Caching In (2 page)

I start to read.

CARLISLE, RICHARD CAMERON

Forty-eight-year-old Richard Carlisle lost his battle with cancer on March 26 at 3:00
pm
in the north wing of the Royal Jubilee Hospital. His loving daughter, Jane, was by his side.

Richard was born and raised in West Vancouver. After earning a degree in commerce at UBC, he took over the family business, moving the main office to Victoria.

Always up for a new adventure, Richard's favorite saying was “1, 2, 3—go!” His biggest challenge and greatest success was his company. At the time of his death, it was valued at over $19 million.

He was predeceased by his wife and parents and will be greatly missed by all who knew him. No service by request. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Tree of Life, 31 Richmond Road.

“So?” I say when I'm finished. “Do you remember how you know this guy?”

Chris's mouth hardens into a tight line, and he shakes his head.

“Maybe you heard his name on television or read it in the paper,” I suggest.

“The obituary says he was rich, so he's probably been in the news.”

He shakes his head again. “I don't think that's it.”

“Too bad there isn't a picture. That might help you remember.”

Chris holds out his hand for the obituary.

“What?” I snicker. “You think reading it yourself is going to make a difference?”

He doesn't even let on that he heard me. He just waggles his fingers for the obituary. I sigh and hand it over.

After a couple of minutes, he says, “What are the dates on the headstone?”

I look at the marker. “January 15, 1960, to March 4, 2012.”

Chris frowns. “That doesn't make any sense.”

“Why?”

“Well, it says here that Carlisle was forty-eight when he died.”

“So?”

He looks up from the obituary. “Do the math. If he was born in 1960 and he died in 2012, that would make him fifty-two,
not
forty-eight.”

I shrug. “Maybe the person who wrote the obituary isn't very good at subtraction, or the guy who engraved the headstone got the birthdate wrong.”

“The year he was born
and
the day he died? The obituary says Carlisle died on the twenty-sixth, and the headstone says the fourth. Another screwup? More bad math?” Chris looks back at the scrap of paper.

“So what are you saying?”

He rolls his eyes like he's explaining something to a two-year-old. “This is supposed to be a challenging cache, right?”

I nod.

“Well, if you ask me, so far it's been a bust. We followed the coordinates and found the cache. So where's the challenge in that? Unless—” he pauses for so long that I'm ready to stick my hand down his throat for the rest of the sentence “—the obituary is a clue to another cache.”

I scramble to my feet and read the notice again. If there's a clue in there, I sure don't see it.

“So what's the clue?” I demand.

Chris's face relaxes, and his eyes start to glitter. He looks like a cat that just ate every fish in the aquarium. He knows I'm dying of curiosity, and he's obviously getting a charge out of torturing me.

I punch him in the arm. “Get on with it, Einstein!”

He laughs, but at least he starts to explain. “I think the longitude and latitude coordinates for the next cache are hidden in the obituary. That's why Carlisle's age is wrong. Forty-eight is the first part of every latitude coordinate around Victoria. And that's why the date of death is wrong too. It needs to be the twenty-sixth because that's part of a coordinate.

“Here.” He whips his pen and a crumpled paper from his pocket and pushes them at me. “Let's read the obituary again. As we pick out the coordinates, you write them down.”

So we do. Once we know what we're looking for, it's easy.

“What have we got?” Chris asks when we're finished.

“Forty-eight degrees 26 minutes 3 seconds North, and 123 degrees 19 minutes 31 seconds West.”

“All right!” Chris grins and gives me a high five. “Plug those bad boys into the
GPS
and let's get going.” He starts jogging down the path toward our bikes.

“Wait,” I holler at him. “We have to put this cache back.”

He does a quick turnaround. “Oh, yeah. Right. I forgot.”

“
And,
since we broke the egg, we have to stick something of our own into the cache too.”

Chris lowers his head and squints at me. “That means we can take the obituary, right?”

“Yeah, but if we do, nobody else can get the next clue.”

Chris grins. “I know.”

I shake my head. “Where's the fun in that? We already have the lead, and you can take a picture of the obituary with your phone in case we need to look at it again.”

A scowl replaces the grin. “You know, Eric, you can be a real downer sometimes.”

“You're the one who wanted a challenge,” I remind him.

He doesn't say anything. How can he? I'm right.

“So,” I continue, “what are we going to stash in the cache? Your pen?”

“Forget it!” He snatches it from my hand and shoves it into his pocket. “Put something of
yours
in the cache.”

“Why? You're the one who broke the egg. Besides”—I start picking through my pockets—“the only thing I have is this ticket to last night's school dance.”

“Perfect,” Chris says, plucking the black-and-green strip from my fingers. “It's worth way more than that hollowed-out egg.” He checks the stamp on the back. “At least, it was before you used it.” Then his face lights up. “Maybe it'll confuse the next guys who find the cache. They won't know if the clue is the ticket or the obituary. They might end up at our school!” He finds the idea so funny that he chuckles the whole time he's stuffing the cache back inside the bouquet.

Chapter Three

Plugging longitude and latitude into the
GPS
is pretty much the same as punching in an address. A map appears on the screen, and the guy inside the
GPS
—we call our dude Merlin—gives us directions to our destination. He doesn't always pick the shortest route. If you're riding a bike, this can mean a lot of pedaling. It would be way better if he told us where we were supposed to go—say, the Inner Harbor or Beacon Hill Park. Even if he told us which part of town we were headed for, it would help. But he doesn't. We never know until we get there.

And even then, Merlin only takes us so far. It would be cool if he said the cache was behind a bench or inside a hollow log. But no. He hasn't been programmed for that little trick, so once we get close, Merlin signs off and Chris and I are on our own.

It's my
GPS
, so I lead the way—for the first half hour, anyway. But as soon as I wheel onto Richmond Road, Chris shoots past me and speeds away.

“Hey!” I holler after him. “Where are you going?”

“Where do you think?” he yells over his shoulder.

I have no clue, but Chris is already half a block ahead, so I have to pedal hard to catch up. The street is narrow, and there are parked cars on both sides, so we're pretty much riding in the middle of traffic. A couple of cars honk. Chris gives them the finger.

When we get to the light at Richmond Road and Bay Street, Chris swings into the turn lane. I look at the
GPS
mounted on my handlebars.

“In one hundred meters, turn left to destination,” Merlin says.

“Hmph,” I mumble in amazement as I follow Chris through the intersection.

And just like that, we're in the parking lot of the Royal Jubilee Hospital.

I brake and lower one foot to the pavement. “This is it.”

But Chris doesn't stop. He hangs another left and coasts down an incline and through the entrance to the parkade. I follow him.

We slide our bikes into the bike rack and lock them. “How did you know we were gonna end up at the hospital?” I say. “And how did you know these bike racks were here?”

He taps the side of his head with his finger. “Brains.”

“I'm serious, man.”

Chris frowns. “What? You think I'm not smart?”

“Yeah, you're a genius. Now answer the question.”

He shrugs. “I played a hunch. When you turned onto Richmond Road, I automatically thought, hospital. I mean, what other landmarks are on the street? Then I remembered the obituary. It said Carlisle died here. I figured it was a clue. As for the bike rack, I used it last summer when my grandfather was having surgery.”

I nod and glance around. “So where do we start looking?”

We head back into the sunshine and up to the main driveway.

Chris points to the shrubbery surrounding the parkade. “What about there?”

I shake my head. “I don't think so. There aren't any weeds. And the shrubs are all perfectly trimmed. The hospital obviously has a gardener. If the cache was hidden in there, he would have found it. Besides, cars are constantly whizzing up and down the road and turning into the hospital parking lot. Somebody would see us finding the cache—just like they would have seen whoever hid it.”

“Unless it was hidden in the middle of the night.”

I shoot Chris a dirty look. “If you're thinking what I think you're thinking, forget it. We're not coming back here later.”

“Fine,” he concedes grudgingly.

We take the crosswalk to a bench on the opposite sidewalk. As we flop down, I sigh and Chris boots a pebble.

“So now what?” he says. “It can't be in the middle of the road.”

I shake my head. “No.”

Even so, we both stare at the driveway as if the cache is going to magically pop out of the pavement. Gradually, my gaze shifts to the hospital. There's a sandwich place attached to it, and as a steady stream of people walks in and then out with subs, my stomach starts to growl. Lunch was hours ago.

Chris pulls out his phone and presses a few buttons.

“Tree of Life,” he mutters. There's a determination in his voice that makes me forget about sandwiches.

“What?”

“That's the clue.”

“What clue?”

“Look there.” He points to a sprawling tree a little to our left. It's not tall, but it's really wide, and its branches are all bent over. The leaves practically touch the ground. “What do you see?”

“A tree.”

“A tree of life?”

I feel my eyebrows dive into one another. “What are you talking about?”

He taps his phone. “The obituary said that instead of giving flowers, people should donate to the Tree of Life. So I did a search. There's a
Tree of Life
movie and a Tree of Life store. Why would the dead guy's family want people to donate to those? And there is nothing on Richmond Road. It's gotta be a clue.”

We stand up and head for the tree.

The dangling leaves form a thick, green, circular curtain. We push through, and suddenly the parkade, driveway and hospital disappear. We can't see out, and nobody can see in.

The tree looks ancient. The bark is black and cracked, and the branches are all knobbly and gnarled. If a tree can get arthritis, this one definitely has it.

“Hey, look!” Chris nudges me and points above our heads. “It's a knothole.”

I nod. “I see it. There's another one too—a couple of feet above that one. Do you think that's where the cache is?”

Chris takes a deep breath and steps up to the tree. “We'll soon find out.”

Like I said, the tree isn't tall, but Chris is, so he has no trouble reaching the lower knothole. When he stands on his toes, he can even feel inside.

I hold my breath as he gropes around.

“Well?” I say when he finally pulls his hand out.

He makes a face and wipes his hand on his jeans. “Nothin'. I should've known that was too easy.”

“But that's good, right? Less chance that anybody's found the cache yet. We'll be the first ones.”

Chris shakes his head. “Or not, since I can't reach that high, there are no branches to climb, and I don't seem to have a ladder.”

I ignore the sarcasm. “I can stand on your shoulders,” I say. I'm shorter than Chris and lighter too.

He doesn't answer right away. He hates it when somebody else comes up with an idea. Finally, he nods and mumbles, “It could work.” Then he crouches on his knees in front of the tree.

I hop onto his shoulders and grab the trunk as he stands up. The knothole is right at my eye level. And there's something inside—a metal tube with plastic caps on both ends. I reach in and grab it.

“I've got it!” I call down to Chris.

In a matter of seconds, I'm back on the ground, and the two of us are scrambling to get the tube open.

“It's a paper,” Chris announces as he fishes it out.

“Another clue, I bet.”

As he unrolls the paper, his eyes practically pop out of his head.

“What? What is it?” I demand, yanking on his arm so I can see too.

I blink a couple of times to make sure I'm not hallucinating. The paper is a handwritten letter. I have no idea what it says—not because it's in code or a foreign language or anything, but because all I can focus on is the fifty-dollar bill clipped to the top corner.

Chapter Four

“Is it real?” Chris asks.

“Do I look like a counterfeit expert?” I snort as I rub my fingers over the bill. It's new and smooth—not a wrinkle or rip anywhere. “Do
you
think it's real?”

Chris shrugs. “It could be fake, I guess, but why would somebody stick a bogus bill in a cache? It's not like they're gonna get change back.”

“Good point. Maybe we should look at the letter.”

Chris flips the bill up out of the way and starts to read while I look over his shoulder and follow along.