The Lost Cipher Read online

  Sarah shook her head. “No, we don’t have any moonshiners left around here,” she whispered. “They’re just trespassing on camp property, that’s all.”

  “What’s Aaron going to do to them?” asked a girl behind Lucas.

  Before Sarah could answer, they heard shouting from back in the forest where the counselors had gone. It was Aaron. They could hear his angry words, but not what the trespassers were saying.

  “No, you’re on private property!… Sorry or not, I’ll be calling the sheriff!”

  One of the men said something Lucas couldn’t make out, but Aaron’s response was loud and clear.

  “And you’re wasting your time! We’ve got holes all over this county because of people like you, and not one of them ever had anything in it but dirt. Just go!”

  The hikers heard the snapping of branches as Aaron and Rooster made their way back to the trail. Plowing angrily through the woods, Aaron looked at Sarah and said, “Just more treasure-hunting idiots. Let’s get these kids back to camp.” He stormed off down the trail, and the campers had to hurry to catch up.

  “Treasure?” George raised his eyebrows.

  “I heard somethin’ about it yesterday,” Lucas told the others. “Some guy in a store near here said it was millions in gold and silver. Had somethin’ to do with secret codes. ’Course there’s always treasure stories like that in these parts. Ain’t none of ’em ever true.”

  “I don’t know,” replied Alex. “Those guys must have had some reason to hike all the way up here and dig a hole in the middle of nowhere.”

  They hadn’t noticed Zack closing in behind them on the trail. But he’d been listening in on their conversation. Passing them, he looked Lucas straight in the eye.

  “Stupid hillbillies,” he said, grinning. “Probably so poor they’d do anything for money.” He kept smiling and looking back, hoping for a reaction out of Lucas, but Lucas just let him pass. He wouldn’t let Zack goad him into a fight. Not here at least.

  A half mile later, Aaron finally slowed his angry pace. He began drifting back along the line of campers, letting them know that the encounter with the treasure hunters was nothing to worry about, and that he probably wouldn’t even call the sheriff. Still, Lucas could tell Aaron was bothered by the trespassing strangers who had interrupted their hike.

  “What were they looking for?” he asked tentatively when Aaron came up beside them.

  “Oh, just an old legend. They won’t find anything.”

  “How do you know?” asked Alex.

  Aaron didn’t answer at first. He stopped at a heavy tree branch that had fallen across the trail and waited for the rest of the group to negotiate their way over it. “You guys help me with this,” he said, and the four of them lifted the branch to the side of the trail. Brushing the dirt from his hands, he turned to the boys.

  “I tell you what,” he said. “I think we’ll answer everybody’s treasure questions tonight.”

  CHAPTER 9

  That evening, with the valley in deep shadow and the last of the sunset sky turning to twilight, the campers gathered around the central fire ring. While Maggie made sure the fire caught, Aaron went over the next day’s plans. They would head off on a backpacking trip and spend two nights camping out.

  “Our camp land is surrounded by a big roadless area on two sides,” he explained. “The Preacher Rocks Wilderness. By hiking a loop through it, we can do a nice three-day trip.”

  Everyone there already knew the backpacking trip was on the week’s schedule, but a few of the campers still groaned about lugging heavy packs and leaving their real beds behind.

  Aaron ignored the complainers. “The rules of the wilderness area say we can’t have more than fifteen in one group. So that means the girls will head out in one direction on the loop, and the boys will go the opposite way. Somewhere on the second day, we’ll pass each other. And seeing as we’re doing the trip in the middle of the week when everybody else is working, that’ll probably be the only time we’ll see anyone else.”

  A lot of the campers had questions, and by the time Aaron finished answering them, Maggie had the fire blazing. She sat down among the campers and spoke above their chatter.

  “Listen up, everyone.” She looked across the fire at her brother. “I understand you ran into some treasure hunters today, and Aaron says some of you have questions about our little treasure legend. So I guess that will have to be our story tonight.”

  “But,” her brother chimed in, “if we tell this story, you all have to promise us one thing—nobody gets gold fever.”

  “What’s that?” asked a lanky boy sitting next to Lucas.

  “It means no one goes crazy and wanders off thinking they’re going to find an imaginary treasure. You do that, and there’s a way better chance you’ll end up lost or hurt or dead.”

  “Are you kidding?” Zack piped up. “Maybe if you’re totally desperate for money.” He was just sitting down with the group, late from his kitchen duty. He aimed the comment across the fire at Lucas. For a second, Lucas caught his eye and glared back.

  Aaron shot Zack a look too before addressing the group again. “So do we have a deal?”

  The campers nodded and muttered in agreement.

  But Aaron hesitated and looked up at the black ridges silhouetted against the twilight, like the mountains themselves might be listening. “You know, Maggie, we really aren’t supposed to tell them about the treasure.”

  “Oh, come on, Aaron. Stop being so creepy about it. I’ll tell it if you won’t.” She stared into the fire, searching for the right place to begin.

  “So, there used to be a little crossroads town called Buford’s down at the foot of these mountains. In the winter of 1820, a stranger named Thomas Jefferson Beale walked into the town’s inn. The owner, a guy named Robert Morris, didn’t know exactly where Beale was from, only he was a Virginian. He described him as tall and strong, with a dark tan, like he’d spent a lot of time somewhere in the sun. He also said Beale was a real lady’s man.”

  “I can relate,” interrupted George. A couple of the girls groaned.

  Maggie continued. “Beale stayed at Morris’s inn for the whole winter and left with some other men from Virginia in the spring, supposedly to hunt buffalo and grizzly bear out west on the Great Plains. Morris pretty much forgot about him. But two years later, Beale was back at the inn for another winter. By then, he’d learned of Morris’s reputation as one of the most trustworthy men in this part of the state. So this time, Beale left something behind—a small, locked box—and he made Morris promise to keep it safe until he returned. And Morris did just what he promised. He locked the box away in a safe place and kept it a secret, even from his own family.

  “Morris only heard from Beale one more time, in a letter from St. Louis two months later. Beale wrote that he was off again to hunt out west and that he wouldn’t return for another two years. He told Morris that the box contained important papers and losing them would cost Beale and his men a lot of money. He also told Morris that the papers were written in code and that if he didn’t return on schedule, a friend of Beale’s would bring him the key, and Morris would be able to decipher them.”

  “So what happened?” asked a girl sitting next to Maggie. “Did he ever come back?”

  “Nope,” replied Maggie. “No one ever saw Beale or any of his men again. If the story is even true, they probably got lost in a blizzard or killed by Indians or something.”

  “So did the dude finally crack open the box?” Zack asked impatiently.

  “Well,” she said, “the friend with the key to the code never showed up like Beale promised. Finally, after waiting for years, Morris opened the box. What he found inside was a puzzle that tortured him for the rest of his life.”

  She poked at the fire with a long, charred stick, letting her words hang over the circle of campers for effect.
Some of the kids finally urged her on and she continued.

  “Three of the papers inside were the codes that Beale had described. Long sets of numbers. But each one had a title to tell what would be revealed if they were decoded—one gave directions to a secret vault in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the second described the treasure it held, and the third listed the names of Beale’s men and where they lived in Virginia, so that the treasure could be given to their families if they never returned. In the other papers, Beale wrote the story of how he and his men had found gold and silver in a hidden canyon at the foot of the Rockies and mined it for close to four years. And how they’d made two separate trips back to Virginia to hide it in the mountains.” She swept her hand across the skyline. “Supposedly, these mountains right here.”

  “Or so the story goes.” Aaron stood up to throw another log on the fire. “Remember, you all, it’s just a story.”

  “Sorry, Aaron,” she replied. “Sometimes even I forget that. So anyway, now Morris was finally seeing what was inside Beale’s secret box. The papers also told him that because he’d been trusted with the box and the treasure, Morris was also supposed to get an equal share.”

  “But everything was in code,” said Alex.

  “Right,” she replied. “Without the key, he worked at it for years before he finally figured out one of the three ciphers—the one describing the treasure itself. The key for that one was the Declaration of Independence.”

  “Makes sense,” said a girl next to Maggie. “Beale was named after Thomas Jefferson.”

  “Yeah, but how’d it work?” George asked.

  “Pretty simple once you have the key. You start by numbering each word of the Declaration. Each of the numbers in the cipher match a word in the Declaration. So, say, the third number in the cipher is fifty-six, you look for the fifty-sixth word in the Declaration. If it started with a J, you plug a J into the cipher. Stick a bunch of letters together, you get words. When Morris did it with the second cipher, it spelled out what was in the treasure.”

  She stopped, working up the suspense until the campers were begging her to tell them what the cipher said.

  “Oh,” she answered, as if the treasure wasn’t much, “only about two tons of gold and almost six tons of silver. Not to mention some jewels that Beale traded for on his way back to Virginia.”

  “Jeez! Two tons of gold!” shouted a boy across the fire from Lucas. But he looked puzzled. “How much would that be worth, anyway?”

  “Duh, like, millions of bucks,” jeered Zack.

  “Actually, Zack, more like a hundred million today, and that’s just the gold,” said Maggie. “There’s the silver and the jewels too. Anyway, the cipher said more.” She took a folded sheet of paper from her back pocket and read. “‘The above is securely packed in iron pots with iron covers. The vault is roughly lined with stones and the vessels rest on solid stone and are covered with others.’” She looked up at the campers. “And here’s the most important part: ‘Paper number one’—that’s the first cipher—‘describes the exact locality of the vault so that no difficulty will be had in finding it.’

  “Supposedly not far from this camp. Supposedly.” She folded the paper and slipped it back in her pocket. “Morris died before he could figure out the other two codes, including the one that told where the treasure was hidden. He eventually sold them to a printer he knew, but the printer didn’t have any better luck, so he printed up a little story about the treasure complete with the codes and sold it to anyone who was interested. That’s why it’s not a secret anymore.”

  “And that’s why we have treasure hunters in our woods,” added Aaron.

  Maggie continued. “Yeah, ever since then, people have either been trying to break the other two codes or just hoping to find the treasure with a metal detector and some dumb luck. Some of world’s best code breakers have even taken a crack at the codes. But even using supercomputers, no one’s ever had any luck breaking them. Some think it’s because the document Beale used for the other key is something really rare, just the opposite of something famous like the Declaration of Independence. Something small and simple. So rare that maybe there’s only one copy in the whole world.”

  Maggie let the story sink in. Aaron got up again to tend the fire. As he did, Zack stood and began walking toward the bathhouse.

  “Are you leaving us, Zack?” asked Maggie.

  “Just need to go to the restroom, if that’s okay,” he said.

  Lucas immediately wondered if the older boy was up to something. He glanced over at George and Alex, who had the same look of suspicion on their faces.

  Aaron watched Zack walk toward the bathhouse before continuing the treasure story. “Of course,” he said, “most people around here, including me, figure there’s a simpler explanation. We figure the whole thing is a fancy hoax.

  “The treasure hunters who come around with metal detectors usually only succeed in trespassing or getting lost. There are caves in these mountains that probably no one has ever explored. Perfect places for a fool with gold fever to get lost in. And since we’ve got the biggest piece of private property around here by far, we get more than our share of treasure hunters, like the two today. The ones we catch, they generally get off with just a warning. But according to stories we’ve heard, a lot worse happens to some.”

  George laughed. “Sure, Aaron. Or maybe you’re just trying to scare us.”

  Other campers smiled and nodded, but Aaron wasn’t smiling.

  “I wouldn’t joke about it,” he said. “Folks really have gotten shot. And others have supposedly headed down into the hollows around here and not come back. There’s one old man who lives down the mountain from us—”

  “Aaron, stop.” Maggie laughed nervously, but he ignored her.

  “Let’s just say you wouldn’t want to be caught treasure hunting on his property. They say he catches copperheads—the poisonous snakes we have around here—and lets them loose on his land. The snakes like to hang out under rocks—same places the treasure hunters like to poke around. Folks in town won’t go near his property, and not just because of the snakes either.”

  “Okay, Aaron, don’t make this into a ghost story. Listen, guys,” Maggie said to the group, “it’s true a few people have vanished around here, but that’s got nothing to do with our neighbors. The mountains can just be a little dangerous if you don’t know your way around. That’s why no one’s going off on any crazy treasure hunts.” She raised her voice a little. “Right?”

  “Right,” the campers mumbled back.

  “Great. Now go pack up and get a good night’s sleep. And make sure you shower before breakfast. It’ll be your last one for almost three days. We want to at least try to smell better than the bears.”

  Before Lucas rose from the fire, he noticed that Zack had not returned. Lucas followed Alex and George to their cabin, still wondering what the older boy could be plotting.

  CHAPTER 10

  When the three boys entered Cabin One, they knew.

  A pile of clothes and gear, all of them Lucas’s, lay scattered in the middle of the cabin floor. The backpack that had held them—his father’s pack—was gone.

  “We gotta go tell Maggie,” Alex said.

  “No,” said Lucas sharply. “We find it first. Then we’ll figure out what to do about Zack.”

  They headed down the lawn straight for Zack’s cabin, but when they peeked in his window, he was nowhere to be found. Probably watching us from somewhere, thought Lucas. He thought about yelling out and demanding to know where the pack was but knew that was only what Zack wanted. And there was no way Zack would give up the pack that easily.

  They checked the boys’ side of the bathhouse next. Lucas half expected to find his pack stuffed in a toilet, but they were all empty, except for one stall occupied by a pair of legs that didn’t belong to Zack.

  Outside, the
y checked inside all the canoes and kayaks, but there was still no sign of the pack. Lucas stared out at the water, wondering if Zack had just tossed the pack into the lake, where it might never be found again. Alex and George scanned the water too, obviously thinking the same.

  Just then Alex spied something dangling from the zip line, well out over the water.

  “Look!” he said in a hushed voice, like he thought Zack might be watching from somewhere close.

  Lucas climbed up the zip line platform to get a closer look. Sure enough, a pack was dangling from the harness, which had been pushed a good hundred feet out over the lake.

  Lucas immediately started hauling himself out along the cable, hand over hand.

  “Whoa, Lucas,” said Alex, “what are you doing?”

  “What’s it look like?” he grunted angrily. “I’m goin’ out to get it.”

  “You’ll never make it,” said George. “It’s way too far out.”

  Lucas’s shoulders tired quickly, so he swung himself a little until he could wrap his legs around the greasy cable and take some of the weight off his arms. He already figured the pack hanging out over the lake was his pa’s—what else could it be?—and nothing was going to keep him from getting it back.

  By the time he got close enough to recognize the camouflage, his lungs were burning and his shoulders felt like they might pop out of the sockets. He barely had enough energy to hook his legs over the cable for one more rest. When he did, he still couldn’t hold on with his aching arms, so he dangled upside down for a while to rest them.

  “Jeez,” he heard George yell. “Hang on.”

  “It’s just water, George,” he yelled back. “And I ain’t nearly as high up as you were.” He wondered if they’d attracted Zack’s attention by now. He imagined the older boy’s face pressed up against his cabin window, getting a good laugh at him hanging over the lake in the moonlight.

  “Just don’t let go, Lucas!” said Alex.

  When Lucas finally reached the pack, he realized he’d never make it back using his arms. Instead he pulled the pack from the zip line harness and draped it over the cable long enough to get his legs partly through the harness’s leg holes. He reached up and pulled down the pack from the cable just as the harness began moving on its wheels back toward the shore. With the harness only halfway on, he had to hang on to the T-bar to keep from flipping upside down, but he managed to stay upright and hold on to the pack with his free hand as gravity slowly reeled him back to the platform. Twenty feet from the platform, his momentum stopped, and he had to pull himself along the cable with one hand to make it all the way.