Sam jumped and nearly dropped the phone. He couldn’t help it. The sudden noise, together with Marty’s comment about booby traps, had rattled him. It rang again. “What do I do?” he asked, as panicked as if he’d never seen a phone before.
“Answer it, you moron!” Marty told him.
Sam blinked at the phone’s screen and poked at a flashing green button. The ringing stopped. He cautiously lifted the phone to his ear.
“Um, hello?”
“Mr. Solomon, I presume.”
Sam felt something cold and heavy, like a hard-packed ball of slush, thud into the pit of his stomach. He’d know that smooth, precise voice anywhere. Gideon Arnold.
“Hold on. Let me put you on speaker,” Sam said. He couldn’t believe what an idiot he sounded like. He pushed another button. Arnold’s voice rang out into the ruined hallway.
“Find the Quill,” Arnold said, and somehow the fact that his words were so few made them even more menacing. “If there are puzzles, solve them. If there are traps, disarm them. I have no interest in difficulties or excuses. Once you have the Quill in your possession, use this phone to call me. If you do all of this, you may see your friend and relatives alive once more.”
And the phone went dead.
“What? Wait!” Sam stared at the phone and shook it, as if that would bring Arnold back.
“Give it to me.” Theo held out a hand. He tapped at the phone’s buttons. “There’s one number in the contacts section. It must be Arnold’s.”
“Great. So we can call the psychopath anytime we want,” Sam said, shaking his head.
“We’ve got to do it.” Abby was staring at the phone as if it might jump out of Theo’s hand and bite her. “We’ve got to find that Quill! He’s going to kill my parents!”
“It’ll be okay, Abby,” Marty said, turning to her. “Just calm down. I know this is all really crazy, but—”
“I do not want to calm down,” Abby answered, narrowing her eyes at Marty. “That guy has my parents. He’s the one you met in Death Valley, right? The one whose ancestor was Benedict Arnold?”
“Yeah, that’s the one,” Sam agreed.
“So he’s really insane.” Abby turned to Sam. “He’d really kill my parents. And your friend, Evangeline—he’d kill her too?”
Sam hesitated.
“Gideon Arnold will kill anyone who gets in his way,” Theo said. “Never doubt that.”
“Then we’ve got to do what he said.” Abby looked fierce. “Come on! Let’s go!”
“Let’s go where?” Sam asked, bewildered.
“Look for clues,” Abby answered. “This house has been here since Josiah Hodge brought the Quill out west. Somewhere there’s a clue. And we need to find it.”
So they looked for clues. It wouldn’t have been easy if the house had been in decent shape, since they didn’t have a single idea of what they were looking for. But as it was, they were looking for something in a house that looked as if an earthquake had hit it. It was hopeless.
They picked up fallen furniture, collected scattered papers, and looked inside broken knickknacks. While they did all this, Marty talked. Sam had known Marty less than a week. But it was long enough to realize that Marty reacted to stress with words. Lots of words.
“Thomas Jefferson died on the Fourth of July. Did you know that?” she asked. Sam was picking up books from the living room floor while Abby crawled into empty cupboards, tapping the walls to look for a secret hiding place.
“Nope.” Sam dropped a thick book on fly-fishing onto a pile he was creating of “Things That Are Not Going to Help at All.”
“So did John Adams. The exact same day. Isn’t that bizarre?”
“Uh-huh.” Sam picked up another book, a Civil War history. Theo heaved a bookcase upright so Sam would have somewhere to put the books that were not going to help.
“So Caractacus Ranch is designed to look like Monticello, right, Abby?” Marty went on. Abby grunted a yes as she crawled out of a cupboard. “Josiah Hodge had seen Monticello, probably. He would have known what it looked like. It’s an amazing place. I went there on a school trip last year. Beautiful. Jefferson was really into geometry. Shapes and angles. Well, you can’t design a house without caring about geometry, obviously . . .”
Thomas Jefferson was starting to sound like a real geek to Sam. But even as he shared a sideways glance and an eye roll with Abby, he had to admit that geometry wasn’t so bad. It could help solve a puzzle, that was for sure, if you knew how many degrees were in a right angle or how to calculate the radius of a circle.
Marty had flopped down on a window seat whose cushion had been shredded. Polyester stuffing drifted up into her lap. “Octagons especially. He based a lot of Monticello on an octagon pattern. That central hall, for a start. Just like the one you have here, Abby. Eight sides. It created a pattern that he really liked . . .”
Sam dropped another book onto his pile and tuned Marty’s voice out. An idea was tickling at the back of his brain.
Pawing through all the stuff in the house was no good. It was like staring at that giant map in the tourist center, trying to come up with a clue. That wasn’t a puzzle; it was just a pile of information. A puzzle was not like that. A puzzle had hints or clues. Something to catch your eye, something to give you a starting place.
Often that starting place was something that didn’t quite fit. That stood out. That caught your attention or that seemed just a little bit wrong.
Something a little bit wrong. Sam lifted a hand. “Marty, say that again.”
“Say what? About Thomas Jefferson’s recipe for ice cream?”
“No, not that. About geometry. About shapes. About—”
“Octagons? Like the front hall?”
The front hall. Sam had been stuck in that safe room for two hours, staring up at the monitors. One screen had showed the hallway where Evangeline and Abby’s parents had been held.
Jefferson really liked octagons. Octagons had eight sides. And something wasn’t quite right here. Something Sam had seen on that monitor . . .
“It’s wrong!” he blurted and ran out of the room.
The others followed him as he skidded to a stop in the hallway, turning slowly around in a circle. “Sam? What is it? It’s a sugar rush from all that candy, isn’t it?” Marty asked. “Or maybe it really is PTSD.”
“No! It’s an octagon! The hallway! I mean, it’s not!” Sam grinned widely. They’d gotten it! He and Marty together had figured it out. The first step of the puzzle, the place to start!
“Look, either it’s an octagon or it isn’t,” Marty said. “It can’t be both.”
“It’s supposed to be an octagon, but look! Count the walls! This room only has seven sides! It’s a seven-sides-a-gon.”
“A heptagon.” Marty’s eyes brightened, and she turned in a slow circle, looking at the ruined hallway. “Seven sides. Seven Founders. Sam, that’s it! Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams . . .”
“Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay . . . ,” Theo chimed in, nodding.
“John Jay? Didn’t he play for the Red Sox?”
“Sam! Be serious!” Marty glared. But suddenly, briefly, Abby smiled. She got it, Sam realized. Marty talked when she was nervous. Sam joked when he was on the verge of solving a puzzle. He could feel it at this moment, that electric fizz of excitement when all the pieces were about to slide into place.
“And the last one, of course, is our old friend, George Washington!” Sam bowed toward Theo.
“So we’re looking for . . . Thomas Jefferson’s wall? Maybe?” Marty frowned, shaking her head. “I don’t see anything specific . . .”
“Let’s hope Tom’s wall wasn’t the one that got blown to pieces,” Sam said. Theo had moved over to the walls of the room and was walking slowly along them, running his fingers lightly over the white-painted paneling.
“Abby? Any ideas? You’ve lived here all your life,” Sam said.
Abby shook her head. “My dad never told me anything special about this room. Maybe he thought I wasn’t ready or something.”
“Or maybe he just didn’t know,” Sam added.
“Or maybe there’s nothing after all.” Marty chewed her lip, looking worried.
“There’s something.” Theo stopped at the wall that was farthest from the room’s outside door—or where that door had once been. “Look. Well, don’t look. It’s hard to see. But come and feel it. Right here.”
Sam came to Theo’s side and rubbed his fingers gently over the wall where Theo showed him. He could feel shallow grooves, lines that had been carved, very lightly, into the wall’s paneling, and then painted over. They were so faint they were hard to see, but Sam traced them carefully with his fingertips. A triangle. No, a pyramid. A pyramid with something inside it—a feather with a curled top. A quill.
“This is it!” Sam grinned with triumph and slapped his palm on the Founders’ symbol, as if he were giving the wall a high five. “Thomas Jefferson’s wall—whoa!”
The panel was shifting. He snatched his hand away as the panel slid aside, revealing a dark opening in the wall.
“What’s in there?” Abby asked, coming to stare over Sam’s shoulder.
“Theo, be careful,” Marty warned, as Theo reached gingerly into the dark hole.
“There’s something—I got it. Here!” Theo pulled his hand out, clutching two objects. He put those down on the little table where they’d found the satellite phone.
Sam studied the two objects, feeling his grin spread wider over his face. Things were pretty dire—Gideon Arnold had tracked them down, Evangeline and Abby’s mom and dad were in danger—but he and Marty could still beat the Founders’ puzzles. So that was something.
For a moment Sam thought the first thing Theo had recovered was a tiny clock, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. Then he realized his mistake. The brass circle had letters around its edges, rather than numbers: N, S, E, W. North, south, east, west. It reminded him a bit of the sundial he and Theo and Marty had found on the top of a mountain in Death Valley, except for the slender needle that quivered and swung in its center. A compass!
The other thing—Sam had no idea. “What’s that?” he asked as Marty picked the object up with gentle, cautious fingers.
“It’s a wheel cipher,” she told him.
“A cipher?” Sam was intrigued. He leaned closer to get a better look. A cipher was a code—and a code was a puzzle. It was the kind of thing Sam was good at.
It looked to Sam like a long cylinder made out of wood, with letters carved all around its edge. But when Marty handled it, Sam saw that it was actually a series of wooden disks, all threaded onto a metal rod so each could rotate independently of the others. Marty spun one disk gently with her finger.
“Thomas Jefferson invented this,” she said in an awed tone. “He used it to send secret messages.”
“How?” Sam’s fingers itched to take it from her to see if he could figure it out. But he restrained himself.
“All the disks have the letters of the alphabet around the edge. So you spin the disks to spell out a message. One letter to each disk.” Marty twisted the disks and arranged the letters.
“Then, to send your message, you write down the letters on a different line—maybe the one above.” Marty pointed to a nonsense row of letters: HWD QH W PNNLXH. “You send your secret message to somebody, and they line up those letters on their cipher wheel and then look around the disk to see which line actually makes sense. So you can read—”
“SAM IS A DOOFUS,” Sam read. Theo’s mouth twitched very, very slightly. “Thanks, Marty. Thanks a lot.”
“It makes sense that Josiah Hodge might have had one of those ciphers,” Abby said. “After all, he was working for Thomas Jefferson.”
“But what are we supposed to do with it?” Sam asked. “Send somebody a secret message, or decode one?”
“Somebody else would have to have a cipher wheel just like this one,” Marty said. “Either to send us a message or to understand one that we sent.”
Sam nodded. “I don’t suppose you guys know of anybody in the world with a wheel cipher just like that one?” Nobody did. Sam shrugged and turned his attention back to the compass, watching the sensitive needle inside the case shiver and swing as he moved it. He turned it over and saw words inscribed on the wooden case. “‘In matters of style, swim with the current,’” he read. “‘In matters of principle, stand like a rock.’”
Abby’s shoulders slumped. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know,” Marty said. “If something isn’t super important, like what kind of coat to wear, do what other people do. But—”
“But when something is important, don’t change. Stick with your principles,” Theo said, cutting Marty off. “Do what you believe is right.”
“I know that.” Abby looked impatient. “I mean, what is it telling us to do? How is it supposed to help find my parents?”
“I don’t know, but—” Marty started to answer her.
“Which way is north?” Sam broke in, staring down at the compass in his hand.
“Sam, you’re holding a compass, and you’re asking which way is north?” Marty sighed.
“I’m serious.” Sam kept his eyes on the compass. “Which way?”
“Well, the sun is rising there.” Marty pointed out the door. “So that’s east. So that’s north.” She pointed a different direction.
“It’s not like the sun is going to rise in the southwest today. Sam, what’s up?”
“The compass doesn’t point north.” Sam looked up, feeling that fizzing excitement again.
“It has to,” Marty insisted. “The earth’s magnetic field—”
“Marty, it doesn’t. It’s pointing northeast.”
“That’s crazy.”
“No, it’s not.” Sam grinned. “It’s a clue.”
Marty insisted on running back to her room for her own compass and using it to check against the antique one they’d found in the wall. Her sleek black compass pointed directly north, but the needle of the old one definitely swung in a different direction.
“Old TJ gave us a clue at last,” Sam said. “The Quill has got to be northeast of here.”
“Then let’s go!” Abby looked ready to set off immediately.
“Hold it,” Theo said. “Wait a minute.”
“Wait?” Abby swung around to face him. “That Quill might be the only chance I have of seeing my parents again. What am I supposed to wait for? Why can’t we start right away?”
“For one thing,” Sam pointed out, “we’re still wearing our pajamas.”