The End of FUN (24 page)

Holes. There were these little holes—these, like, little pinholes—scattered throughout the paper, as if it had been blasted with a tiny shotgun. Dozens of holes scattered around the paper, with the light pouring through, like stars. And then I saw that the pattern wasn't random. The dots were positioned in line with the text, each one above a word.

Some kind of code! It had to be!

The first thing I did was call Katie.

“I think I found something!”

“What, the treasure?”

“No. Some kind of code.”

“A code?” she said. “What is it?”

“I don't know. I haven't worked it out yet. There are all these, like, little pinholes. In the paper. Like some kind of code.”

“Cool. Want some help? I like solving codes.”

“Come on over. I'll wait for you.”

By the time Katie arrived I'd underlined all the words with holes above them:

And then I wrote them out on a separate piece of paper:

Katie was pretty stoked. “Holy wow. That's
amazing
.”

I read the message again, proud of myself for cracking the code. But then the reality began to set in—now what? The code—it wasn't actually all that helpful. The only instructions were to “ddig ddeeper.” Which is the same thing he told me in the original will. Ddig ddeeper. What did it mean?

“Dig deeper…” said Katie. “It means we've got to keep searching.”

“Well, but it's the same clue as before. How is that helpful? This thing just keeps going in circles.”

She looked at me. “
Faith
, remember?”

“Yeah. Sure. But now what?”

“I'm not sure.”

We spent the next hour reading over the message, considering the possibilities. Maybe the treasure was buried somewhere—but where? I needed a location. Some kind of
x
-marks-the-spot-type thing. It was starting to get late, and I was sure she was going to leave soon, but then she noticed something else.

“Check it out! Some of the words have more than one hole above them. Like the word ‘insurance'—there's a hole above both the
i
and the
s
. ‘Usurpers,' too. It's got a hole over the
u
and the
r
. That's it! I bet we're supposed to look at the individual letters.
Levels of nested answers! Dig deeper!
The clue itself is another clue!”

She wrote out the letters with holes over them, and it looked like this:

DDT­EEF­DDT­HGI­EEV­ILO­DDN­AIS­SUR­DDR­AEN­DDG­IDDD

“That's a lot of letters, I said. “So many
D
s…”

“Yeah,” said Katie. “But look—it says in the PPS you're supposed to ‘ignore the double
DD
s,' so let's take those out.” She crossed out each pair of
D
s and rewrote the code:

TEE­FTH­GIE­EVIL­ONAI­SSU­RRA­ENG­ID

“OK,” she said. “Let's see….In the middle there, we've got the word ‘evil.' Or actually ‘evilonaiss,' kind of like mayonnaise, but evil. The most evil condiment of all.”

I gave her a look, like,
Really? That's what you got?

“And what's ‘aengid'?” she said. “That's kinda creepy, don't you think? Aengid, the evil angel. And there at the beginning? ‘Teef'? That's, like, how a baby would say ‘teeth.' A creepy demon baby. It's like one of those books.”

“What books?”

“Or movies.”

“What movies?”

“You know—one of
those ones
. Where the hero finds a mystical object and meddles where he shouldn't and ends up opening the gates of hell.”

“And the evil angel comes out.”

“Yes! Or a demon baby, or a plague of wild rats, a rainbow of fruit flavors…I don't know….” She looked at me with wonder in her blue eyes. “Aaron, it could be
any
thing.”

“Anything. How is that helpful?”

“I don't know!” she said. “But isn't it
fun
?
My
grandpa never left
me
a hidden treasure.” She grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil from her bag, “Let's crack the next code!”

Huh. I hadn't really thought of it that way. It
was
kind of cool—and not just because of the treasure. I mean here we were, me and Katie, hanging out together, having fun. Like
actual
fun. Together. The together kind of fun. Which is maybe the best kind of fun.

We spent the next hour hard at it, arranging and rearranging the letters according to a dozen different schemes. We wrote out every other letter, every third, every fourth. We wrote the corresponding letters that came before and after in the alphabet. Nothing. Strange to be using actual paper—the process was so slow. Something occurred to me.

“The solution—it's so simple!”

Katie looked up from her work. “You figured it out?!”

“I'll ask Homie
™
! There's got to be a program out there for cracking codes. I'm telling you, ten seconds and we'll have it!”

“Wait. But doesn't that kind of take the fun out of it? Don't you want to figure it out on your own?”

I gave it some thought. “But see, that's what you're not getting—this
is
me figuring it out.”

“Give me a little more time. I want a shot at it before you go using technology.”

YAY! for the pencil in her hand, a good old-fashioned Dixon
®
No.2/HB—because wasn't that technology? “A pencil is technology, too.”

Katie begged to differ. “It isn't the same thing. At least this way we're using our brains.”

“Hey, FUN
®
is
in
my brain.”

“You know what I mean….Maybe we need to try a different approach. Maybe there's some other clue we're missing.”

“Like what?”

“Like I don't know. Tell me about your grandpa. What was he into?”

“Well, codes, obviously.”

“But what kind of codes?”

“I don't know. Everything.” I directed her attention to his bookshelf: crosswords, Sudoku, word searches, anagrams…

“Anagrams,” she said. “Maybe that's it. Maybe it's an anagram!”

“You think?”

“You got any better ideas?”

“Yeah. FUN
®
.”

“Come on,” said Katie. “Just give it a shot on your own.
Without
FUN
®
. Humor me, Aaron.”