lucky. I'd be happy to forget my first thirty years."
"I spent a considerable sum of money in my attempts to discover my past," Foster went on. "And several years of time. In the end I gave it up. And it wasn't until then that I found the first faint inkling."
"So you did find something," I said.
"Nothing I hadn't had all along. The notebook."
"I'd have thought you would have read that before you did anything else," I said. "Don't tell me you put it in the bureau drawer and forgot it."
"I read it, of course—what I could read of it. Only a relatively small section is in English. The rest is a cipher. And what I read seemed meaningless—quite unrelated to me. You've glanced through it; it's no more than a journal, irregularly kept, and so cryptic as to be little better than a code itself. And of course the dates; they range from the early eighteenth century through the early twentieth."
"A sort of family record, maybe," I said. "Carried on generation after generation. Didn't it mention any names, or places?"
"Look at it again, Legion," Foster said. "See if you notice anything odd—other than what we've already discussed."