The Tell-Tale Start (12 page)

“What is it?” Uncle Jack asked.

The boys processed it, working backward. They substituted letters here and there for every word in every mysterious message they’d received. One ordinary brain would have taken hours to go through all the possibilities—but Edgar and Allan, working together, took mere seconds.

They turned pale when they realized that changing two letters under their old photo in the brochure turned a happy invitation into a dire warning: “Stay far away!” And worse, the “brilliant trip” to the farm was really a brilliant
trap
!

Edgar and Allan looked at each other.

Wasn’t this just about picking up the family cat from a kindhearted animal lover? Unless…

The boys remembered the poster of the sleeping kitten: “Beware the cat napping.” Remove a space and the two words become one:
catnapping.

Clear as moonlight.

Roderick Usher had been catnapped to lure Edgar and Allan to the Gale Farm, a trap from which they should stay far away!

But who wanted to trap them? And why?

Uncle Jack stood impatiently beside the driver’s side door. “Get in, boys. What’s wrong with you?”

Danger and deceit…That’s what was wrong.

But how to explain this to their aunt and uncle?

Even more pressing: what to do about it?

Edgar and Allan knew there was still time to persuade Uncle Jack to turn the car around and safely return home. (Even if he refused, they could always reprogram the car’s GPS at the next gas station and be halfway back to Baltimore before Uncle Jack realized he was driving in the wrong direction.) But what then would become of Roderick Usher? The boys would
never
abandon their best friend.

This journey, which had started as a mere retrieval of their cat, was now a full-blown rescue mission, requiring the boys to walk with eyes wide open into some kind of trap.

Hadn’t they always wanted to match wits against an opponent more formidable than their school principal?

“Why are you two acting so strange?” Aunt Judith asked with concern.

The boys looked at each other. They knew that the disconnected brains of Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith didn’t work as fast as their own. So how to make them understand? Or might their guardians, natural worriers, be better off not knowing? Worry only made things more difficult. Besides, how truly dangerous could a villain be whose lair was a broken-down
Wizard of Oz
amusement park?

“Oh, nothing to fret over,” Edgar and Allan said in unison.

The gravel road that led from the highway to the Gale Farm and OZitorium twisted into a dense cornfield,
winding among eight-foot-high stalks until soon all that was visible from within the car were walls of corn.

“It’s like being in a maze,” Edgar said nervously.

“Maize,” Aunt Judith remarked, turning and grinning at them. “We’re in a maze of maize. You know, M-A-I-Z-E? The Native American word for corn. It’s a pun. Do you get it, boys?”

Of course they got it. But that didn’t mean they thought it was funny. Still, Aunt Judith had given it her best shot. So they forced crooked smiles.

She beamed.

Soon the stalks thinned, and the road led out of the maize to a dusty lot where a few cars were parked beside two buses.

Uncle Jack pulled in. “All right, boys. Let’s find this professor, get your cat, and start back home again.”

Edgar and Allan nodded, though they doubted it was going to be quite that simple.

At the emerald-green ticket booth, Uncle Jack grinned widely when a clerk in a funny hat told him the professor had left them free passes. However, the smile faded when the clerk added that the professor was currently “indisposed” and that they should all just “enjoy the park for a couple hours until his schedule cleared.”

“After all the miles we’ve traveled he’s too busy to see us?” Uncle Jack said incredulously.

The clerk shrugged, helpless. “Don’t worry, sir. He’ll track you down in no time. You’re his special guests.”

The twins didn’t like the sound of “track down.”

“It’ll be OK, Jack,” Aunt Judith reassured, patting his arm. “Let’s go in.”

He turned to her, still put out. “Who does he think we are? His Munchkins?”

“I’m sure it’ll be fun,” she said, leading him toward the entrance.

The boys weren’t sure
what
it was going to be.

Inside the front gate, a cracked cement sidewalk had been painted to look like the Yellow Brick Road. Hedged on either side by tall cornstalks, the path branched in two directions. A signpost pointed one way toward the Authentic Gale Farmhouse, and in the other direction toward the OZitorium.

There were very few other tourists around.

And oddly—particularly for a sunny Saturday—there were no children.

Instead, they were either old folks wearing wide-brimmed sun hats or middle-aged couples dressed in embarrassing colors (or worse, in husband-wife matching
outfits). An amusement park with no kids? The boys wondered if this was a sign of danger or just characteristic of
any
crummy roadside attraction.

“This is a strange place for a professor to call home,” Aunt Judith observed.

“Not if he’s a strange professor,” said Edgar, his tone a bit suspicious.

“Or a professor of the strange,” Allan added.

Uncle Jack gave the boys a funny look.

“Maybe he’s in the farmhouse,” their aunt suggested reasonably.

Uncle Jack nodded and started in that direction.

The other three Poes followed.

They rounded a corner and arrived at the crest of the hill.

From there, they could see the farm, which looked like any abandoned, broken-down, century-old place, only worse. The barn consisted of a small forest’s worth of rotting wood piled haphazardly within the boundaries of a barely recognizable barn-shaped frame; the pigpens were empty; the water tower leaked; and the farmhouse was nothing more than a collapsed pile of splintered wood, roof shingles, and twisted metal bed frames and stovepipes. In short, the house looked exactly like what it claimed to be: a small wooden structure that had
been lifted off its foundations and into the air by a tornado and then dropped from a great height.
Crash!
It was hardly a house at all anymore.

A sign beside the wreckage read:

“That’s all there is to it?” Aunt Judith said.

Uncle Jack shook his head, disgruntled. “The professor must be at the OZitorium, whatever
that
is.”

The boys kept their eyes open for anything unusual or threatening as they retraced their steps and then took the other path, passing a souvenir stand that sold T-shirts, DVDs of
The Wizard of Oz
, paperback editions of the Oz books, snow globes, Toto dog leashes, and “authentic” Dorothy Gale sunglasses and cell-phone cases. They continued around a bend until they came to the OZitorium, which was just an ordinary-looking auditorium. A murmur of voices from inside resolved itself into music and singing as the Poe family drew nearer.

“
We’re off to see the Wizard, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz…
”

Aunt Judith smiled. “Oh, I do love a live show.”

A sign above the entrance to the OZitorium read:

At the entrance, the Poes were stopped by an attendant dressed like an old-time movie usher. He was as round as he was tall and wore a walkie-talkie holstered on his hip.

“Sorry,” he told them. “No one’s allowed inside after the show begins. Come back at three thirty. Until then, you can tour the authentic Gale Farm.”

“We already did,” Aunt Judith said.

“It took about two seconds,” Uncle Jack added dryly.

“Well, I don’t make the policy,” the attendant said, looking past them as if on guard against nonexistent battalions of gate crashers. “Now, why don’t you all just move along?”

“Look, we’re not actually here for the show,” Uncle Jack said. “We’re here to see the professor.”

“Yes, he found the boys’ lost cat,” Aunt Judith added.

The security guard’s eyes widened. He moved away from them, turned his back, and whispered into the walkie-talkie. The boys couldn’t really hear what he said, but they caught this much: “Poe twins.”

They didn’t wait around for more.

By the time the security guard turned back to the Poe family, saying, “It seems we’ve made special arrangements for you folks,” the boys had disappeared. He looked around, worried. “Hey, where’d they go?”

Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith had no idea.

WHAT THE POE TWINS DID NOT KNOW…