The Case That Time Forgot (10 page)

They went down the stairs with Karim. “It's pretty bright down here,” Xander said, and Karim held the paper up to the light.

“Nothing.” He passed it to them and they checked it out. He was right.

“Can I borrow it?” Xena asked. “We'll take it by the SPFD and see if someone there can find something. Whatever it was must have faded.”

Karim handed her the envelope just as his train came in. Xena and Xander waved good-bye and were turning to go when Xena, who was looking at the map, said, “Look, Xander—we're not far from the British Museum. Let's go look at that stone on our way. Maybe there's something like these marks on it!”

“But I want to figure out who that other person was—the one who got to the pub ahead of us!” Xander protested.

“We can't split up. You can't take the Tube alone, and I think it's more important to figure out the clue. We don't have anything to go on with that other person—just that it's a boy with brown hair. That could be lots of people!”

They cut through the park in Russell Square, dodging pigeons as they went, and entered the British Museum. The Rosetta Stone stood in its case right near the entrance. It was a large, dark gray slab covered with tiny writing in three different languages. Not one of them looked anything like the marks on their paper.

Once again they had to step aside when a tour group came by. The guide told the tourists about the stone and how it had been used to decipher hieroglyphs. “The first complete English translation of the Egyptian portion of the text was made in 1858, but today most people prefer the later work of Fotheringale and Smythe, two young scholars at Oxford, whose translation is considered more poetic, even though it departs somewhat from the original. . . .”

Xander yawned but then he caught sight of Xena, who had a broad grin on her face.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I know what the hieroglyphs from the casebook mean!”

Y
ou know what the hieroglyphs mean?” Xander couldn't help sounding doubtful.

“Yes!”

“Tell me about it on the way to the SPFD. It's getting late!”

They hurried out of the museum and ran down the steps. “It'll be quicker on foot,” Xander said, so they trotted down the sidewalk, dodging pedestrians.

“Okay, so it turns out that hieroglyphs don't use many vowels, not the same way that our alphabet does,” Xena began.

“How do you know?”

“Read it. What were those letters that Dr. Bowen said the hieroglyphs stood for?”

“F-t-h-r-n-g-l, then a space, then s-m-y-t-h.”

Xena nodded. “That's what I thought. Didn't you hear what the guide said?”

Xander stopped dead in his tracks.
“Fotheringale and Smythe—the people who translated the Rosetta Stone. That's what the hieroglyphs spell!”

“So put it all together. Amin wanted someone—his son or his grandson—to read the Rosetta Stone. Of course they wouldn't know how to read hieroglyphs, so he had to send them to a translation—the Fotheringale and Smythe version!”

They soon found themselves in the neighborhood they had lived in when they'd first arrived in London. They hurried to the headquarters of the SPFD in a secret room at the back of the Dancing Men pub. They had discovered the door to the headquarters as part of a test that the SPFD had given them to see if they had inherited Sherlock Holmes's powers of deduction. First they had to go through the main room of the pub and down a long corridor to a storage room. Inside the storeroom a large box, which looked as if it were made of cardboard, was pushed against a wall. The box was really made of concrete—and it concealed the small door. Xander crawled inside the box and set the dials on the actual door to the combination he had figured out: 221B, Sherlock Holmes's street address on Baker Street.

Xander pushed the door open and crawled through. As his feet disappeared, Xena took a deep breath and followed him. She always hated this part. She didn't like small, enclosed spaces, and even the breakthrough about the Rosetta Stone didn't distract her enough to make her comfortable.

Andrew met them as they emerged into the club's sitting room. “So what's the excitement?” he asked as he helped them to their feet.

Xander gave him a quick rundown of the case, leaving out the part about the amulet's supposed power to make time stand still.

“Interesting!” Andrew raised one eyebrow. “Let's have a look at Sherlock's notes.” An uncomfortable silence filled the small room. “What, don't have the casebook on you? Bring it by school tomorrow, then.”

Xena looked at Xander, who looked down at his shoes. “I can't,” he finally said. “It's disappeared.”

If Andrew had yelled at them, it would have been better than the stony silence followed by his bitter exclamation, “I knew it! I
told
Aunt Mary you weren't to be trusted.”

“But—”

“But nothing. You're too young to be given
such a treasure. You don't even care about it or about Sherlock Holmes! Just wait till the others hear about this.” Andrew stomped off and slammed the door behind him.

“Do you think he'll tell everyone?” Xander asked.

“Probably.” Xena couldn't bear the thought. “Let's leave the paper from Mrs. Collins with a note asking someone to send it to that Egyptologist.”

“If we leave the real thing, it might get lost like the casebook,” Xander objected, “and then Andrew will get us kicked out of the Society.”

“He won't. We'll find it first. Besides, the others wouldn't let him do that to the descendants of Sherlock Holmes.” Xena wasn't as sure as she sounded. “Give it to me and I'll make a copy.”

She headed into the office, where Mr. Brown, the Society's secretary, was clicking on his keyboard. He looked up and smiled at them. “Xena! Xander, my boy! How are you two?”

“Fine,” Xena mumbled, hoping he wouldn't mention the casebook. “Can I make a copy?”

Mr. Brown waved his hand at the photocopy machine. “Be my guest!”

She placed the paper facedown on the glass.
She'd have to make a copy of each side, but the marks were faint and didn't show up well on the first try. She pressed a few buttons and tried again. Better, but still not great. She increased the contrast to the maximum. This time it came out so grainy that it was almost worse. She was about to drop that attempt into the recycling bin when Xander grabbed her wrist.

“What?” she asked, twisting free.

“Look!” He pointed at the paper.

“I don't see what—Oh!”

The light from the copy machine had been so bright, and the contrast had been increased so much, that the marks from the front were overlaid on the marks from the back.

“They're numbers!” Xander said. “Two, eighteen, thirty-five, ninety-one, forty-four.”

Their eyes met. “The Rosetta Stone!” Xander breathed. “It's
got
to have something to do with the translation!”

Mr. Brown cheerily interrupted his work to give them directions to the nearest public library. “Thanks!” they called out as they dashed away, and for once Xena didn't notice how closed in she felt crawling out through the box in the pub's storeroom.

In the library Xander went in search of the book—the Fotheringale and Smythe translation of the Rosetta Stone—while Xena called their mother to tell her they were close to home and would be there soon. “Yes, Mom, we're all caught up on homework,” she was saying when Xander reappeared waving a piece of paper with a call number on it. She gestured at him to go find the book while she finished talking to their mother.

“Phew!” Xena settled next to Xander, who was turning the pages of a large book in a dark gray binding. “Mom wants us home soon. Maybe we should check the book out.”

“Can't.” Xander shook his head. “Reference only. See?”

Someone had written things in the margins of some of the pages. Was that what they were looking for? They checked pages two, eighteen, thirty-five, ninety-one, forty-four, but some of those pages had nothing handwritten on them and others had notes that didn't make much sense. “C-f-r Budge? What on earth is that?” Xander wondered out loud at one of them.

“I don't know,” Xena said, “but if it means nothing to us, it probably wouldn't mean anything to Amin's descendants either. It's got to be
something that makes sense. Let's start at the beginning of the translation, not in all this introduction stuff.”

Xander turned pages until he came to the actual translation. He read, “The timekeeper,” and stopped. He turned sparkling eyes on Xena. “Timekeeper!”

“Go on,” she said.

The timekeeper tells of the prince who has followed his father as king, ruler with sparkling crowns, greatest, who rules the land of Egypt and worships its gods, stronger than his enemies, who brings safety to its people, lord of the Festival of Thirty Years, like the great god Ptah, like the sun-god Ra, who rules both Upper and Lower Egypt, son of the Philopatores gods beloved by Ptah, granted supremacy by Ra, like unto Amun the son of Ra, King Ptolemy the eternal, also beloved by Ptah, in year Nine of his reign. . . .

Xander counted silently and found the second, eighteenth, and all the other letters:
h-s-s-w-h
. No help there.

But in the meantime, Xena was counting the words and scribbling down what she came up with:
timekeeper, greatest, safety, year,
and
thirty
.

“Look, Xander.” She pointed at it.

“That doesn't make much sense.”

“It makes more sense than ‘hsswh'! And remember, it talks about a timekeeper. That can't be a coincidence!”

“You're right,” he conceded. They thought for a moment.

“Who's the greatest timekeeper?” Xena asked. “Thoth, god of time?”

Xander shook his head. “If this is a key to where the amulet's been hidden, then it's not a who. It's a
what
. A safe place—”

“Wait a second. Let's think like Sherlock. Examine the evidence, not what we think we're looking for. The amulet's first hiding place, the water clock, was a timekeeper, so the greatest timekeeper could be a bigger clock. ‘Greatest' can mean ‘biggest' too, not just ‘best.'”

“I know!” Xander jumped up. “Big Ben!” The clock in the tall tower at Westminster Palace was once the biggest clock in the world and was still one of the most famous.

“Big Ben's the bell, not the clock,” Xena reminded him.

“Duh! But you know what I mean. The clock in the tower where the bell is.”

“All right. But what about ‘year' and ‘thirty'? Maybe Karim's grandfather was wrong and the amulet works once every thirty years instead of every fifty!”

“Why would Amin say that in code? Anyone who was looking for the amulet would already know how it worked and wouldn't care if it was every thirty years or every fifty. I think this is telling someone where to find it, not what it is.”

“Wait!” Xena counted again. “What if ‘sun-god' is one word instead of two? Then we get ‘nine' instead of ‘year.' Big Ben at nine-thirty?”

Their eyes met over the pages of the book. At last they were getting somewhere!

T
hey still didn't know exactly what they were looking for. They were pretty sure that they had to go to Big Ben and do something at 9:30, but what? And 9:30 in the morning or night?

I hope it's 9:30 in the morning, Xander thought. There's no way Mom and Dad would let us go there so late. Just as he thought that, Xena's cell phone rang.
Oh, please let it not be Mom and Dad!
Xander thought as hard as he could, but it was no use.

“Hi, Mom.” Xena rolled her eyes at him as she spoke. “Yes, I know. But it's not that late! And we have a case that—but, Mom—but—” She frowned and kicked the ground while their mother's voice came through the phone. “Okay. Be right back.”

“Let me guess,” Xander said. “Dinner, homework, it's getting dark—right?”

Xena nodded. “You left out ‘You two should know better!'”

“Maybe Sherlock Holmes didn't have a computer and GPS,” Xander said as they headed for the flat. “But at least he didn't have a
curfew
!”

Xena managed to get most of her homework out of the way before dinner and went online to investigate a trip to Big Ben. She found the nearest Tube stop and then tried to find out what hours the big clock-tower was open. Her “Oh,
no
!” made Xander look up.

“What?” he asked, and his heart sank as he saw her face.

“We can't get in.” She pointed at the screen. “You can only go up inside the tower if your MP gets permission for you.”

“What's an MP?”

“Member of Parliament, like your member of Congress. Only we're not British, so we don't even
have
an MP.”