The Exact Location of Home (4 page)

From a safer distance, I read over her shoulder.

It's kind of like the whole website is written in secret code. I figured out the names of the geocaches are in the middle, but they're all like riddles, with weird names.

Nest Egg.

Where the West Was Won.

Cold Hard Cache.

The people who hid each cache have code names for themselves, too. There are dates to show when the geocache was left and when somebody found it last.

“What's this picture of the Tupperware thing?” Gianna points to the screen.

“Dad told me people put little trinkets and a log book, and sometimes a disposable camera, in a waterproof container and then hide it in a hollow log or something. I bet that symbol shows you what it is you'll actually find when you locate the cache. Look.” I point to one that looks like a globe. “It says this one's an Earthcache—a place you can go to learn something cool about geology.”

“Nah—I want to find one of the Tupperware things.” Gianna clicks on one called “Aromatherapy” that has the container symbol next to it. She squints at the numbers on the screen. “So if we plug these numbers into your GPS…” Gianna grabs a pencil and starts scribbling them down on one of Mom's sticky notes. “Then we can just go there?”

I nod. “It's pretty close, I think.” I enter our home base and destination coordinates into the GPS.

“Ready?” Gianna starts to close the website.

“Hold on. Let's enter a few caches, in case the first one doesn't work out.”

“Okay.” She clicks the back button and starts scrolling through the list again. I scan the titles, but nothing really catches my eye. I glance down the list of code names of the people who planted the caches.

Mary Quite Contrary. Sirius Black. Bob Times Two. So Longitude.

I wonder what Dad's code name would be.

Gianna starts scrolling faster

“Hold on!” I grab her hand over the mouse, scroll back down to the listing that caught my eye, and click on it.

Gianna pulls her hand out from under mine and leans in to read the page. “Nest Egg?” she reads. “What's that cache name mean? Think somebody stashed a log book in a bird's nest?”

“It's not that—look!” I point to the pseudonym for the person who created the Nest Egg cache. Senior Searcher. The perfect code name for Dad.

“So?” Gianna tips back in the chair and wraps her feet around its legs.

“Senior Searcher? Who do you know named Senior? My dad!”

“
What
?”

I tap the computer screen. “Gianna, he loves geocaching. He was going to take me some time. I bet that's him! Remember, I'm Zig
junior
. He's Zig
senior
. Haven't you ever heard people call him Senior?”

Gianna puts the chair back on all four legs and looks at me. “I've only met him once, Zig, for about a minute and a half. At the fifth grade picnic. Remember?”

I remember. Dad got there just as we were getting in line to leave the park and walk back to school.

“He was really nice, though,” Gianna adds. “So you think this could be him? I don't know…. .”

“Look.” I point to the screen name again. “It
has
to be him. It's too perfect not to be.” I pick up the pencil and jot down the coordinates on another Post-it note. “And maybe if we find it, he'll have his new contact information in the log book, and I'll be able to call him—or
something
.”

“Maybe your dad will be stuffed in the Tupperware container, too.”

“Gianna, I'm
serious
. This could help. At least it's something.”

Gianna blows air up at her bangs and they lift off her forehead for a second. She stands up and crosses her arms. “Hey, Zig—I'll go with you on this because I think the whole thing is just pretty cool. But I'm not convinced this is your dad. These names are all over the place.” She leans to look at the screen again. “Sirius Black. Mary Contrary. Senior Searcher could be anybody.”

“I know.” I put down the pencil and grab the GPS and the coordinates paper. “I know. I just want to get outside and get some air anyway. Are you game?”

“Sure.” She smiles and pulls a rubber band thing from her pocket to put up her hair. It makes a big poof out of the back of her head. She pushes up her sleeves. “I'm off to find a treasure!”

“Me, too,” I say, and I reach for my backpack.

But what I'm really going to find is my dad.

“We should have tried Aromatherapy first. This one's impossible to get to,” Gianna says.

We've been picking our way through the woods behind the school for half an hour. Gianna ducks under a low branch and stops to pick cockleburs out of her hair.

“Can I have those?” I hold out my hand for the burs.

She gives me a look.

“I like messing around and building stuff with them. They're like supersonic Legos that never let go once you stick them together.” I pull one from her hair and add it to the double helix I've made from the burs that keep sticking to my socks.

“What's that supposed to be?” she asks.

“DNA.”

Gianna rolls her eyes. “Are we almost there?” She takes the GPS from me and squints down at it. “Hey—it's talking in yards now instead of miles. Sixty-five yards this way.” She points toward the riverbank where the trees start to thin out a little.

I take the GPS unit back from her and watch the number get smaller as we walk in the direction of the arrow. For a while, I forget about Dad and just geek out on the science behind it all. I mean, this little yellow gadget in my hand is sending out signals to
five
satellites that are orbiting the earth—sending out signals saying, “This is where Zig is in the universe.” The satellites are sending signals back, and the computer uses all that to figure out my exact latitude and longitude. So cool.

“How far?” Gianna asks.

“Twenty yards.”

“We're going to have wet feet in twenty yards.” Gianna leads me to the edge of the woods, where a steep, crumbly dirt bank leads down to the river.

“Huh. The GPS unit says five more yards, but that doesn't seem reasonable, given the situation,” I say.

“That's kind of an understatement,” Gianna says. She's right. September's been rainy, and the river is flowing faster than usual for this time of year, making white foam around the rocks.

“Didn't Mrs. Loring say these GPS things aren't perfect?” Gianna says.

“She mentioned a margin of error, yeah.” I look down at the GPS, wishing it would point back at the trees instead of into the water.

I take another step and feel water squish through my sneaker.

I hate margins of error.

“We must be just about here,” Gianna says. “Let's look.” She scrambles down the bank and starts looking into patches of weeds and picking up rocks. “Nope. Not there. Not there either. Nope. Nope. Nope.” She puts her hands on her hips and looks up at me. “Are you going to help?”

“I'm actually thinking that the cache must be up here at the higher elevation. The area where you're standing would be flooded each spring, and the cache is in a plastic container that would float away.”

She climbs back up. “If I were a Tupperware container full of trinkets, where would I be?”

Where would my dad hide a geocache?
I think.

“Hey!” Gianna says. “There was a clue, remember?” She pulls the rumpled printout from the computer out of her jacket pocket. “It says … oh.” Her nose wrinkles. “It's just gibberish. Brzoo kadeeya wer orn klik-jik dequig orz.
That
helps a lot….”

“It must be a code.” Now I'm interested. “Let's see.”

She hands me the paper.

BRX'OO KDYH WR ORRN KLJK DQG ORZ

“I've seen stuff like this before,” I tell her. “It's a code where each letter stands for another letter, and when you figure out how it works, the new letters will spell out the message.”

“So you just start plugging in other letters? That'll take forever.”

“No. Usually in a code like this the letters are just shifted. So an A, for example, might really be the letter that comes five letters later. We just need to figure out what the shift is. Whether it's five letters off or three or what.” I pull a pencil and yesterday's math homework out of my backpack.

“What are you, a secret agent? How do you know this stuff?”

“I read about it in a book about spies during the American Revolution. They used codes so the spies could carry secret messages that wouldn't be given away if they got caught. And they got the idea from ancient times. This kind of thing is actually called a Caesar cipher. Julius Caesar used it to communicate with his generals in ancient Rome.”

I sit down in the leaves and lean against a tree trunk, studying the message. Gianna plunks down next to me and starts tossing leaves in the air. After a while, she leans over. “Got it yet?

“Hold on. I'm looking for clues.”

“Like what?”

“Like letters standing by themselves,” I tell her. “A letter by itself has to be either I or A, so you choose one. Let's say A. Then you can look at what letter the code maker is using to represent it, figure out how many letters away from A that is, and you've figured out the code.”

Gianna looks at the scrap of paper in my hand. “There aren't any letters alone.”

“No, but look at this.” I point to the BRX'OO. This has to be a contraction where the apostrophe comes before two letters that are the same.”

“Ummm…” Gianna twirls a maple leaf. “She'll? You'll?”

“You got it,” I say. “And that means the code maker used O to represent the letter L. O comes three letters after L. So if we're right, then it's a three letter displacement.” I scribble a quick chart under the coded message and hand it to her.

BRX'OO KDYH WR ORRN KLJK DQG ORZ.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
DEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABC

“Now can you figure it out?”

Gianna takes the pencil from me. She has it within a minute.

BRX'OO KDYH WR ORRN KLJK DQG ORZ.
YOU'LL HAVE TO LOOK HIGH AND LOW.

We look up. There's a hole in the trunk of the white pine I was just leaning against. A perfect hiding spot.

“That's it! And he named the cache Nest Egg,” I say. “That must be it.”

“It'd be a great spot …” She doesn't sound so sure. “…
if
somebody could get up there. But I can't imagine—”

“I know that's it!” I say. Dad would climb up there in a heartbeat. He's the one who taught me to climb the sugar maple in the yard at our old house when I was four. He climbed up behind me, and we sat way out on branches and scared Mom when she came home from the grocery store. “That's him.”

“Who?”

“I mean, that's it.” I hand her the GPS unit and jump for the low branch. I miss the first time and my palms get all scratched up. The second time, though, I manage to catch the branch. I swing a little and get a leg up and over it so I can pull myself up. I straddle the branch and shimmy my way over to the place where it meets the trunk.

The hole isn't that big. Probably not big enough for a plastic container, but to be sure, I shimmy a little closer. A bird comes blasting out of the hole, right at my face, in a big, flapping squawking explosion. I duck to avoid getting my eyes pecked out. I lose my balance and fall backwards over the branch. I clench my knees around it, since
they're the only part of me that can still reach, and that's the only thing that saves me from landing head first on the ground.

I see Gianna upside down. Laughing—no,
snorting
—the way she does when something's so funny she can't be bothered to laugh her more respectable laugh.

“Want some help?”

“No thanks.” Still upside down, I tuck in my shirt so my skinny white stomach doesn't blind her. Then I reach back up to get a grip on the branch, let go with my legs, and drop down.

I land the wrong way on my ankle and fall forward onto my knees. Gianna reaches down to help me up, but just as I start to stand, I see it.

A corner of blue plastic sticking out from the leaves blown up against the trunk.

“Yes!” I brush away damp oak leaves and pull out a Tupperware container the size of a shoe box. It's like the one Gee's Nonna keeps her recipes in.

My fingers are cold, so it's hard to get them under the edge of the lid, but finally I pry it off.

“Look!” Gianna says. She reaches in and pulls out a little green plastic army guy. “Stop!” she makes the army guy say in a deep voice. “I'm guarding this geocache. Do you have clearance to be here? Do you know the secret code word?”

I start to reach in, but Gee's army guy blocks me again. “I said halt. Don't make me use my itty bitty plastic machine gun.”

“Gianna, come on.” I pull the box from her and paw through it. I push aside an “I love Canada” key chain, a little plastic pig, a red whistle, one of those gumball machine bouncy balls, two state quarters, a little wooden airplane, a blue jay feather, and two polished rocks. There has to be a log book in here somewhere.

Gianna reaches over my shoulder, takes out the feather, and tickles me behind the ear with it.

“Quit it!”

“Have a little fun, Zig. It's a geocache. Not a top secret government file.”

At the bottom of the container, under a tiny book of Robert Frost poems and a page ripped out of a cocker spaniel calendar, I find it. A little red spiral notebook with a golf pencil stuck in the rings.

“Are you logging our find?” Gianna puts the feather back and takes out the polished stones.

I don't answer her. I'm too busy scanning the entries in here.

Fantastic location! Enjoyed the hunt. We found it on the second try.