The Haunted Lighthouse (17 page)

Code Buster’s Solution found on
this page
.

“Duh,” said Matt. “I did that, but the letters didn’t make any sense.”

“It was a hidden-word search,” M.E. said. “You had to solve it to figure it out.”

“She’s right,” Ms. Stad said. “There are words hidden in the grid. They run horizontally, vertically, and even diagonally. They relate to a theme.”

Ms. Stad went to the whiteboard. “All right, class. Please raise your hands and I’ll call on you to share the hidden words.”

“It still doesn’t make any sense,” Matt argued.

Cody raised her hand. “It’s a word anagram,” she said. “You have to rearrange the words in order to make a sentence.”

“So which word comes first,” Ms. Stad asked.

“Who!” called out Stephanie.

“Raise your hands, please,” Ms. Stad reminded the class. She wrote the word
Who
on the board. Once the words were placed in order and the puzzle was solved, Ms. Stad read the sentence out loud.

“Awesome!” Bradley said. “I love searching for pirate’s treasure. This is going to be totally fun.”

Matt the Brat turned and frowned. “Dude, there’s no such thing as hidden treasure in California. They only find that kind of stuff at the bottom of the sea.”

Ms. Stad grinned at the class. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough. As you know, we’ve been studying the settling of the American West. We’ve also just learned about mapping. We may not have the battlefields of the South or the fishing ports of the Northeast, the pioneer trails of the Midwest, or even the pirates along the East Coast. But we do have our unique California missions and we’ll be taking a field trip to the Carmel Mission. There, you’ll learn about life in the 1700s and visit the tiny room where Junipero Serra, founder of the mission, lived. Father Serra helped explore and colonize the area that became our home state, California.”

The class cheered at the idea of a field trip.

“And that’s not all. Matt, you said there were no pirates and no buried treasure in California. But we
do
have one pirate—the only known pirate in California—Hippolyte de Bouchard. He and his men landed in the Monterey Bay searching for treasure rumored to have been hidden by the missionaries!”

A pirate named Hippolyte?
Cody thought.
A hidden treasure at a mission? An overnight field trip? This is going to be awesome!

Finger-spelling:
Chapter 1:
A Pirate in California

Caesar’s cipher:
I wonder if there’s a pirate code?

Hidden Word Search Puzzle:

WHO WANTS TO VISIT THE CARMEL MISSION WHERE PIRATES SEARCHED FOR TREASURE?