“It’s so remarkable, Mr. Priam, that it’s impossible. No conceivable chance or coincidence could produce a communication of almost a hundred English words that was completely lacking in T’s. The only way you can get a hundred-word message without a single T is by setting out to do so. You have to make a conscious effort to avoid using it.
“Do you want confirmation, Mr. Priam?” asked Ellery, and now something new had come into his voice; it was no longer thoughtful or troubled. “The writer of this note didn’t use a single TO or IT or AT or THE or BUT or NOT or THAT or WITH or THIS. You simply can’t escape those words unless you’re trying to.
“The note refers to you and Leander Hill; that is, to two people. He says: I have looked for you and for him. Why didn’t he write: I have looked for the two of you, or I have looked for both of you? ― either of which would have been a more natural expression than for you and for him? The fact that in the word TWO and in the word BOTH the letter T occurs can hardly escape us. He just happened to express it that way? Perhaps once; even possibly twice; but he wrote for you and for him three times in the same message!
“He writes: Slow dying... unavoidable dying. And again: dying in mind and in body. He’s no novelist or poet looking for a different way of saying things. And this is a note, not an essay for publication. Why didn’t he use the common phrases: Slow death... inevitable death... death mentally and physically? Even though the whole message concerns death, the word itself ― in that form ― does not occur even once. If he was deliberately avoiding the letter T, the question is answered.
“You believed me dead... Had he expressed this in a normal, natural way he would have written: You thought I was dead. But thought contains two T’s. We find the word pondering, for to think over, for obviously the same reason.
“And surely Here is warning number one is a circumlocution to avoid writing the more natural This is the first warning.
“Am I quibbling? Can this still have been a coincidence, dictated by an eccentric style? The odds against this mount astronomically when you consider two other examples from the note.
“And for each pace forward a warning, he writes. He’s not talking about physical progress, where a pace might have a specialized meaning in the context. There is no reason on earth why he shouldn’t have written And far each step forward, except that step contains a T.
“My last example is equally significant. He writes: For over a score of years. Why use the fancy word score? Why didn’t he write: For over twenty years, or whatever the actual number of years was? Because the word twenty, or any combination including the word twenty ― from twenty-one through twenty-nine ― gets him involved in T’s.”
Roger Priam was baffled. He was trying to capture something, or recapture it. All his furrows were deeper with the effort, and his eyes rolled a little. But he said nothing.