Case Closed #4, page 16
I wake Eliza and Frank. It’s the first time I’ve ever been up before Frank, and probably the last time too. We’re all a little somber. I think it’s the nerves.
Outside, the ground is damp, and it smells like rain. A few archaeologists are up, having a quiet morning with their phones and coffee.
With the fake necklace in my backpack, we move to the work tent. No one is inside, but I know Smarty has a schedule on her wall. And there it is—“Morning meeting at eight a.m. in front of the bosses’ tent.” That means we only have seventeen minutes to wait.
Of course, these seventeen minutes are the longest of my life. I’ve never seen a clock tick more slowly. We walk around the dig, just taking in the sights of the pit, the columns, the distant mountains.
At eight o’clock, we start heading to the bosses’ tent, making our (very planned) fashionably late arrival.
“Perhaps we can have a modified map by this afternoon, Zip? Dr. Mandible, are you ready with a medical kit, just in case—oh, and Professor, how many books are you able to carry down into the excavation pit? I’ll have you posted outside the catacombs in case we need your knowle—”
Nadira Nadeem stops talking when she sees us approach.
“Good morning! Good morning! To you, and you, and you, and you!” Frank sings.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, detectives,” Nadira says. “We have a lot to do today, and our schedule doesn’t permit time for interruptions, unfortunately.”
“We’ll only take a minute,” Eliza says, holding up her phone. “Take a look—we found the Necklace of Harmonia.”
“You did not.” Smarty snorts indignantly.
But they all gather around the phone, snatching it from Eliza’s hands and zooming in closer. Orlando Bones’s jaw drops so wide that I can basically see his tonsils.
“No way, no way!” Smarty says.
Nadira squints at us. “I don’t understand—how?”
“We went last night,” I lie. “After midnight. Looking for my mom, remember? By the way, thanks for making it your priority to find her.”
Everyone shuffles uncomfortably.
“So we went into the catacombs, searching for her. Guess who we didn’t find? But we did stumble upon this. It’s even more beautiful in person. You guys should really see it.”
“It’s a MASTERPIECE,” Frank agrees. “Created by a master sculptor!”
I nearly elbow him. He’s not great at being discreet.
“So where is it?” Richard Leech says greedily.
“Where’s what?”
“The necklace,” he says, nearly salivating. That’s when I notice that just about everybody—except Zip—looks hungry for the relic.
“Here’s the thing,” Eliza says. “We’re going to set up an exchange. The Necklace of Harmonia for the missing artifacts.”
Nadira Nadeem splutters. “You—you can’t do that! The Necklace of Harmonia is the most prized legendary artifact in the world! It’s worth a hundred times what the other artifacts are worth. You can’t just give it to a thief.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Eliza says. “We were hired to find missing artifacts, not the Necklace of Harmonia. And that’s exactly what we’re going to find. After that, we wash our hands of this whole deal.”
“You’re sweetening the pot for the thief?” Bones wails, throwing his fedora to the ground and stomping on it. “They get rewarded with the jackpot? What I’ve worked my whole career for?”
“Sorry, Mr. Bones, but we’re finding the artifacts you asked us to find,” I say, and he looks miserable.
“You really went down there?” Smarty says skeptically, grabbing the phone to look at the picture of our forgery again.
“We really did,” I confirm. “You underestimated us.”
She opens and closes her mouth wordlessly.
“Here’s how this is going to work,” Eliza says. “Between now and noon, one of you will leave the bag of stolen artifacts in—”
“THE BATHROOM,” Frank says.
“Er . . . sure, the bathroom,” Eliza says.
“Once we get the artifacts,” I continue, “we will call everyone together again to announce the next handoff: the necklace, in exchange for my mom’s location.”
There’s a collective mumble.
Eliza raises her hand for silence. “In essence, we’re trading one artifact for all the others and Detective Serrano unharmed. You’ll be able to take the necklace and escape, so long as we have the information about where to find Cat Serrano. Whoever the thief is among you, we hope you find this deal amenable. We think it’s more than fair.”
“Makes me wish I had stolen the artifacts,” Professor Worthington mutters. “If this is how one gets rewarded for thievery.”
Frank claps the professor on the back. “I guess it goes to show you that CRIME ALWAYS PAYS.”
If waiting seventeen minutes was painful earlier, waiting nearly three hours is even worse. We try to stand watch around the porta-potties, but it seems like a lot of people are going in and out, and no one with a bag—at least not that I can see.
We snack nervously on bread that Frank takes from the food table, and all the while I’m trying really hard not to think of Mom. How frightened she must be—and whether we really can trust the culprit to release her.
At last the clock strikes noon. Time to check out the porta-potties.
We open door after door. In front of each new stall, my heart races faster—but each door I open leads to an empty porta-potty.
It has to be here.
It has to.
But it’s not.
Our plan failed.
My throat feels tight, and I know I’m going to cry, even in front of all our suspects who have come to the porta-potties to witness part one of the hostage exchanges. But it was all for nothing.
“It’s okay, Carlos,” Eliza whispers, rubbing my back gently. “We’ll figure it out.”
A long shadow appears on the ground. Someone is walking toward us holding a giant trash bag. One of the archaeologists who’s not on the special task force.
“Does this belong to someone here?” she says. “Someone left it at my tent with instructions to bring it to the porta-potties at noon. Oh, are you those detectives? Nice to meet you. Thanks for trying to find our missing artifacts.”
“We aren’t trying,” Eliza says. “We are succeeding. Can you put that bag down, please?”
She places it on the ground. “Okay, well, I don’t know what this is, but I did my duty—I have to get back to excavating.” She scurries away.
Eliza puts on gloves before reaching into the bag. She pulls out artifact after artifact—three vases, the bust, the golden armband, the coins, the hair ornament. It’s all here.
Now that we’ve got the artifacts, it’s time to set up the second exchange. “Okay, we will be putting the necklace—”
“Hold on a second, Carlos,” Eliza says.
What is she doing, deviating from the plan? She’s looking very intently at a vase, and she slowly slips into a grin. I lean down next to her, and she whispers, “You know how I’ve been studying fingerprinting? I think if we dust the artifacts, we could compare the fingerprints on the artifacts to those of our suspects. And then—”
“BLAMMO!” Frank shouts in my other ear.
“Yes, blammo, we have our culprit.”
“But that wasn’t the plan,” I say softly.
“I know,” she whispers. “But I think the fingerprints thing is better. I have my kit in my backpack.”
“But—”
“Our necklace has served its purpose already—we got the artifacts back. And didn’t you say you were going to try to be more flexible?”
* * *
TO SET UP THE NEXT EXCHANGE, CLICK HERE.
TO FINGERPRINT THE ARTIFACTS AND SUSPECTS, CLICK HERE.
* * *
I’VE UNTANGLED THE snakes on the disk . . . or at least I think so. I press Ν Κ Σ Ψ Γ Ε Ο.
Crack! The floor splits open beneath us, and we fall.
“AHHHHHHHHHHHH!” we scream as we drop down.
We land on a sand dune. There’s a weird hissing sound, but I didn’t break a bone or twist a limb. I breathe a sigh of relief. Unexpected bone fractures would really mess up my day.
I wonder if Mom even came through this way, or did we just get stuck in a part of the catacombs where she’s never been? The ground we fell through is about ten feet above us. “How do we get back up later?”
“That’s the least of our worries,” Eliza says, her voice trembling.
I look where her flashlight’s shining. And suddenly I understand what the hissing is.
There are snakes.
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of them. Tangled up in each other like some giant rat king. Hissing and slithering and spitting.
“Cool! Are they friendly?” Frank says, as one lets out an angry sssssss.
I gulp. “Are these the kind of snakes that are venomous? Or the kind that strangle you?”
“Red touches black, venom lack. Yellow touches red, soon you’ll be dead,” Eliza recites.
“That doesn’t help us at all! All these snakes are tan!”
“I don’t know!” Eliza says. “I’m not a walking snake encyclopedia!”
Snakes. Something horrible pops into my head, and I start to groan. “Oh no . . .”
“Carlos, you’re scaring me. What is it?”
“I just remembered. ‘Under the earth the riches lie. Ophidian curses too.’”
“Well, this is clearly an ophidian curse!” Eliza shrieks as she kicks sand at a snake crawling ever nearer.
“This is the catacomb part, Eliza. This is where the bodies are.”
I see her expression in the faint light of my flashlight beam. She looks confused. “What do you mean?”
“Harmonia and Cadmus got turned into serpents, remember? What if this room is the resting place for all humans turned into serpents?”
“Carlos, there’s no way Harmonia and Cadmus survived thousands of years down here, not even as snakes.”
“Maybe these are their snake descendants.” Fifteen slither toward me with evil gleams in their eyes. “We can’t stay here. The snakes are getting closer, and they look hungry.”
“Do you think they like garlic bread?” Frank asks. “I don’t mind sharing mine.”
“Frank? Explain.”
“I saw they were about to serve garlic bread for dinner, so I stole some.”
“That’s where you ran off to while we were working on the nonogram?” Eliza says.
“I stole a whole backpack full of garlic bread. That’s the special thing I brought. You’re welcome!”
“Frankie, I don’t think they’ll eat garlic bread. They like mice and frogs. . . .”
“Things that are alive,” I say with a shiver.
“Humph! Well you never know until you invite them to dinner!”
The serpents are closing in. Inching closer and closer. The only thing we have is sand. Maybe we can throw it in their eyes and stun them. I know I can’t do anything when I get sand in my eyes.
“Garlic bread! Garlic bread!” Frank chants.
* * *
TO FEED THE SNAKES GARLIC BREAD, CLICK HERE.
TO THROW SAND AT THE SNAKES, CLICK HERE.
* * *
“CAN YOU TELL us more about your job, Zip?” I ask.
“Sure. My job is to take laser imaging scans of the interior of the catacombs, then provide 3D maps that will allow everyone to head underground safely.”
“And everyone’s waiting on you to get the job done?”
“Zip,” Eliza says, cutting in with her own line of questioning, “you work where all the artifacts are. Nadira seems to think that you would have the easiest time taking an artifact.”
I want to groan—why would Eliza think accusing Zip is a good idea? Especially when they were being so cooperative?
“She thinks I stole them?” Zip is really riled up now, just like I knew they would be. They wring their hands together. “Why would I do that?”
“YOU TELL ME!” Frank says, waggling a finger at Zip.
“Money?” Mom says. “Spite?”
Zip takes a deep breath, and the angry energy seeps out of them. Suddenly, they’re cool, calm, and collected again. “I don’t have a motive,” Zip says evenly. “This is all speculation and conjecture.”
“If not you, then who?” Frank shouts.
“Right now, you’re our lead suspect,” Mom lies, and a little pink comes into her cheeks.
“Me?” Zip says incredulously. “I don’t see how you can possibly come to that conclusion—and so fast too. Are you sure you looked at everybody thoroughly?”
“Sounds like you have some suspects in mind. Would you like to help us out with our investigation, Zip? If you can give us other leads, perhaps our investigation would be fundamentally altered, away from you.”
* * *
TO ASK WHO ZIP SUSPECTS, CLICK HERE.
* * *
WE TRACE 285 across the clock’s face, and it pops open to reveal a hollow interior. I reach in and grab a long L-shaped object . . . only, the bottom of the L looks like a comb. I’ve never seen anything like this before.
“Um, Eliza?”
“It’s a key,” she says as she turns the object over in her hands. “An ancient key. This is what they used to look like, thousands of years ago.”
“A key to what, though?” I ask.
“To the Necklace of Harmonia,” Mom says in awe. “There has to be a reason why someone would have left this key at this site. For anyone who bothered to learn the history . . . this is a bread-crumb trail.”
“YAY, ELIZA! MY SMARTY SISTER!”
“Yes, this was an excellent detective instinct, Eliza. I’m so proud of you.”
Eliza looks smug, and for a second, annoyance jolts through me. If we had gone the way I wanted to go, maybe we would have found something in the tunnels, and Mom would be looking at me with wonder and respect.
“So there is a keyhole somewhere in the tunnels?” I ask. “And this will open up, well, whatever needs to be opened?”
“Possibly,” Eliza says, slipping the key into her backpack.
“Do you think it has something to do with the disk Mr. Bones showed us this morning?”
Eliza half shrugs. “Maybe,” she says, like she doesn’t think it’s likely at all. She’s clearly just trying to be nice. “I didn’t see any keyholes on it, but we could . . . um, go back and ask Mr. Bones to see it again?” She sounds skeptical.
We hop into the car and drive back to the dig. The drive back seems so much longer than the drive there—I think because I am so eager to get back. I can’t wait to see the look on Mr. Bones’s face when we tell him what we’ve found. And hear his barking laughter . . .
But to our surprise, Orlando Bones is not in his tent. No one is. It’s completely empty.
I walk over to his desk, hoping to leave a note. There are a bunch of playing cards scattered across his desk, along with pictures of him grinning at different casinos. And then there’s his computer. Sitting there. Waiting for us.
I look up at the tent flap. We could risk it . . . I think we have enough time. . . .
“What are you doing?” Eliza says.
“Breaking into his computer.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
Eliza frowns. “I don’t see how this could be productive for our case. It’s not like we suspect Mr. Bones . . . do we?”
I shrug. “You never know what we’ll find on his computer. Maybe about him, or maybe about someone else. I wouldn’t discount anything. It’s all relevant to our case.” I stare at the playing cards again. “This could be crucial, for all you know. If only we can break in. . . .”
“Aren’t you the one always saying we shouldn’t anger the client? If Bones catches us, we’re done for.”
“Well, I think it’s only fair you do what I want since I did what you wanted this morning. Fair is fair.”
“Don’t talk to me about fair!” Eliza cries.
Mom looks between Eliza and me, concerned. “Okay, well, why don’t Carlos and Eliza do that, while Frank and I . . . um . . . keep guard up front?” Mom says, in a thinly veiled attempt to give Eliza and me alone time to work out our issues. Mom drags Frank outside, and I can hear him protesting through the flap.
Eliza sighs and puts her elbows on Bones’s desk. “For the record, I think this is a terrible idea.”
“Noted,” I say, rolling my eyes. And thanks for the confidence in me, I almost add. But I don’t.
Bones’s computer is password protected. I click on the password hint, and it tells me:
The blackjack hand closest to your heart, four cards, low to high, no faces, no aces, we’re off to the races.
Well, that doesn’t help us. Unless . . . I look at the pictures around Mr. Bones’s desk, the ones of him at gambling tables. One of them must be his favorite winning hand, if he has a picture of it in his office. Every card I see in the pictures, I take out of his deck of cards and lay it on his desk.
“Eliza, what’s blackjack?”
“It’s a game where you have to get your cards as close to twenty-one as possible without going over. But if you get twenty-one exactly, it’s a winning hand. Face cards are ten. Aces can be one or eleven, depending on what you need. It’s an interesting game.”
Twenty-one exactly, huh? I think Bones gave us enough clues to figure out his password.
* * *
IF YOU THINK THE FIRST THREE PLAYING CARDS ARE 2, 5, and 6, CLICK HERE.
IF YOU THINK THE FIRST THREE PLAYING CARDS ARE 4, 8, and 9, CLICK HERE.
TO ASK ELIZA FOR A HINT, CLICK HERE.
* * *
“WHY DOES EVERYONE keep calling the tunnels catacombs? Are there bones or bodies down there?”
