The Secret Cellar (8 page)

“No thank you,” I say. “I bought it for my dad, and he is going to love it.”

“Five hundred dollars,” Klinger blurts out. “Surely with that much money you could find another fountain pen for your father. You could buy ten. I could help you find them.”

Now, I don’t know much about playing poker, but I know when somebody has shown their cards too soon.
It’s pretty obvious that Klinger is desperate to get his paws on that grid, which means that whatever that clue leads to, it must be something special.

“Sorry,” I say. “It’s my private pen. It’s not for sale.”

I get a text message from Malcolm the moment we step out of the warm and cozy Sturm & Drang and into the bitter December afternoon.

“Well, that’s good timing,” I say. “Malcolm found a copy of
Nine Worthy Men
at the Columbia University library; he’s on his way to Elizabeth’s with it right now.”

And so, forty numb toes and eight numb ears later, we arrive at the blazer-red door to Elizabeth’s townhouse.

When we get inside, we’re treated to a most welcome sight, one that is all too rare for New Yorkers: Elizabeth has a roaring fire going in her fireplace! We shed our coats and boots and race to claim the valuable real estate directly in front of the flames.

“Oh, man, this feels good,” says Leigh Ann. “It’s just in time, too. It’s been an hour since I felt my toes. I’m not even sure they’re still attached.”

Helen brings us hot chocolate with marshmallows, and by the time Malcolm arrives, the blood is moving through our extremities.

“Hail the conquering hero,” he shouts, waving the book over his head.

“Yippee,” offers Elizabeth sarcastically. “Now tell
the girls what you told me. It was your assistant who found the book, not you.”

“A technicality,” replies Malcolm. “It was my expedition; therefore, I get the credit. That’s the way it works in archaeology.”

He hands the volume to Margaret, who flips through the pages until she finds the start of the section devoted to Alexander the Great.

“Okay, Sophie. Break out the grid,” she says.

Each page of the book is printed with tiny type, in two columns, which, according to Malcolm, was common during the Depression and World War II, as a way to conserve paper. The grid that I discovered inside the pen is exactly the length and width of one of the columns, and I set it down on the left-hand column, quoting from the poem printed at the top. “Aligned on the page … that begins the tale of his age.”

Through the twelve rectangular holes, this is what we see:

Together, we read the words aloud: “Pull the ribbon and you’ll see the walking stick is the key.”

“Pull what ribbon?” Becca asks.

“The key to what?” wonders Leigh Ann.

Malcolm takes the book in his hands and shows us the attached ribbon bookmark, which had been tucked between pages in the section on Julius Caesar. “You used to see these in a lot of books. Not so much anymore.”

“My mom has a cookbook with one like that,” says Leigh Ann. “Do you think that’s the ribbon we’re supposed to pull?”

“Worth a try,” says Malcolm, tugging gently.

“What if it’s, you know, like a trigger?” I ask, leaning away from him and waiting for the big explosion.

But this ribbon isn’t budging. Malcolm takes a closer look and declares it to be untampered with; it is still solidly glued into the binding of the book. “If I pull any harder, I’m just going to rip it out.”

“Well, that settles it. We need Dedmann’s copy,” says Margaret. “He left a message in his pen, about pulling a ribbon in a book that he has in his library. But now Marcus Klinger has it.”

“And he is never going to let us see it,” I say. “And even if he did, he’s certainly not going to let us yank the ribbon out of it.”

Malcolm shakes his head angrily. “The walking stick! I knew I should have kept bidding. It’s the key … to something.”

“Um, guys, I’m really confused,” Leigh Ann says. “Have I missed something, or do we still not know what we—or this Klinger guy—are even looking for? I mean,
I understand about the book and the ribbon, but then what? What is, you know, at the end of the rainbow?”

Everyone turns to Margaret for an answer, which she (of course!) provides.

“We don’t know, but it must be something really valuable; look at what Klinger is going through to get it for himself. I don’t know about you, but I kind of get the feeling that Lindsay, the woman from the antiques store, knows a lot more than she’s letting on. I think we have to pick her brains.”

Before I can beg Margaret not to make me go back out into the cold, Becca jumps to her feet. “Malcolm! Elizabeth! You are not going to believe what else we found out today! The Winterbottoms! They split up!”

Elizabeth comes running from the kitchen. “What! Gordon and Winnie? Wherever did you hear that?”

“Remember the shop where Sophie found the fountain pen?” says Becca. “It’s called GW Antiques and Curiosities. The ‘GW’ stands for Gordon Winterbottom. He just opened it a few weeks ago. Lindsay works for him. She says he’s got a broken heart, if you can believe that.”

“Did he …? Did you see …?” Malcolm starts to ask.

“No,” I say. “He was in the back the whole time.”

“Winnie is working at the Heidelberg,” Margaret adds. “I actually feel a little sorry for them.”

“That makes one of us,” I say. “I still haven’t forgotten how he tried to frame me for stealing that stuff from the church.”

“Maybe he has turned over a new leaf,” says Malcolm. “Stranger things have happened.”

Becca and Leigh Ann dig in their (finally warm) heels; no way are they going back uptown to Eighty-First Street.

“Sorry, but I’m going home to my nice warm bed,” says Leigh Ann. “And then I’m gonna do … nuttin’. I never get to do that. But I have no homework, no rehearsal, no dance class. I’ll see you guys tomorrow. You can tell me all about it then.”

“And me,” says Becca. “You two go right ahead, though. I’m done with antiques shops and old-book stores. I want to see some new stuff for a change.”

So it’s just Margaret and me who peek in the window of GW Antiques and Curiosities, making sure Lindsay is still working alone before we go inside. She’s leaning over a laptop computer behind the counter, reading an online newspaper article with the curious headline “
WHERE IS THE THIRD WISE MAN
?”

“Remember,” I whisper to Margaret as she reaches for the doorknob, “be careful who you trust.”

“
Whom
. Got it. But we have to let her think that we trust her. That way she’ll trust us.”

“How are we going to do that?” I ask.

“I have a plan. Trust me.”

“But I’m not supposed to—”

“Sophie.”

“Right. I trust you.”

“Well, hello again,” Lindsay says as we step inside, quickly closing her computer. “But you’ve lost your two friends. Have you been over at the bookstore all this time?”

“No, we had a little detour, but we had to come back, because we’re kind of out of options, and, well, can we trust you?”

Seems like a simple question, right? Lindsay’s reaction is interesting, but not simple. She looks surprised, and pleased, and suspicious, all at the same time. (There, I’ve done it again—created yet another new word: she is surplicious.)

“I—I suppose so, yes. I’m not sure how I can help, but I’m willing to try.”

Margaret makes eye contact with me for a split second—long enough for me to understand that it’s all part of her plan—and then tells Lindsay an abridged version of my discovery of the grid with the poem and the cutout rectangles, and Marcus Klinger’s strange
behavior when we asked him about
Nine Worthy Men
(intentionally leaving out the part where Malcolm found us a copy of the book and we were able to use the grid to decode the message).

Lindsay, suddenly eager to leave, glances at her watch. “Oh my. It’s later than I thought. Sorry, girls, but I have an appointment … across town, and I, um, have to run. Can you give me your email address? Let me see what else I can find out and I’ll share it with you.”

“That would be great,” says Margaret, taking the pen and paper that Lindsay holds out. “So, I guess we’ll wait for you to contact us.”

“Well,” says Margaret when we’re a few doors down the street, “I don’t know about you, but it seems pretty clear to me. We can’t trust her—at all.”

“Is that why you gave her a fake email address?” I ask.

She smiles at me. “You see? That’s why you’re my best friend, Sophie. I knew that you knew it was fake, and for a second I was afraid you were going to say something, but you trusted me. I don’t know how this is all going to end up, or how she’s involved, but if it’s something big, I don’t want a bunch of emails from her making it look like we’re part of whatever it is that she’s up to.”

“So, why don’t you trust her? I mean, I agree with you, but I’m wondering what it was for you.”

“I just don’t think she is who she says she is. The way
she slammed her computer shut when we walked in. The way she reacted to everything we said. The way she suddenly had an appointment, it was like she couldn’t wait to tell somebody else what we found. And another thing just doesn’t quite fit, but I’m not sure what it is. Look how she dresses, her hair, her nails: none of it seems to fit someone working in a funny little antiques shop. Did you notice the article she was reading on her computer—before she closed it?”

“Something about the Three Wise Men, right?”

“The
Third
Wise Man. We need to see what that’s all about.”

When we get to Margaret’s apartment, I shout a hello-I’m-fine-how-are-you-that’s-great greeting to her parents and follow Margaret into her room, where I throw myself on her bed and watch her get down to RBGDA business.

She types in the headline, and clicks on the first article that the search turns up. It’s from a December 2002 issue of a weekly newspaper from Portland, Maine, and I recognize it at once.

“Hey, that’s the one! What’s it about?”

Margaret reads for a few seconds. “Wow. I never knew this. This article is about the sixtieth anniversary of something that happened during World War II. In 1942, Nazi spies landed in Maine.”

“What, like, in an airplane?” I ask.

“Nope. In a rubber raft. Get this: they were dropped
off from a submarine a few hundred yards offshore, in the middle of a blizzard, on Christmas Eve.”

“Wait a second. With World War II going on, a German submarine just parks off the coast of Maine, opens the door, and lets out a bunch of spies, and nobody sees this?”

“It was night, and Maine is a big place, Sophie.”

“So, what happened?” I get off the bed to read over her shoulder.

“I’m looking, I’m looking. Okay, well, it appears they made it all the way to New York. They were trying to spy on the scientists who were starting to work on the atomic bomb. They got caught about a month later. Ohhhh. Here’s where it gets interesting—
how
they got caught. Back in Maine, some guy reported picking up two men with briefcases in a snowstorm and taking them to the train station. After he dropped them off, he got suspicious, wondering why there were strangers wandering around the middle of Maine in a blizzard on Christmas Eve with briefcases. So he told the police, who told the FBI. When the FBI came to New York, they eventually tracked down the two guys and arrested them.

“But some old lady back in Maine swore that she saw three men walking in the snow that night. Since only two men bought train tickets, and all the other eyewitnesses reported seeing only two men, the FBI basically ignored her. They never officially closed the case, though, because there was one agent—a guy named Vernon Ryerson—who believed there was a third man. Oh,
this part is funny: they started calling the phantom spy the Third Wise Man because he came on Christmas Eve and then just disappeared.”