The Lost Cipher Page 14

  Maggie sensed them simmering. “Look, guys, I know what Zack did was idiotic and dangerous—and just plain mean. But put yourself in his shoes…”

  “I couldn’t afford his shoes,” said George.

  “You know what I’m saying,” Maggie said. “He just went through the same crisis you two did. His mother died, just like yours, George. Just like your father, Lucas. You both know what that was like. Even good kids can react to something like that in bad ways. To be honest, I wish we could have helped him more.”

  George wasn’t buying it at all. “If Zack’s a good kid, then I must be Jesus or something.”

  But Lucas recalled some of the things he’d done at camp himself, things that he never would have risked before his pa died. Like going after Zack, right in front of the counselors. Or the whole plot to embarrass him on the zip line, even if it meant fighting with him, maybe even getting kicked out of the camp. And sneaking away to the cave. Even the way he talked to Creech in the store and up in the hollow, and sneaked around his house in the middle of the night. He’d done those things because he just didn’t care what happened. Or what anyone thought of him.

  He’d never been like that before the accident. It spooked him, thinking he could become a different person so quickly. Suddenly he didn’t want to think about Zack anymore.

  “So how come you know Mr. Creech so well?” George asked. “I thought he was supposed to be some kind of scary, old hermit. And you even kissed him.”

  “Oh, he’s definitely a hermit,” she replied with a smile. “But not too scary to me. We actually go way back. I even help him out every once in a while. I mean, we are neighbors in a way. It’s just not something he wants me to spread around. In fact, that was the first time I’ve ever been up to his place with anybody but Aaron.”

  “In town they say he’s crazy,” said Lucas.

  “So you heard about him in town, huh?” She shook her head and sighed. “I can only imagine.”

  Lucas shrugged. “He doesn’t seem crazy to me.” He pictured Creech stalking around the house in the dark. Maybe not crazy but a little creepy.

  “He’s not. He just wants everyone to think he is. Crazy and mean. If you spent the night with him, you probably got the whole act. And believe me, it’s just an act.”

  “Why?” George asked.

  “Oh,” she sighed, “just to keep everyone away, I guess.” She sounded like she was tired of the old man’s act herself. “He wants to be left alone. He likes it that way. Says all he needs is his old house in Moccasin Hollow to make him happy. And you know, I believe him. It’s like a sanctuary to him, the quiet up there, in the forest and up on the mountain—and his creek and his orchard.”

  Lucas knew exactly what she meant. But at least the old man gets to keep his mountain.

  Maggie maneuvered the truck around a section of broken road, smiling and shaking her head, like she knew something else about Creech. But she also seemed a little sad when she talked about the old man.

  “He figures if he acts like a mean old coot, no one will ever bother him. Especially treasure hunters. They’re always wanting to get on his property.”

  “Is that because he’s related to the old innkeeper?” Lucas probed.

  She kept her eyes on the road, but he saw her surprise. “How would you know that?” she asked.

  “It was on a gravestone up there. I just asked him. He said Morris was like his great-great-great grandfather.”

  “One more ‘great’ actually. And I’m surprised he talked about it with you. That legend is a real sore subject with him.”

  “Do you really think it’s just a legend?” Lucas asked her.

  “I guess no one knows for sure. But if Mr. Creech knew anything about it, he’d be the last one to say. He doesn’t have much use for money, and he doesn’t care for greedy people, especially the trespassing kind.”

  “But how does he know that everyone who wants the treasure is just greedy?” Lucas asked. “Maybe someone would do something good with it, something that needs to be done.”

  Maggie turned to him. “What would you do with it, Lucas?”

  He wasn’t about to tell her about his mountain. “I don’t know. I just know not everybody with money has to be greedy about it.”

  “You mean like Zack?” George muttered.

  A few minutes later, the pickup crunched to a stop in front of the office. Inside, they found Aaron at a computer behind the front desk. Maggie walked up and tossed her pack onto the counter.

  “Treasure hunting,” she said to her brother. “They saw a cave up in the Preacher Rocks and just had to check it out.”

  “What did I tell you?” Aaron said angrily. “That’s exactly why we don’t tell the story to the campers. All it takes is one kid to wander off and get hurt, and we’re shut down for good.”

  “Well, Alex accomplished the getting hurt part—snakebite and probably a broken ankle,” she reported. “In fact, I’m going to the hospital right now. Walk with me out to the truck. We need to talk.”

  Maggie held the door open, and Aaron came out from behind the desk. Before she left, she grabbed another pack leaning against the wall and slung one strap over her shoulder. It was Alex’s.

  The other two packs were there too, scuffed up some, but Lucas was relieved to see the patch across the back of his, his pa’s name, still intact. He and George shouldered the packs and headed outside, where Maggie and Aaron were leaning against the camp’s truck, talking quietly.

  It wasn’t until he and George turned out of the little parking lot onto the loop road that they saw the big luxury car parked behind Cabin Four. The same driver from the weekend before was loading Zack’s gear into the trunk.

  Lucas and George stopped in their tracks for a second before Lucas said, “C’mon,” and started walking. “Let me do the talking,” he added.

  They were ten feet from the cabin when Zack came out the back and saw them. Lucas expected him to laugh at them and make some snarky comment, like something about what the cat dragged in. Lucas was ready to drop his pack and charge him when he did.

  But instead, Zack went straight to the car and opened the passenger door. He sat down heavily, slammed the door, and buried his face in his hands. Lucas stopped beside Zack’s window and stared in through the tinted glass. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought the boy was crying. George saw it too and gave Lucas a wide-eyed shrug. There was nothing they could say even if they wanted to. They turned to go inside, but the driver’s voice caught them.

  “You the kids who got lost?”

  “With a lot of help from him, yeah,” Lucas said.

  “That’s what I heard. Look, it probably doesn’t mean much after what you went through, but the kid is pretty sorry for it. He just doesn’t have the backbone right now to tell you himself.”

  Lucas didn’t doubt it. Not anymore. But somehow he didn’t think that’s what the tears were all about. He knew that in a day he’d be in the exact same shoes as Zack, going home to a different world, one that was missing the most important person in his life. And no amount of money would change that.

  CHAPTER 28

  Inside the cabin, Alex’s bunk was bare, the mattress already stripped. The sight of it reminded Lucas that he’d probably never see his new friend again. They dropped their packs on the floor, and Lucas collapsed onto his bunk. He didn’t care what George did. He only wanted sleep, and it came almost as soon as he shut his eyes.

  Lucas dreamed of a deep forest cut by a tiny stream. Below each little rapid, the water settled into a clear pool where thousands of tiny trout hovered. An old man came through the trees, a faceless stranger who became Gideon Creech. He leaned his shotgun against a tree and waded into the creek, morphing into a panther as he touched the water. The panther slunk through the pools, scooping out the trout and tossing them up onto the mossy rocks along the creek. When
each little fish flopped onto the rocks, it became a shiny nugget of gold.

  In the dream, Lucas scrambled to catch them, but each time he lunged for one, it morphed back into a slippery trout and wriggled out of his grasp. Finally he waded into the pool himself, but before he could capture a fish of his own, he awoke to sound of their screen door slamming.

  “Sorry, Lucas,” whispered George sheepishly. “I was trying to be quiet.”

  “George,” Lucas replied groggily. “Where’d you go?”

  “Lunch, man, you missed it. It’s like we’re some kind of celebrities or something for getting lost.”

  “Great. What time is it?” asked Lucas, propping himself on an elbow. He wasn’t even sure what day it was anymore.

  George glanced at his oversized watch and pushed a button. “Five after two,” he answered. “They said your grandma was up at the office a little while ago. I guess she checked in on you. Twice. But you were dead asleep both times. Guess she decided to let you sleep. They told me to tell you they got her a hotel room in town, and she’d be here at the pickup time tomorrow morning.”

  Lucas was sorry he’d missed his grandma, especially with so much to tell her. But now that he remembered he was down to his last afternoon at camp, he didn’t want to waste it.

  George was thinking the same thing. “I don’t know about you, but I’m heading out to the lake. They’ve got the zip line going again, and I never did get a real turn at it, thanks to Zack. You think he was really sorry?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Lucas replied, still wishing he’d at least heard the words from Zack himself.

  “You coming?”

  Lucas realized he was still wearing his jeans from the past three days, and they were filthy. He sat up on the edge of the bunk. “Yeah, but I gotta put on something I can swim in. I’ll meet you at the top of the zip line.”

  “No problem,” said George, pulling off his shirt and grabbing a towel. “Just follow the sound of my screaming fans.”

  Lucas watched him bound out onto the porch and down the steps, his pale belly jiggling. He got up from the bunk, riffled through his extra clothes stacked in the closet, and found a pair of shorts.

  Out of habit, he emptied the pockets of his jeans before taking them off. In one, he felt the crunch of paper, and it took him a second to remember he still had the page from the old poetry book. He pulled it out gently, and began carefully smoothing out the folds. He figured he’d tell Maggie about it tonight. The way she’d handled Creech this morning, at least she wouldn’t be afraid to take it back to him.

  He was just about to toss the page on his bunk when he saw the numbers.

  Even in the moonlight streaming into Creech’s parlor, he hadn’t seen them. But now, in the daylight, they were there. Tiny numbers scrawled above every line of Annie Morris’s handwritten words.

  He read the poem’s title—“Heaven”—and studied her handwriting. The numbers above the words were definitely in someone else’s hand, not Annie’s. Lucas counted ten words between each numbered one.

  Someone had used the book to make a code. Or someone else had used it to try and break one. Had Creech tried to break the codes using his ancestor’s book?

  Maggie’s words from the other night, when she’d told the treasure story, came back to him: So rare that maybe there’s only one in the whole world.

  She’d said the key to Beale’s other ciphers might be something so rare, there was only one ever written. Something small and simple. Something like a little book of poems.

  There couldn’t be another copy. And Annie Morris grew up in the same inn where Beale had stayed for two winters.

  Frantically, Lucas fished the paper bag from the market out of the little trash can next to his bunk. Inside he found the crumpled brochure his grandma had put in with his toothpaste. The clerk had said the codes were inside, and when Lucas opened the brochure, he saw all three ciphers. They were long lists of numbers, each with its own title.

  Cipher Number One: The Location of the Vault.

  Cipher Number Two: The Contents of the Vault.

  This one had the same translation Maggie had read to them at the campfire, the one using the Declaration of Independence.

  Cipher Number Three: Names and Residences.

  Desperately, Lucas dug through his daypack for something to write with and came up with a stubby pencil. Outside, the shouts from the lake told him the fun on the zip line had started. He’d have to miss it.

  With the pencil, he circled all the numbers in the first cipher between 335 and 435, the range of the words in the single poem he had. In the cipher, the numbers ranged from single digits to the high hundreds. If the book of poems really was the key, he had only a small part. Better than nothing.

  He went back through Beale’s list of numbers twice to make sure he hadn’t missed any. When he was done, he paused to stare at the circled numbers in the first cipher, wondering if his little poem would be enough to turn any of them into words.

  He needed paper.

  He’d removed his school notebooks from his daypack before the trip, so he began rummaging through George’s backpack. Buried in one of the side pockets, carefully sealed in a plastic bag, he found his roommate’s cherished roll of toilet paper. Only about a third of the roll was left, but he wouldn’t need much. He unrolled a strip of the paper and began making notes.

  Some of the circled numbers stood alone in the key. He ignored these. Single, random letters wouldn’t help him.

  Others were in pairs or threes. At first these only produced hopeless pairs of consonants like “L-N” or “W-T.” But one string of three numbers formed “E-A-S,” and Lucas wondered if this was the beginning of “EAST,” the kind of word you’d see in the directions to a buried treasure.

  There were only a few places in the codes where more than three numbers in a row fell within the range of the numbers in his poem. After a few of the shorter strings, he skipped to these.

  The first that he tried, a four-number combination, produced “M-A-R-Y.” That made no sense. How could a lady’s name lead to a vault full of gold and silver?

  Lucas tried another combination, four numbers in a row again, but only got “L-L-S-I,” a string of letters that meant nothing to him.

  He tried the final series of four numbers. The string was “428-380-411-386,” followed by a “58,” a number he didn’t have, and then “377.”

  The first four numbers produced “M-O-C-C.” Lucas spoke the sound out loud. Only one word came to mind.

  Moccasin.

  Like Moccasin Hollow. Was the treasure buried somewhere in Creech’s snake-filled hollow?

  He skipped to the number 377. “Silence.” An S. Leaving a blank for the fifty-eighth word, it gave him “MOCC_S.”

  It fit. Moccasin worked.

  In the cipher’s next-to-last line, he found a 404, a 409, and a 374 together. The three corresponding words from Annie’s poem were “on,” “ancient,” and “keep.” An O, an A, and a K.

  Oak.

  Suddenly Lucas Whitlatch had a pretty good idea where the treasure of Thomas Jefferson Beale lay buried.

  CHAPTER 29

  Just then George bounded up onto the porch and through the screen door, a towel wrapped around his shoulders, his wet hair matted to his freckled forehead.

  “Hey, I thought you were zip-lining with me. What are you doing? Why are you smiling at me like that?” Then his mouth dropped open. “Hey! That’s my toilet paper!”

  “We have to go back,” said Lucas.

  “Sorry, dude, you missed your chance,” said George. “They just shut it down for the day.”

  “Not the zip line, George. Back to Creech’s farm.”

  George was dumbstruck. “Are you insane?”

  Lucas held up the strip of toilet paper he’d used to jot down the few decoded words from Ciph
er One. “It’s the treasure, George.”

  “Uh, Lucas, that’s toilet paper,” replied the younger boy, now certain that his friend had gone crazy. “I mean, it’s awful important to me and all, but I wouldn’t exactly call it treasure.”

  “No, you idiot,” exclaimed Lucas, “not the toilet paper. The words!”

  He quickly but calmly explained how Creech had retrieved the box in the middle of the night and how he himself had ended up with a page from Annie Morris’s book. Then Lucas showed George the copy of the ciphers from the store and the notes he’d made while decoding Cipher One with the poem.

  “That treasure is somewhere on that farm, and it’s gotta be near the old oak tree, maybe right under it,” Lucas concluded. “I mean, why else would it say moccasin and oak right at the end of the code? If you’re following the directions, that’s where you’re supposed to end up.”

  George had listened intently. He fingered the page from the old book and held it up toward Lucas.

  “But if this book already has numbers in it, Mr. Creech must know it was used for a code. Wouldn’t he have the treasure by now?”

  “I already thought about that,” replied Lucas. “If he does, where is it? I mean, does he look like a millionaire to you?”

  “I don’t know, Lucas,” said George, looking at the page again. “Maybe someone else used this book and found it a long time ago.”

  “There ain’t nobody but Creech and his kin who could’ve even seen that book. It’s like Maggie said; it’s one of a kind.”

  George pondered that for a few seconds “Okay, then one of his old relatives found it, and it’s long gone.”

  “I thought about that too, and it don’t make any sense. I mean, if he found the treasure, why wouldn’t Mr. Creech tell everybody? Why’s he keep saying the story’s a fake? I mean, he could just tell everybody the treasure’s been found, show ’em some kind of evidence, and then everybody’d leave him alone like he wants. I’m tellin’ you, George, that treasure is still sittin’ in the ground somewhere near that oak tree. Either that or Mr. Creech knows a lot more about it than he’s tellin’ us. Either way, I aim to find out.”