The Explorer's Code, page 7
CHARLIEBDFGJKMNOPQSTUVWXYZ
So, C=A, H=B, and so on. If a letter in the code word repeated, you just skipped it. For example, if he used his full name, “Charlie Henderson,” the alphabet would be:
CHARLIENDSOBFGJKMPQTUVWXYZ
You’d remove all the repeated letters from “Charlie Henderson” until his last name was just “NDSO.” After all, you could only have twenty-six letters in an English alphabet, or it wouldn’t work.
The guard there, with his painted key, seemed to prove that this was a keyed cipher, not just a shifted alphabet.
It made sense. Charlie looked back at the mural’s other phrases. The sign had a tiny key painted on its side, and the man’s toga had another key hanging from it.
A new challenge. So what was the key that would turn the jumble of letters in the mural into a readable message?
Charlie searched the painting for any other words, in English, hoping they might give him the code word. No use. He was going to have to use trial and error to guess what it might be.
But he would. As Charlie left the Roman room, carefully closing the door behind him, his determination grew. He’d already managed to solve so much of the code. Nothing was going to stop him from figuring out the rest!
6
THE DUSTY STAIRS to the third floor were silent as Anna ascended, the bookcase door closed behind her. The layers of dust cushioned her steps, making her feel like a ghost floating along.
At the top of the stairs was a long hallway. It was dark and smelled musty, and Anna had to cover her nose and mouth to keep from coughing and sneezing. She didn’t know how thin the walls (or ceiling) were, and she didn’t want to get caught. Again.
The carpet stretched down the hall. Mouse droppings littered the ground, and cobwebs bridged the walls to the ceiling overhead. No one had been here, not for years and years.
The silent air felt heavy with the weight of what this third floor had been a long time ago but wasn’t anymore. Who had lived here? Why had it been blocked off but not walled off for good?
Anna tiptoed down the hall and stopped at the first room. She laid her hand on its dusty door handle, soft and slick beneath her fingers. If she had a floor of a building that was off-limits, she’d seal all the doors so no one could get in. But what if …
She turned the handle. The door opened, creaking as she pushed it. Inside was a bedroom with a huge brass bed frame pressed against the wall. The metal had corroded, turning green, and the mattress was gone. There was also a dresser, which, when Anna checked it, was totally empty.
She went to the window. Pale light shone through the dingy glass, and down below the other guests were playing croquet. Her own parents were down there, playing as a team. Her mom hit the ball into the pond. Charlie was nowhere to be seen. Anna stepped away from the window and went to the closet.
It was empty except for a dress, which had been left hanging on a hook inside the door. Once it had been pale blue, with a deep neckline (wasn’t the past supposed to be all proper, Anna wondered?) and a skirt that looked like it would be fun to twirl in. But now the blue was barely visible beneath the dust, and in places the color had bleached and faded to a gross yellow. There were holes where moths had nibbled the fabric. She touched the dress, the cloth silky under her fingers.
“Who did you belong to?” Anna breathed, and then coughed on the dust swirling around her, loosened from the dress by her touch. Mr. Llewellyn had given the family a history of Idlewood, but Anna hadn’t had a chance to read it before the upstairs mystery took all her attention.
She rubbed the cloth gently between her hands. It must have been an expensive dress. For a moment, Anna considered taking it with her, as proof that she’d found this place. But that would be wrong. The dress wasn’t hers. It belonged here, on this dusty secret floor. And Anna was no thief.
Anna closed the closet and left the room. She closed the door behind her and made her way to the next room. Each room was like the last: old, dusty, and empty. Here and there, she found remnants of the family that used to live in the house. A few hairpins. A man’s shoe. Out in the hall, on a chair, was a stack of books. Anna picked up the top one. Its cover had been torn off, but it still looked familiar. She set it back down and kept exploring.
At the end of the hall, Anna turned left and discovered another long hall. This one had no doors on either side, but there was one down at the end. Anna’s heart sped up as she ran to the door.
But when she pulled on the handle, it didn’t move. Another locked door.
Anna took out the tarnished key she’d found and set it to the lock. It didn’t go in at all, so that was another dead end. Literally.
She sighed and looked around. The door to the third floor had been hidden, so maybe there was more than met the eye here, too. Anna took a step back and examined the door.
The door itself looked like all the others in the house, except for the carved one downstairs: big, wooden, flat. But while the other doors were set in painted plaster walls, this one was set in gray stones, like the outside of the house.
Hmm. That did make sense. If Anna’s mental map was correct, this hallway connected to the house’s tower. Maybe the tower had been separate once, and the hallway was added later to connect the rest of the house to it through this door.
But if it was the same stone as the outside, maybe it was just as easy to climb. Ideas sparking, Anna set her hand on the stone. The dust coated her hands, like a gymnast’s chalk. Yes! They were just as rough as the stones she’d climbed earlier that morning. But was there a ledge, like outside?
Anna looked up and choked on dust. Her coughing and spluttering turned to laughter, echoing in the empty hall. “Oh my gosh,” she said. “What kind of house is this?”
A hole had been cut into the ceiling, just above the handholds Anna had found. A hole meant to accommodate a climber.
Anna had a sudden vision of a rich lady in diamonds and that blue dress from the closet clambering up through the hole and snorted.
Okay, so maybe not her. The husband, then? Who needed this kind of entrance to the tower when there was a perfectly good door?
Only one way to find out. Anna couldn’t have ignored this mystery even if her parents, Charlie, and Mr. Llewellyn had begged her to. She rubbed her hands on her dusty clothes (there was no way to avoid it—it stuck to everything) and began the climb.
It wasn’t any harder than the climbing stones outside. Anna lifted herself into a small room, cut off from the rest of the house, with unpainted walls. There was a small door in front of her. Very small.
“Alice in Wonderland,” she whispered, kneeling in front of it. The knob turned with a squeak, and soon Anna was crawling through the little door into the most marvelous room she’d ever seen.
It was the inside of the tower. A spiral staircase wound around the stone outside, leading from the ground floor where Anna stood to several platforms above. Ropes hung from the platforms to the ground, or stretched to the walls. Like the other rooms, this tower room was covered with dust. But unlike the others, this room wasn’t emptied of its belongings. Items littered the ground: books, a few plates and cups, and stacks of loose papers.
Anna stepped tentatively inside. The stone walls were plastered with maps and charts. The paper had yellowed with time, but the images were unmistakable: India, China, Africa. A map of the Pacific Ocean hung over an old, dusty sofa.
Anna raised a hand to touch the Pacific Ocean map but stopped. She didn’t want to destroy anything. Still, who had lived here? This room seemed different from the other rooms on the third floor. Those had belonged to a proper, wealthy lady and her gentleman husband. This tower was messy, lived in. Forgotten.
Maybe this was an office of some kind. Anna had no idea what kind of man Mr. Gardner was—maybe he was a sea captain or traveler in his own right. But it wasn’t like any office she’d ever seen.
Anna climbed the creaky stairs to the platforms above. On the first one, she found a locked chest. On the next, a wardrobe. When she looked inside, she found both women’s dresses and men’s jackets and pants made of heavy material.
Maybe both Gardners used the tower? If so, they were much more interesting people than Anna had expected.
And those ropes … some stretched taut like tightropes, between the platforms and the walls, and others held wooden slats, like seats on swings. What were they for?
Anna climbed all the way to the top and found a place that looked like it could be Rapunzel’s tower room. The small, topmost platform held a little bed and a desk that overlooked one window. This bed was made with a red comforter—or at least, it would have been red once. Sunlight had bleached much of the cloth, leaving only a few dark patches on the side of the bed away from the window. There, even under the dust frosting the bed, the vibrant color shone through.
“Who used you?” she asked.
The third floor had felt heavy with memories, but here, the atmosphere felt more alive to Anna. There, the rooms had been packed up and moved away, with small remnants left behind. Tombs. But this room was full and busy, like the owner had just gone down to dinner and would be back. Eventually.
She pulled out the dusty chair and sat at the desk. Out the window, she could see the tops of the trees around Idlewood blowing in the wind. They looked like a stormy green sea, making a wooden roof of a nearby building look like a raft. Interesting. Anna had thought there weren’t any other buildings in the area. Maybe it was a work shed, for Garrett the Gateman.
Back to the desk. A desk could hold all kinds of mysteries. Anna had once searched her father’s desk and found all of her and Charlie’s baby teeth. She wondered why he’d kept them. It wasn’t like he could do anything with them.
What secrets did this desk hold? Hopping out of the chair, Anna rattled the handles on the desk’s drawers, dislodging dust and causing another coughing fit. Eyes streaming, she grabbed an old piece of cloth off the ground and dusted the desk as well as she could. The sun-bleached wood was marred with scratches and even a few small burns.
Whoever owned this used it hard, she thought. She pulled on one of the drawers, and it opened.
Inside were an envelope, a compass, and a gold picture frame. Anna took out the compass first. It was old and heavy, cased in tarnished brass. She spun it in her hands and noted with satisfaction that even after all these years, it still pointed north.
Then she pulled out the envelope. Letters were just what she needed: names, reasons for this house and its secret third floor—and who had lived here in this tower.
Carefully, treating the old paper like it could dissolve in her hands at any moment, Anna unfolded the letter and laid it on the cleaned desk.
The letter was dated March 14, 1921.
My dear Ginny,
I know this letter may find you rather late, but I couldn’t wait until you were back to tell you the good news. Everett has proposed, and I have accepted. I will now be the new Mrs. Gardner of Idlewood.
So this was written by Mrs. Gardner, Anna realized. She wouldn’t have kept her own letters, so the room must have belonged to “Ginny.” Anna kept reading.
I’m pleased to be getting married, as I’m sure you know, not only because Everett is a wonderful, handsome man but because I can finally shed my ridiculous rhyming name. See? Now you’re laughing! It never seemed fair that you should get the only elegant name in the family, especially since you have no use for anything elegant in your life. As for Idlewood, it’s a lovely house, and I think you will like it as much as I do. Yes, it is elegant. But it is also spacious and rather remote, deep in the forests in the mountains here, and although it’s not the kind of adventure I’m sure you’re used to, it is plenty for me.
Speaking of adventures, I have recently finished reading a lovely book by an English lady named Agatha Christie. I have high hopes for her, and for her Monsieur Poirot. When you come home for the wedding (which you will have to!), we shall have a discussion about it. With its clues and mystery, I think you will enjoy it.
The wedding will be in July. You must be there. I cannot get married without my sister beside me! I expect your reply or your presence soon.
With love,
Elaine Maines (Soon to be Gardner!)
Anna’s heart stopped. As she’d read, she had pieced together an image of Mrs. Gardner curled up in Idlewood’s library, writing this letter, although at that point, she probably hadn’t lived here yet, and of Ginny, the sister. An adventurer. A traveler. But then came the last name. Maines. Elaine Maines. Ginny Maines.
Virginia Maines.
Fingers trembling, Anna scrambled for the picture frame in the drawer. No. It couldn’t be. There was no way that Anna could be this lucky, that she could be in the same place where the one and only, the mysterious and vanished, explorer of all explorers—
There was the picture. And there she was, dark hair as curly as Anna’s own, wearing a sturdy-looking dress and a smirk, eyes twinkling even in the old picture. Her arm was thrown around another young woman. Elaine.
It was her. Anna’s breathing quickened, and her hands tightened on the frame. Virginia Maines had been here. Had lived here, in this tower! No wonder it was so hard to get to—the woman lived for adventure. Those ropes and swings must have been for practice, or just letting off steam. Anna would have designed her own tower the exact same way.
She turned back to the letter and read it again with her new perspective. How had Virginia come to have this tower room? What happened? And had this been the place where she had vanished, leaving behind all her things like treasures in a pharaoh’s tomb?
The letter was dated in 1921. Virginia had disappeared without a trace in 1925. Four years later.
Anna sat back and looked out the window. Virginia Maines. Oh, man. The things these walls had seen. If they could talk—
What if they could? There were so many things spread around—what if Virginia had left a clue behind about what happened to her? The room was filthy; the Gardners had locked it up. Somewhere in all this mess could lie a treasure.
Where to start? Letters. There had to be more letters!
Anna rifled through the desk drawer but found nothing else. She looked around. The tower was a mess of papers. If Virginia had kept one letter, chances were good she had kept more. Maybe they were scattered in the stacks.
No time to lose—she had to find out more! But as she stood to begin her search, she heard the distant sound of the dinner bell. Darn it! Her parents were going to wonder where she’d been. Anna raced down the stairs and out of the tower, trailing clouds of dust all the way.
As she hurried down the third-floor hall, back to the stairs and the bookcase door, she realized she was going to have to shower or everyone was going to know she’d been poking around where she wasn’t allowed. She sighed.
Looked like she’d be late for dinner.
7
DINNER WAS chicken and potatoes, served with all the guests sitting around the dining room. The tables were large enough to accommodate everyone, but the adults had started to mingle, leaving Emily to sit with the other kids her age.
Mr. Llewellyn was chatting with the women’s tour group. He leaned back slightly, probably due to the thick cloud of coconut sunblock around them. Emily’s parents sat nearby, looking preoccupied but listening in. Another couple with sport sunglasses perched on their heads had been chatting pleasantly to a lady with dark hair tied back in a braid.
Another family had five kids, all under the age of six, so their mom sat with them at one table in the nice, blue dining room, keeping the youngest’s hands off the white linen tablecloths. They were all wearing the same T-shirts with a cutesy Idlewood slogan on them. One of the kids wandered over to the Sunglasses Woman and opened her purse, pulling out a dark tan cookie and raising it to her mouth. The woman snatched it out of the child’s hand, shoved it back in the purse, and scolded the child, making her cry.
As for the kids Emily’s age, the redhead and the boy with glasses, they had also opted to sit apart from their parents. Though, neither of them seemed like they were in any mood to talk.
The boy, Charlie, kept mumbling to himself, jotting things down in a notebook, then frowning and staring ahead like he could see into another dimension. And the girl fidgeted with her fork, her food, her hair (wet, Emily noticed—she must have gone into the pond) and kept glancing back at the door to the entry hall.
No matter, Emily thought. She wasn’t here to play anyway. She had work to do and was almost done. Backing out of croquet with her parents had been smart. While they’d snuck photos of the facade, she had managed to photograph the entrance hall. Leaving Charlie to explore her family’s suite had been a gamble, but she’d taken the real evidence with her (the book, photos, and some of her parents’ notes were still in her bag) and pushed the somewhat less suspicious books under a bed. He wouldn’t have noticed anything.
Besides, she couldn’t have let him follow her, not when she wasn’t actually going outside. It was much safer to leave him there while she did her work.
Two more days. Emily looked at her half-eaten food. She’d gotten all the pictures, but what could she do with two more days?
Find absolute proof that Idlewood should not be torn down. Her parents had come to prove that Idlewood was perfectly preserved enough to be protected. But Emily would prove why it had been preserved. She had her theories based on unsubstantiated notes from her parents, but if she could find proof, everything would be fixed. It would be a historic site, and the Shaughnessys would have grounds to have it protected. But they only had the rest of the weekend to find that proof before Mr. Llewellyn’s sale of the house went into effect and new owners demolished the house or ruined it some other way. They might not care about history. But Emily did.
