Sherlock Sandy and the Case of the Cryptic Cipher

 Hullo! I received some mail today!! Well... actually in mid-March but... we appear to have a backlog of adventures to post... Anyhow...

It has a fleur-de-lis on the back which means it's from Jerry & Ben but... their signature faces is not on the outside of the envelope...beary strange.

And... inside we have this!!! Their signature faces and... a coded letter!!!

OMG!!! This is exciting!!

Inside... it says I can enjoy the puzzle and they sent me an empty Sbux card because the design is nice. It is!!

And you know what this means...?

We have a case for Sherlock Sandy... the case of the Cryptic Cipher! (Or Cypher...). Let's get started...

First... I made a photo copy of the card... and now we need something to start our decoding. Given that this is from Jerry & Ben, and they always sign their names... I'm going to assume that EKTTJ & PKX is a direct transposition of JERRY & BEN... let's run with that... So every "J" is actually a "Y" and so on...

This is taking a while... but we are getting there...

But there are only so many letters in those two words... hmmm... are their other words that we can use?

Hmmm...

The first two words are RKDDI and FYXOJ! Given the few letters we already know... I'm going to guess that says HELLO SANDY... so let's run with that!

Yep, that gets us farther along...  and... the two words before JERRY and BEN are probably "YOUR PALS"... so let's use those in our transposition...

Whew... this is hard work!

And while I can see the shape of certain words... there are some, like just above and to the right of PALS that are perplexing... I'm going to guess that should read GARDENING but... the V shouldn't be a P... maybe it's a U? 

Let's see... hmmm... "Hello Sandy, We hope you are doing well. We're glad winter (those V/U distinctions are tricky!)... is... hmmm...

It took a bit but we figured it out!!! "Hello Sandy! We hope you are doing well. We're glad winter is almost over. Jerry cant wait to start gardening again. Your pals, Jerry & Ben"

That was an EXCELLENT puzzle!!! I wonder if there is an online decryption tool?? But Sherlock Sandy is old-school and did it the old fashioned way. Neat!! Thanks guys!