Lost Cipher (14 page)

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 Cipher 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.”

But even as he said it, a part of him still wondered if he'd become so desperate he'd believe anything about the treasure. But then he thought about returning to Indian Hole in less than a day, to a mountain that was going to disappear forever—the mountain his father had told him to look after. If the treasure was still buried somewhere on the old man's property, just a small part of it could save his mountain. And if it wasn't, if Creech already had it, then the old man was the only person he knew who might be able to help him. Either way, he had to see Creech again.

Lucas looked at his friend and added, “I got to, George.”

“Okay,” George replied, “so let's say there's a tiny little chance you're right. And I mean tiny. Even if I thought it was a good idea, how are you supposed to get back there? You're going home tomorrow morning.”

Lucas knew George was right. His grandma wasn't going to hear any more talk about treasure either. Once he got picked up from camp, he'd never get another chance at it. He stared down at his notes once more, and the letters stared back:
MOCC_S__, OAK.
Behind the cabin, he heard the sound of Aaron buzzing by on the four-wheeler.

“Then we go back by ourselves,” he said.

“Are you crazy? It took us three days last time!” said George. “And why do you keep saying
we
?”

“It took us three days to
walk
,” Lucas countered. “But we're not going to walk.”

All of a sudden it hit George. “You're going to steal the truck? You can't even drive!”

“You're right,” said Lucas. “I can't drive a truck. But I can drive a four-wheeler. Aaron's four-wheeler.”

The buzz of the four-wheeler had died to an idle as Aaron pulled it to a stop up the road. “And we're not stealing. We're
borrowing
.”

“Whoa,” said George. “That thing's only got room for one. And why would I go off and get lost with you again anyway?”

“It's got that little trailer on the back, George. You can ride in it.”

“No way!”

“C'mon, George. I need you to help me find my way back. Plus, I don't want to head up into Creech's place by myself.” He saw the fear enter the younger boy's eyes at the thought of facing the old man again. “Look, all we're going to do is talk to him one more time. We'll be back here before dark.”

George went quiet and paced across the cabin floor, shaking his head. “But what about dinner?” he finally blurted.

“I think that can be part of the plan,” replied Lucas, and then he worked out the rest of it.