The Case That Time Forgot (6 page)

Mr. Grayson sighed. “What a shame. It was smashed over a hundred years ago.”

Xena nudged Xander, who nudged her back.

“It was broken before anyone had a chance really to examine it,” Mr. Grayson went on. “We do know a few things about it, though, because in the nineteen fifties a similar clock was found, and scientists discovered a hole drilled right here.” He put his finger under a seated figure that was so battered it was unidentifiable. “It was capped with a piece of stone so perfectly made that you couldn't see a seam.”

“Was there anything in the hole?” Xena asked eagerly.

“Not that we know of,” Mr. Grayson said.

Xena felt a flash of excitement. That sounded exactly like a hiding place for something small, like the amulet, especially if it was hidden by a carving of a baboon, one of the ways that Thoth was pictured. And if it had been that perfectly made, no wonder the people in the Carberry Museum hadn't seen it. They hadn't had the chance to make a thorough examination, and even if they had, they might not have found the little hole with the limited technology of a century ago.

Xena and Xander thanked Mr. Grayson and walked out into the chilly afternoon. They
turned right on Upper Thames Street and made their way to the wide gray river, walking past several bridges, until they paused on the Victoria Embankment near Charing Cross. Traffic whizzed past them, so they went into the small park, where a huge column with squared-off sides and a pointed top loomed above them.

“Look!” Xander flung his hand triumphantly at the two sphinxes at the base of the column.

“Wow!” Xena walked over and admired them.

A tour group came up, the man in front holding a bright yellow flag. The group of chatting people who followed gathered in a small group to hear him.

“Clear off, you kids,” he said to Xena and Xander. “This tour is for paying customers only.”

Xander moved away, but Xena stayed put. She knew that if she held still, she'd manage to blend in with the crowd and hear what he had to say. This was a talent she'd always had, and she found it useful in situations like this one.

“The two sphinxes here still show the effects of the German bombs dropped on them in the Second World War,” the tour guide said, and then he droned on with facts about the sphinxes' weight, how old they were, and what the writing on them meant.

Xena caught a glimpse of someone lurking around the monument. She shifted her position to get a better look, but he ducked into the crowd. Xander didn't seem to notice the shadowy figure, and she knew that if she said something, the tour guide would see her and make her leave. She kept one eye on her brother while she turned the rest of her attention to the guide.

“Now, this obelisk,” the man said, pointing to the column, “was brought here from Egypt in 1877. It weighs a hundred and eighty tons. Although it was made fifteen hundred years before the birth of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, it has always been jokingly referred to as Cleopatra's Needle.”

Xena gasped. A needle—but without an eye! And it had been there well before Amin had come to London. This
must
be the needle in the riddle! She looked around for Xander, only to see him frantically waving to get her attention. As soon as he saw her looking at him, he pointed to a stand of trees. She spotted someone in a dark hooded sweatshirt and jeans, before whoever it was darted out of the shelter of the trees and sped toward the sidewalk. Xena squeezed through the crowd and sprinted after him.

She paused and looked around. Where had he
gone? Then out of the corner of her eye, she saw someone running away at full speed down the sidewalk. Hooded sweatshirt, jeans—it was the same person! She took off again, dodging people and dogs and baby carriages. The person ahead of her tore through a crosswalk just as the light changed. Horns beeped and brakes squealed, but her quarry leaped onto the sidewalk on the other side and disappeared into the crowd.

Xena leaned over, hands on knees, to catch her breath. The person she was chasing had blended in with the other people going home or shopping, and by the time the light changed, he—or she?—would be far, far away.

When Xena could breathe regularly again, she turned back to the park. She found Xander standing near the trees where the mysterious figure had first appeared. “Too late,” she said.

“Not entirely!” Xander pointed at the ground. In the mud were two perfect footprints. Xander pulled the notebook out of his back pocket and flipped to the drawing he'd made of the print in the shower room at school. “Look! It matches, even down to that little circle on the right print.” He bent down and measured it with his hand.

Before Xena could answer she felt a drop of
rain hit her head, and then another, and then it was pouring. London weather was like that—if it wasn't raining, it either had just stopped raining or was about to start. They ran for the Underground station.

In the train car they sat close to each other so they could talk without being overheard. Luckily a group of students got on and were making enough noise to drown out most sounds.

“Did you get a good look at him?” Xander asked. Xena shook her head. “Me either.” Xander sounded as disappointed as she felt.

“I'm not even sure it
was
a him,” Xena said. “Whoever it was had that hood pulled up, and anyone could have been wearing jeans.”

“Well, at least we know something about his shoes. Or her shoes. What was that tour guide saying, anyway?”

“That tall thing is an obelisk. You know what that means?”

Xander nodded. “Like a column, only squared off with a pointy tip, like the Washington Monument.”

“Exactly. That one by the Thames is Egyptian, and it's called Cleopatra's Needle. Get it? It's a needle without an eye.”

“Wow!” Xander exclaimed.

“It was in London when the amulet was stolen, and it was something that people would know about. The riddle must be from Sherlock's time and not a translation of an Egyptian saying or anything, because the Egyptians didn't call the obelisk Cleopatra's Needle.”

“That means it's a clue about where the amulet is. It
must
be something that Amin wrote and left for his descendants to find!”

As soon as they got home, Xena checked out the guide's information. “Listen to this, Xan,” she said breathlessly. “There's another obelisk in Paris—that's across the Channel, not across the sea.
But
there's a third obelisk in New York, and it's also called Cleopatra's Needle. That must be the ‘sister across the sea'!”

“Now we're getting somewhere!” Xander said, but then his face fell. “Are we supposed to go to New York? How can we do that?”

“Let's look at the riddle again.”

They went into Xander's room and pulled the fragile piece of paper out of its envelope. Xander read:

“I am a needle but cannot sew.

I have no eye and cannot see.

I face my sister across the sea,

and toward my sister you must go.”

“Aha!” Xena said. “We're supposed to go
toward
the other obelisk, not all the way
to
it. And look—the writing under it says ‘five hundred yards'! So we're supposed to start off at the Cleopatra's Needle in London and go five hundred yards in the direction of New York, which is west!”

Xander pulled his map out of his pocket. He figured out roughly five hundred yards due west from the Egyptian monument. The spot was in a jumble of buildings, and it was hard to tell exactly which one was meant. “Anyway,” he said, “New York isn't exactly west from London. It's south too.”

“But if we get a globe and draw a line between London and New York, it won't be accurate enough to tell us what's five hundred yards away!” This sounded like one of those impossible word problems in math:
If London is X miles north and Y miles east of New York, what will be the angle of the line that you draw between the two cities, relative to the equator, and what will you find five hundred yards along that line?
Xena was good at math, except for word problems. They mixed two different things—math and language—and her orderly mind had a hard time with that.

Xander smiled in the infuriating way that
meant he had figured something out ahead of her. “Be right back.” He disappeared into the living room, and she heard him rummaging around in the gadget box. He came back wearing the GPS watch that their mother had said was too small to be useful.

“London. Cleopatra's Needle,” Xander said into the watch. They heard a few beeps. “New York. Cleopatra's Needle.” More beeps. “Connect.” Then, “Five hundred yards. Enlarge. Aha!” He showed Xena the small screen where a tiny red dot blinked on the map of London. “That's the spot!”

She squinted at it. “Okay! Let's go!”

They were on their way out the door when their father appeared from the kitchen. “Whoa! Where do you two think you're going?”

“Out, Dad.” Xena was impatient. “We're working on a case, and we just got an important clue about—”

“Have you finished your homework?”

Xena sighed in exasperation. “Not all of it.”

Actually, she hadn't even started it.

“It's okay,” Xander said. “I'll go. It's just a few Tube stops away.”

“No, you won't,” their father said. “Not by yourself on the Underground. Besides, it's getting
late. We'll be eating dinner soon. Xena, get back to work, and, Xander, you find something to do. The case can wait until tomorrow.”

No it can't! Xena wanted to say. We have less than a week left! But she knew there was no point in arguing, so she slumped down at the table.

Xander gave Karim a call. “Making any progress?” Karim asked.

“A little.” Xander explained about the obelisk. “We're going back tomorrow to see what's there. And we think someone was following us.” He told Karim about the hooded figure whom Xena had chased. “Can you meet us after school? We can tell you about it, and you can go with us to the place we think the clue was talking about.”

“Super! I have a piano lesson on Tuesdays, but it's over in an hour.”

That night both Xena and Xander had a hard time falling asleep. When Xena finally did, she had a series of strange dreams about ancient Egyptian gods. As a tall, lean human figure with the head of a long-beaked bird leaned over her, its glittering eye fixed on her, she woke with a start. She lay there, her heart pounding, while her head cleared.

It was just a dream, she told herself, but in the dark quiet of her room, anything seemed possible. Had Thoth come to visit her? And if so, was he asking Xena and Xander to help find the amulet?

Or had it been a warning?

I
t was still drizzling the next day, so PE was indoors. After a while Xander asked permission to go into the locker room and use the bathroom. The coach nodded, hardly paying attention to him before turning back to the boys still passing the ball to one another.

Xander felt uneasy in the locker room by himself. Usually it was crowded with talking, laughing boys. Now it was silent, and he could hear every creak and pop of the old building. Someone had left a showerhead dripping, and the rhythmic
tap-tap-tap
of the drops hitting the tile got on his nerves. He went into the shower room and turned it off.

He looked around, thinking back to last Friday when Karim first told him about the case. Where had the mysterious eavesdropper hidden? The shower stalls were separated by shallow partitions. You could see into almost all
of them just by standing in the doorway, and he and Karim had gone all the way in. There was only one way out—through the locker room. Nobody had gone that way or the two boys would have noticed.

Or
was
there only one way out?

Xander looked around. Six shower stalls lined one wall. On the back wall was the janitor's utility closet. Next to it—he stopped and looked again. The closet! Someone must have been hiding there!

No, that couldn't be it. Mr. Franklin had been mopping the floor when they were in there, and he would have seen a person in the place where he kept the mop and bucket.

“ ‘When you have excluded the impossible,'” Xander quoted his famous ancestor softly, “‘whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'” It was improbable that someone had hidden in the closet, but everything else was impossible.

He had to get a look into the closet somehow. He wished he'd asked the SPFD for a set of lock-picking tools. Halfheartedly he turned the knob, and to his surprise, the door opened. Silently, he noticed. Someone hiding in there could have come into the shower room, and he and Karim never would have heard a thing.

Then he noticed something else. At the back of the closet, a thin line of light ran along the floor. There was another door! Whoever had come in had done it after the janitor had removed his supplies. That was why Mr. Franklin hadn't noticed.

Where did the door lead? Xander closed his eyes and pictured the floor plan of the ground floor of the school. Aha! This was the same janitor's closet as the one near his locker. Someone must have come in through the hallway.

Now he was getting somewhere. Xander had been careful not to disturb any evidence. He went back into the locker room, feeling around in his backpack. There it was—the multipurpose tool that he always carried, with a small flashlight and magnifying glass.

Back in the shower room, he squatted near the door to the closet and ran the light over its walls and floor. He saw rags, cleaning solution, and an industrial-sized vacuum cleaner. And something else. On the floor was a dusting of what looked like spilled cleaning powder. He peered over to look at it more closely, but the powder got up his nose and he sneezed. The force of his sneeze was enough to blow the powder all over, scattering it.

But not before he saw that there were footprints in the dust. Familiar footprints, made by athletic shoes, with a little circle in the middle of the right one.