| |
––––––––
DRAKE LOOKED AROUND the room for the red team and spotted them sitting at a table off to the side of where Bruce typically did his morning briefing. Unlike most of the other teams who were working on the last bites of breakfast, the red team was already sitting at attention and had their game faces on.
At eight-forty on the dot, Bruce and Andy appeared. Once again, Bruce greeted people while Andy set up his laptop. The teams applauded when Andy was ready to go, and Bruce took his spot.
“Good morning, everyone. I hope everyone enjoyed the letterboxing yesterday, and based on some stories I’ve heard, some of you had some difficulties. That’s okay though because today is a brand-new day. Before I send you out, does anyone want to hear the results of yesterday’s leg?”
Bruce waited for the chorus of yeses to die down and picked up a note from the table.
“Team red came in first with a time of four hours and seventeen minutes. Team pink was second at five hours thirty minutes, and team black was third with a time of five hours and forty-two minutes. Here are the updated standings.”
Bruce turned around and pointed at the monitor, which was blank.
“Andy, come on, I thought you were ready.”
“Sorry, Bruce, technical problem.”
Andy checked a couple of things on his laptop, and as a last resort, got up and wiggled the HMDI cord running into the monitor. After a second, the spreadsheet appeared on the screen.
“Looks like we moved up,” Allie said to Drake.
Drake noticed it as well. Their team had jumped from ninth to fifth. The red team had the overall lead by an increasing margin over the second-place team.
“Yeah, but we’re still almost three thousand points behind the lead team,” Drake said.
“Geocachers, today is all about my favorite geocache type, the mystery cache,” Bruce said.
The crowd’s reaction to Bruce’s statement was mixed. Some people cheered; others moaned.
“There are fifty geocaches hidden out in the field, but to find them, you’ll have to solve fifty puzzles. To help you do that, you’ll have to rely on your own intelligence with a helpful assist in what information you find in the schoolhouse. Because you’ll have to do some work on the front end, chances are you’ll be caching after dark. Since that’s the case, we have added two flashlights to your backpacks. By now, I shouldn’t have to remind you that the terrain out there is dangerous, so watch where you’re driving if you’re out past sundown. The deadline has been extended by an hour, so you have until ten tonight to turn in your sheets. Instead of a cache list, today you have a booklet. Each geocache has its own page describing the puzzle you need to solve to get the coordinates. And there are plenty of blank pages in the back of the book to use as scrap paper. Don’t lose the book though, you’ll have to submit it when you check in, and all the pages will need to be there. So, if you tear some pages out of the book, make sure you hold on to them. Like the first day, each cache has random points assigned to it, but since there are only fifty of them, we doubled the points. You’ll have a minimum of two points and a maximum of a hundred points in the caches. Any questions?”
Bruce looked over at the crowd. There were no questions, only the looks of determined geocachers ready for the next challenge to begin.
Suddenly, Roy’s hand shot up in the air.
“Yes?”
“How will we know if the solutions are correct?”
Bruce smiled. “That’s the question I was waiting for. I know you’re used to having an online checker to verify you have the puzzle answer right, but you won’t have that luxury today. Instead, when you want a solution checked, take the puzzle to Andy, who will wait for you next door in the church. Present him the puzzle you want verified and he’ll give you either a green checkmark or a red X on that page. Green means you got it right, red means it’s wrong. Here’s the rub. You can only get a puzzle checked once. If you have it wrong, you’re welcome to figure out the correct answer, but you can’t ask Andy for a recheck. At that point, you’ll have to rely on your solving skills and best guesses. Also, you can only get one puzzle checked at a time. If there’s a line behind you, you get a check on one puzzle only, then go to the back of the line if you need any additional puzzles verified. Another thing, you’re not required to get a check, so if you’re confident you have the right answer the first time around, run with it. Are there any other questions?”
The group remained silent.
“Okay, everyone. Come and get your backpack, and good luck!”
The teams rushed forward to collect their gear. Allie got theirs while Drake headed to the kitchen to grab the lunches.
Allie was at the table making sure all their equipment was in the backpack when Drake returned carrying a large silver bag.
“What’s that?”
Drake smiled. “Our lunches. I was right, there are more options than just salami. They put everything in this bag to stay cool. Hey, are you sure you’re going to be okay today?”
Allie put everything back in the bag and stood up. She had the leg brace on, which hindered her movement, even with the cane. “I should be. I admit, I’m a little stiff, and I took a couple of pills this morning, so I’m not feeling any pain yet. Let’s just hope there aren’t any trees to climb or mountains to slide down. Come on, let’s go.”
Drake took the gear and the lunch sack and held the door for Allie as they left the restaurant.
“Schoolhouse was next to the church, wasn’t it?” Drake asked.
“Yep,” Allie answered.
They stepped out into the street and headed toward the tall white steeple at the end of the road. As they passed a barrel, Drake extracted a half dozen bottles of water and added them to the large lunch bag.
“I can carry something. I’m not a frail old woman,” Allie protested.
“Not yet, anyway,” Drake said.
Allie raised her cane and whacked Drake on the butt. Drake laughed and ran a few steps ahead to get out of the way of her reach. When they pulled even with the UTV barn, Drake left Allie alone for a few minutes. He stored the lunches and water into their vehicle and caught up to her as she was getting to the schoolhouse door.
A single, large room dominated the schoolhouse. There were two rows of six tables each, with enough seating for twenty-four people in all. Around the perimeter of the room were bookshelves from floor to ceiling, except for where the windows let in the sunlight. Board games and jigsaw puzzles of all types stuffed one six-foot section of shelves from top to bottom, and another held stacks and stacks of comic books. Non-fiction books dominated a large section of shelf space, and another area held rows of textbooks on every subject imaginable, from algebra to zoology. The centerpiece of the non-fiction section was a complete twenty-five volume encyclopedia set from 1972.
At the room’s front was a teacher’s desk, and atop the desk sat a single plastic red apple and a wooden paddle with holes drilled into it to lessen wind resistance. Hanging on the walls on either side of the desk hung sepia toned portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Directly behind the desk, an American flag was on display, complete with thirty-seven stars.
Teams occupied eight of the tables, so Drake and Allie settled into an empty one and Drake took the booklet from the backpack and set it on the table.
“We both know you’re better at these puzzles than I am. How should we handle it?”
Allie took the book and paged through it to get an idea of what they were dealing with. “This doesn’t look as bad as it could be. There are several ciphers to solve, of course. And quite a few math puzzles, and I know how much you love those. There’s a few where we only need to find information on several topics. I guess we should probably divide them up. You take the easier ones, and I’ll work on the ciphers. Are any of the whiteboards free?”
Drake looked around the room and spotted a group of portable whiteboards lined up along one wall. He got up and rolled one back to the table. The board was four feet high and two feet wide, and they could write on both sides. Drake took off again and returned with a coffee mug filled with dry erase markers, as well as two erasers.
“I don’t suppose the teacher has a ruler or a pair of scissors in her desk drawer?” Allie asked.
Drake left for a third time and returned with a plastic tub a little larger than a shoe box. “Here you go.”
Allie opened the box and looked inside. She found a random smattering of supplies, including a pair of scissors, a roll of tape, paper clips, rubber bands, rubber cement, a foot-long wooden ruler, a ball of yarn, and a single violet crayon.
“Here, I’ve got an easy one for you to start with,” Allie said.
Allie grabbed the ruler from the box, lined it up against the spine of the booklet, tore out a page, and handed it to Drake.
Drake looked at the page, which looked like a checkerboard with sixteen squares, four high by four wide. He turned the page over and saw it was blank.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked.
Allie rolled her eyes and pulled the cache list from the previous day out of the backpack and turned it over. On the page were the sixteen stamps from the letterboxes with random line patterns on them.
Drake looked at the cache sheet, then at the puzzle page. “I got it now. Like a jigsaw puzzle?”
Allie smiled. “That’s right. Go for it.”
He grabbed the pair of scissors and carefully cut out the stamps from the cache sheet and laid them out on the table. Once he had them all free, he shuffled the pieces until they aligned with each other. Within five minutes, he had the correct combination and used the rubber cement to paste the squares onto the cache page. Once he had them in the correct order, the random lines combined to reveal the corrected coordinates for the puzzle. When he finished, he picked up the paper and grinned at Allie.
“Done!” he proclaimed with a good deal of pride.
“Sweet. One down, a bunch to go,” Allie answered without looking away from the whiteboard where she was trying to work out a cipher. “There are two puzzles in there based on the periodic table of elements. Go see if you can find a chemistry book.”
Drake took off for the reference section and, after a few minutes, returned with a volume from the encyclopedia. “All the textbooks were gone, so I brought this.”
Allie looked at the book. “That’ll do.”
She capped her dry erase pen, set it aside, and flipped through the booklet until she found the first element puzzle, and read through it.
“Okay, to get the coordinates for this one, simply read through the story. See those words where there are two bold letters together?” She pointed at an example on the page.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Good. All you need to do is find those, and I’m guessing the atomic number of the element it represents. For example, He is helium, so the atomic number is two. All the puzzles will have north coordinates starting with thirty-two and west coordinates starting with a hundred twelve, so you don’t need to bother with the degrees. You good?”
Drake nodded and started on the puzzle. He found a highlighter in the supply box, then read through the short story on the page and found all the instances of bold text. As he discovered them, he added a stripe of yellow through the elements. Once he had the list, he copied the elements from the story and converted them to their atomic numbers. Within seven minutes, he was done and set that one aside.
As he was paging through the book to find the other chemistry puzzle, Allie clapped her hands, grabbed the page she was working from, and jotted down the coordinates.
“That one took you a bit,” Drake said.
“Too long. I recognized it right away as a Caesar Cipher, but I had to figure out the right rotational. I’m never going to complain about the speed of an online solver again.”
“Maybe we should stay away from the cipher puzzles and pick off the low-hanging fruit first?”
“Good idea, Drake.”
Allie took the book, paged through it, tore out pages as she scanned them, and made three piles on the table. “Okay. The first pile are things I think we can get through fairly fast. It’s about half the caches. The second pile had about fifteen puzzles I think are doable, but will take some time. The last pile are ones I’m not so confident on and may take a while for us to solve.”
Allie grabbed the first one off the easy pile and handed the second one to Drake.
Allie’s was a Pigpen Cipher, which was a breeze for her to figure out, while Drake took one look at his puzzle and realized it was a message in Morse Code. As Drake ran to find a Morse Code table, Allie finished her puzzle and gathered the next one on the pile.
Drake returned and set a book on the table.
“Can you go find me a book with a Braille table in it?” Allie asked.
Drake nodded and took off again. While he was gone, Allie opened the book he had retrieved, found the Morse Code table, and had translated a dozen letters in the message before Drake returned.
“How’s it going?” Drake asked.
“So far, I have ‘the coordinate’, but I just started. You want to continue with this one, or work on the Braille?”
Drake reached for the puzzle Allie had started. “I’ll take this one. And I’ll race you. Whoever loses takes the next puzzle no matter what it is.”
“Okay, then go,” Allie said as she opened the book Drake had and looked for a Braille table. Once she found it, she broke the dots on the puzzle sheet into groups of six and started translating them into letters.
“I like these puzzles,” Drake said. “They’re not as bad as I thought.”
“I think you dislike mystery caches because you don’t want to take the time and get impatient with them if you can’t figure them out in ten seconds or fewer. I, on the other hand, like the thought process that goes into creating them, and then solving them. How many of these do you think we should do before we go out searching for the caches?”
Drake glanced at his watch. “It’s quarter after nine now. Let’s work on the puzzles for another hour and see how many we get done. Then we’ll judge if it’s time to go or not. I mean, if we run out of caches, we can always come back here and do more of the puzzles.”
“We can, but would traveling out and back save us any time?”
Drake shook his head. “Probably not. But like the first day, I don’t think these were all meant to be found. There’s no sense spending the whole day doing puzzles for caches we wouldn’t find in time, anyway.”
Allie checked her puzzle page, added the last three letters, and placed her sheet face down on the table. Then she collected the other few puzzles they’d finished and added them to the completed pile.
“That was quick,” Drake said.
“Mine had fewer words than yours did.”
Allie selected the next page and looked at it. There was a line that went through the center of the page. Above the line, there were seven logos of professional baseball and football teams. Below the line were logos of eight basketball and hockey teams. As quickly as she could, she penciled in the team names she knew below the logos.
“Chicago Cubs, Buffalo Bills, Green Bay Packers... hey, Drake, have you seen this logo?”
She pointed at the one she meant. It was a letter B with what looked like spokes around a circle.
“Yeah. Boston Bruins. Ice hockey. My dad was a big fan of theirs.”
Allie wrote the answer on the page.
“What about this one? It says Oilers. Isn’t that Houston?”
Drake smiled. “Not anymore. They moved to Nashville and are the Titans now. How could you not know that? We went to three games last year. Try Edmonton Oilers. Hockey again.”
“The hockey ones are hard.”
“That’s only because you don’t want to go to any Predators games with me. You need any more help with that one?”
“Nope. I got it.”
Allie looked at her scribbles and noticed that all the city names started with letters from A through I, which she then converted to numbers one through nine. She replaced the team logos with the number corresponding to the first letter of the city name, then added the puzzle to the completed pile.
As she picked up the next one, she noticed the red team was already packing up and heading for the door.
“Are they finished already? How can that be? We’ve all been here less than thirty minutes,” she said.
Drake looked up in time to see the door close. “I have no clue.” He looked around to see if anyone was close enough to overhear him. “Remember what you and I and T.R. talked about yesterday? I think we need to monitor that team if we can. Something to me just doesn’t sit right with the way they’re blowing through this competition every day.”
Allie nodded. “I agree. It’s like they already know where everything is. We’ll keep them in mind as our top suspects, but for now, get back to work, mister!”
