“Well?” Brent said, answering my silence.
I looked at him. “Cyril didn’t figure out the last puzzle,” I said with conviction. “He didn’t even figure out the first one. He let us figure them out for him!”
“But how…” Brent began.
“He has money. He’s rich, remember? I’ll bet he paid the lady in the lawyer’s office – the blonde one who’s been buying our plane tickets, arranging our travel – to tell him where we were going. It would be easy enough, for no one could ever prove that he didn’t solve the puzzles himself. Remember – all he had to do was find out the name of the city that solved each puzzle. The rest of the instructions, like bringing a kumquat to the mayor, were already spelled out for him.”
Loni thought about this. “But the blonde lady helped us in Columbus! She told us which plane Cyril was getting on…”
I nodded. “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean anything. As far as she knew, the plane he was taking had nothing to do with any puzzles. To her, it probably seemed like an innocent thing to ask about.”
Brent’s eyes widened. “Do you think he followed us to the mayor’s office in Columbus?”
I thought it over. “I’ll bet he did,” I said. “Yeah, it makes sense. The blonde lady could have told him what hotel she had arranged for us. When he got out of jail, he probably went to our hotel and sat in his rented car at the curb, waiting for us to do something. We led him not to the governor, as he expected, but to the mayor! And at the airport in Columbus, he waited, in hiding, to see if we would get on the plane. When we didn’t, he didn’t either. Later, he called the blonde lady and found out that we were going to Boston.”
“He paid Mel, too!” Loni said angrily, looking at the shore and the empty parking space that once held Mel’s car.
“He paid Mel and Roger!” Brent added. “I’ll bet neither of them works for the mayor. The mayor isn’t even on that boat! We’ve been tricked!”
I nodded. “For all we know, the mayor is back in her office right now, talking to Cyril.”
We all fell silent again. Then Loni spoke up. “Uh-oh! I think we’ve got another problem!”
“I know,” Brent said. “It’s almost two o’clock, and we still haven’t had lunch.”
“No, not that,” Loni said. “This boat is leaking. We’re taking on water!”
****
We had to act fast. Fortunately, the leak was small, and the water wasn’t gushing in – at least, not yet. Brent saved the day when he found a paper bag jammed under the siding at the very front of the boat. It was somebody’s lunch trash – the remains of a fast food meal. Inside we found two paper soda cups. Brent and my mom went to work right away with the cups, bailing out the bottom of the boat.
Meanwhile, I took off my red shirt and slowly stood up. I know you’re not supposed to stand up in a boat, but I had no choice – I had to be sure that someone would see me. The boat started rocking back and forth as I struggled to gain my balance. Loni, scared of tipping over, let out a little scream. Brent started to curse me but stopped himself, probably because my mother was there.
“Calm down,” I said. “We’ve stopped rocking!” My mom and Brent continued bailing while I waved my shirt back and forth over my head, hoping to attract the attention of one of the other boats. Loni did her part, too. She’s always been a good screamer. She kept screaming “HELP” as loudly as she could. Her high voice carried well over the water.
The whole thing was embarrassing, but it worked. After ten minutes or so, we could see one of the sailboats reverse its direction and head straight for us. “What’s all the noise?” asked a friendly young woman as the sailboat pulled up alongside us. She was sitting in the front of the boat, below the sail. According to her T-shirt, she went to Boston University. A young man, maybe her boyfriend, sat in the back, guiding the boat with the tiller.
“We’re stuck!” Brent said, scooping cupful after cupful of water out of the boat. “We don’t have any oars, and our boat is leaking!” Turning to me, he added, “It’s coming in faster now!”
The woman looked amused. “Why on earth would you leave the shore without oars?” she asked.
“Could you do us a favor?” I asked, before Brent could say something sarcastic. “The oars for this boat are sitting on that dock over there. Would you mind getting them and bringing them to us?”
“No problem!” the woman’s boyfriend said. “I’ll be right back. Now don’t go anywhere!!” They both laughed at this last joke as they left us. As I said, the whole thing was totally embarrassing.
Within a few minutes, they were back, handing us the oars. We flooded them with thank-yous, and I began rowing back to the dock. It wasn’t until the sailboat was gone that I noticed just how bad things were getting. The water was really gushing in now, and we had about three inches of standing water in the bottom of the boat. One of the paper cups was now torn up and useless. Brent was cupping his hands together and splashing water out as fast as he could. Loni was doing the same thing. My arms ached as I moved the heavy boat forward, inch by inch.
“Faster!” Loni yelled.
“I’m rowing as fast as I can!” I responded, panting.
It was hard work, and it seemed to take forever, but we did it – we finally made it back to shore. One by one, we stepped gratefully onto the solid planks of the dock. Wearily, we tied up the boat, which was now practically underwater. “What a disaster!” my mom muttered as she sat down on the dock, removed her wet shoes, and wrung out her socks. “I came out here with you kids to keep you safe, and what do I do? I expose you to dysentery!”
“What were you doing with my boat?” growled a guy in a turtleneck and a captain’s hat, stepping up behind us.
A whole hour – sixty full minutes – was spent talking to this guy and to the policeman that he called. We finally convinced them that we were not trying to steal the boat and had not caused it to leak. Grudgingly, the turtleneck guy finally let us go. We trudged up the hill and found a footbridge over the highway. We walked straight into town, our wet shoes squelching loudly.
“Obviously, we need to go back to the mayor’s office!” I said, searching the streets for a cab.
“And obviously, we need to get some lunch!” Brent added.
“No, obviously we need to go straight to the hotel and get washed up!” my mother said. There was no arguing with her. She was still worried about us catching some disease.
****
It was almost five o’clock when we made it back to the mayor’s office. We had showered and changed, and even though my shoes were still wet, I had to admit that I felt better. Loni was wearing some of my socks and a pair of my shorts. She looked ridiculous, but I didn’t care. It was her own fault for not packing properly.
I didn’t expect to have any luck at the mayor’s office, but it seemed like the right place to go. After all, what else could we do? You can imagine my surprise when, after stepping off the elevator on the third floor, we ran straight into Hobart Grumly, who – amazingly – looked happy to see us. “Kids! You came back!” he said, shaking my hand. “I apologize for my behavior earlier. When I told the mayor that some kids were talking about kumquats, she told me to send anyone mentioning kumquats straight to her office. ‘Blast my schedule!’ she told me. ‘Just send them in!’ So, that’s what I’ll do. Follow me, please.”
Hobart Grumly flashed us a huge smile. Here’s a guy, I thought, who can completely change his personality whenever he wants, depending on who he thinks he’s talking to. A perfect guy for politics. We followed him into a large room at the end of a long, paneled hall, where he introduced us to the mayor, a short, oldish woman with curly hair and glasses. “Welcome to Boston,” she said, standing up and extending her hand across her large, glass-covered desk. We each shook hands with her. She motioned us to some chairs near her desk, and we sat down.
“Do you have something fo
r me?” she asked. Nodding, I stood up, reached into my pocket, and pulled out the golden kumquat. She didn’t seem surprised to see it. In fact, she held out her hand for it. I placed it there and sat down again.
“Very good,” she said. She reached into a drawer of her desk and pulled out a small cherry wood box, identical to the ones we had seen before. “I have something for you, too,” she said. “I’ve been expecting you.”
We waited, patient and eager. She removed the lock. Then, with a sly look, she opened it very, very slowly, to tease us.
And then, to our dismay, we saw her frown in surprise.
“That’s funny,” she said. She continued staring into the box. Furrows crossed her brow, furrows that matched her frown perfectly.
I couldn’t keep quiet. “What’s the matter?” I asked.
“It’s this box,” she said. “There were papers in here!” She turned the box around and held it up so that we could see inside. We did see something on the bottom of the box. Etched into the wood there – actually burned into the wood – was the following word and set of numbers:
Combination: 56-11-11
The box itself, though, was empty.
The mayor continued to frown. “When I opened the box this afternoon,” she said, “there were two yellow sheets of paper inside: two copies of what seemed to be some kind of poem. I didn’t have time to read it, but I got the impression that it was a clue of some sort – something you needed to figure out this 56-11-11 business. And now both copies of the poem are gone!”
A clue! That would make sense. The combination wouldn’t be as simple as 56-11-11. That would be too easy. The late Jeffrey Morton – the man who came up with the other two puzzles – would have something tricky up his sleeve. But what? The clue would tell us. Somehow I knew that we needed the missing clue to figure out what the numbers really meant.
My heart sank. I asked a question, even though I already knew the answer. “Excuse me, but earlier today, why did you open the box?”
“I had to. Some unpleasant man with wild hair gave me a golden kumquat. He earned the right to look inside.” She sat back in her chair and thought for a while. “When I opened it, we both saw the papers. The unpleasant man asked me if I had seen them before. I told him that I hadn’t, that this was the first time I had ever opened the box. He grabbed one of the papers and started reading it excitedly.” The mayor thought some more. “At that moment, one of my staff came in with some emergency, and I had to step out of the office for a minute. When I came back, the box was back on my desk, padlocked shut, and the man was gone. I’ll admit that I haven’t had time to look inside again until just now. That was unfortunate. I’m sorry, kids!”
I looked at Brent, Brent looked at Loni, and Loni looked at me. We all knew what this meant. “Cyril!” I muttered in anger, for the second time that day. “He stole the clue! This doesn’t look good!”
“Are you kidding? ” Brent said, with pain in his voice. “This time, it looks absolutely hopeless!”
Chapter 6: Scamming the Schemer
We did the obvious thing first. Before we even left the building, I used my mom’s cell phone to call my Dad back home. I asked him if he would drive to Arthur Halverson’s house and try the combination 56-11-11 on the safe there, the one that held the treasure. We knew it wouldn’t work, but it was worth a shot.
Two hours later, my dad called us back at the hotel. “Hi, Dave!” he said, chuckling. “Do you still smell like a river?”
I ignored the joke. “What about the safe, Dad?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “I went over to that fellow’s house, expecting to try the combination you gave me, but I couldn’t. The combination uses letters, not numbers.”
“What? Letters?”
“That’s right. There are six dials on the safe, located in a single row along the top edge of the front door. Each dial includes all the letters from A to Z. By positioning the dials, you can spell out any six-letter word you want.”
“The combination is a six-letter word!” I said to Dave and Loni, lifting my head from the phone.
“I suppose it could be 2 three-letter words,” my dad corrected me. “Or any combination of words totaling six letters. Or maybe even a six-letter abbreviation!”
“True,” I said into the phone. “Hmmm… 56-11-11. There must be a way to turn those numbers into letters.”
“If there is,” my dad said, “I’m sure you kids will figure it out!”
I thanked him for the information, and I told him we would be on a plane the next day, headed for home. As I turned off the phone, I thought about what he just said. “You kids will figure it out.” Right! Fat chance of that. What hope did we have, without the stolen clue?
****
We argued a lot that night about what to do when we got back. Brent and Loni wanted to go straight to the lawyer’s office and tell them what Cyril had done. We could even have the mayor herself call in and back us up. We could force Cyril to return to us our copy of the clue.
I didn’t think that was a good idea. “Look,” I said, “If we do that, do you know what Cyril would do? He’d say that he took our copy by accident and that he’d be happy to return it to us. But he wouldn’t give us back the real clue. He’d give us a phony clue, similar to the real one but changed in important ways. And who’d know? How could we ever prove otherwise? We’d be stuck again, right where we are now.”
“I guess you’re right,” Brent finally agreed. He shook his head. “If only the mayor hadn’t told him that she never saw the clue herself!”
“If only she had seen it!” I said. “Then she could just tell us how it went!”
Loni looked annoyed. She looked at Brent and then at me. “Stop talking about what should have happened,” she said. “Start talking about what we should do now!”
I nodded. My sister was right. “Okay!” I said, thinking it through. “Here’s the first thing we’ll do. We’ll let Cyril think he fooled us. We’ll pretend we don’t know anything at all about a clue being missing.”
“And how will that help?” Brent asked, unconvinced.
“Well, if he doesn’t think we’re after him, he’ll let down his guard. That’s important. Think about it – to get the clue back, we’ve got to go on the attack! And we don’t want him know it!”
****
Our attack began four days later. It took us that long to come up with a plan that might work. In the meantime, we thought, and we thought, and we worried, and then we thought some more.
We worried, of course, because Cyril might be solving the puzzle on his own and opening the safe as we sat there thinking. On the morning of the third day, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I called Arthur Halverson at his home to find out how Cyril was doing.
“That jackass has been in and out of here a lot these last few days,” he told me. “Two days ago, he sat at the safe and started trying, in order, every possible combination of letters. He lost patience – and started yelling at us – right about the time he got to AAAGOL. Yesterday, he was trying every six-letter word he could find in the dictionary. He got as far as ‘airway’, and then he threw the dictionary down in disgust and stormed out of the house.”
“What’s he doing today?” I asked.
“He’s here again, of course. He’s downstairs, staring at the safe. Whenever I walk by he stops me and asks me all kinds of foolish questions. ‘What was the name of my uncle’s parrot?’ he asked me. ‘What was his favorite card game?’ He’s driving me crazy! Oh, and every once in a while he pulls a yellow sheet of paper out from his shirt pocket and stares at it. I asked him about it once, and he thrust it back into his pocket and said it was nothing.”
“Yellow, huh?” I said, remembering the color of the stolen clue. I thanked Mr. Halverson for his information and hung up the phone.
I knew then that we had to come up with an idea soon. Cyril may
not be clever about solving puzzles, I thought, but he sure is persistent. He might accidentally stumble on the right answer at any moment. I focused again on the problem. How could we get our clue back? What was his weakness?
The answer came, at long last, during a phone call with Brent an hour later. “Cyril hasn’t solved it yet,” I was telling him. “But he’s working on it.”
“What if he gets someone to help him?” Brent asked. “Someone smart! Then it’s hopeless, right?”
“No,” I said. “I still don’t think that’ll happen. Cyril would never trust anybody with the final clue. He’d worry that they would find out about the treasure and get to it first. He’ll keep the clue a secret from everyone for as long as he can.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Brent agreed. “You know, from what you told me, he’s conceited enough to think that his uncle wanted him to win all along. I’ll bet he would ask his uncle for help right now, if he could. Too bad for him his uncle’s dead!”