When Boone stepped back into the suite a few minutes later, I gasped. He had shaved off his mustache, let his long hair hang to his shoulders, and put on a pair of shorts with tennis shoes and a t-shirt. He looked like he might be ready to throw ultimate Frisbee down at the park.
“Wow,” I whispered when he walked toward me. “Talk about a transformation.”
“Believe it or not, this is more or less my preferred look.” He touched his upper lip. “The mustache is an affectation for my role as clandestine operative.” He lowered his voice as he said those last two words. “But don’t tell anyone. It’ll be our secret.”
I smiled. I liked the idea of having secrets with him. “Well, I like either look on you, but this one is more my speed.”
He laughed. “If I said I preferred your usual jeans and blouses to this, would you hate me?”
“Not at all,” I said as I looked down at the jeans I’d borrowed from Beattie, which were far longer and looser than I typically wore. And given that she was a full foot taller than I was, I had rolled them up at the ankles, so I looked a bit ridiculous. Add to that the button-down shirt and the baseball cap I’d borrowed from Adaire, and I was definitely not looking myself. I’d tucked all my hair into the cap and pulled it low over my eyes, and I’d chosen my very utilitarian sneakers instead of my usual quirky shoes. I wasn’t going to be fooling anyone who was looking too closely, but hopefully it was enough.
Just then, Frank walked out of the other bedroom and stretched. “Wow, look at you two. Do I have to disguise myself, too?” He looked at little bit panicked at the thought, and I couldn’t blame him. When you were as big and brawny as Frank, clothing wasn’t going to do much to hide that.
“Nope,” Boone said. “You’re our distraction. We need you to be out and about nearby doing some shopping so that people think Poe and I are still here in the room.”
Frank grinned. “My nieces always expect gifts, so I can definitely handle that. You’ll call if you need me.”
“And keep you posted on our location at all times,” Boone replied before turning to me. “More coffee?” He pointed to the to-go cups that he’d set out on the table.
“Bless you,” I said as I poured a cup and took a long sip. “Ready when you are.”
“You go first, Poe. Change your walk and head out the front door. Walk three blocks to the right and go into the coffee shop there.” Boone glanced at the cup in my hand. “I trust you can drink that cup in that much time.”
“Oh yeah,” I said as I took another deep pull from the cup. “You’ll meet me there?”
“Yep. Order to go, and then wander on up the street. I’ll find you.” He held the door open for me. “I’ll be about five minutes behind.”
I smiled and walked out the door and down to the elevator. When I glanced back, Boone was watching me from the door and smiling. I blushed again.
As the elevator dropped to the lobby, I tried out different postures. Slouching. Standing up very tall. Leaning to one side. That one felt most natural, so I took a pose. When the door opened, I did a one-sided lean walk that I had adopted in high school to make fun of the boys who had thought they were so cool. I probably looked like I had a leg injury, but it definitely wasn’t my normal gait.
The lobby was almost empty, only Gregory the concierge was there, and while he gave me a small nod, nothing about his demeanor made me think he recognized me. I walked straight out of the hotel and to the right and drank my coffee. The morning air was cool, and I was glad of the warm coffee.
But true to my word, by the time I reached the coffee shop three blocks up, I was on empty and ready for more. The store looked like it had just opened, and the bleary-eyed young woman behind the counter stared at me for a moment before she was able to say, “What can I get you?”
I ordered a straight coffee with lots of room for cream and sugar, and then I took my time adding those in while I gave Boone time to catch up. I was eager to see what kind of gait change he had put on to throw off anyone who might identify him.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long because as soon as I stepped out of the coffee shop with my new walk, someone who was bouncing with each step joined me. “Good morning,” he said as he matched my pace. “Nice swagger.”
I laughed. “Thanks. Nice, um, hop thing.”
He let the bounce fade away and resumed his normal walk, which now that I studied it was actually a bit of a strut. I considered for a minute why this confident walk was now appealing when, just a couple of weeks ago, I had found it so obnoxious. A couple of embarrassing possibilities that included the word ’romance’ came to mind, but I disregarded them. I needed to stay focused.
“Anyone notice you?” I asked.
“Gregory said good morning,” Boone answered, “but he didn’t seem to be particularly interested in me.”
“Same,” I said. “Where are we headed?”
“Well, the lion clue made me think we need to head toward Lion’s Head Mountain,” Boone said with a nod toward a peak I could just see over the buildings in front of us.
I groaned. “Are we hiking?” I had on the right shoes, at least, but I wasn’t sure I had the stamina for climbing a mountain. Besides, the peak looked like it was all the way across the city. Even at a brisk pace, that walk was going to eat up most of the day.
“No, I expect that whoever designed this hunt was aware of the people he was dealing with. I can’t see Victora hiking up a mountain, can you?” Boone said with a small laugh.
I shook my head. “So where do you think we need to go?”
“I can’t be sure, of course, but I think the parking lot may do us.” He waved down a cab that was passing by. “You game?” he asked as he opened the door.
“Oh yeah,” I said. I was always game for a car ride and a treasure hunt. “Can we pretend we’re on The Amazing Race?”
“You mean fight the whole time and make terrible choices about travel?” Boone said as he slid in next to me. “Definitely… but without the fighting and the bad choices.”
I laughed as the cab pulled out and zoomed ahead on Boone’s direction.
The ride took about fifteen minutes, and I was very glad we hadn’t tried to walk it. The driver set us off without a word in the parking lot at the base of the trail and then headed back into the city. We’d probably taken him a good distance from his best chance at fares, so I was glad Boone had tipped him well. Maybe he could take it a little easy and enjoy the morning a bit.
The parking lot was, not surprisingly, empty, and I felt a little flicker of happiness in my chest when I realized that parking lots for hiking trails were pretty universal in their appearance. Flat, raggedy-edge things with portable toilets. Even the trail sign, made from stained logs and carved with the name of the trail and some guidelines painted in cream paint resembled those back home.
But because there wasn’t much there, I didn’t really know where to look, which didn’t matter that much because, well, I didn’t really know what I was looking for. “Now what?” I asked Boone.
He spun in a circle and then walked over to the trail marker and read the whole thing. He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
I walked over to join him and took the sheet of notes he handed me. I read the clue again. “Turn left at the golden lion.” There wasn’t an image of a lion anywhere on the sign, and I didn’t see anything that looked even vaguely golden. I sighed and then walked around the sign, hoping to get some sense of direction. Sometimes pacing helped, I’d learned.
When I’d circled the sign, I stopped and looked around the parking lot again. Besides the portable toilets, which I expected were changed out or at least cleaned on a regular basis, there wasn’t anything human-made here. This sign had to be it.
This time, I walked around the sign slowly, looking up and down, and that’s when I saw it, close to the ground on the back right pole—a little golden lion head stamped onto the wood. “Look,” I almost shouted before I realized that my voice carried like a cannon out here.
Boone jogged around the sign and bent down to see what I was pointing to. “Look at you!” he said. “I think you may have done this before.”
For the forty-millionth time that day, I blushed. “Maybe,” I said. “I’ll tell you while we walk.”
So as we strode what we thought was twenty paces, I told him about my hunt for Roanoke Island’s secret. He didn’t laugh, but he did make me promise to show him the image and what clues people thought they’d identified when we were done with this case, as he called it. “And next time you go look, I want to come along,” he said.
I smiled at this and agreed. Another treasure hunt, without these high stakes, would definitely be a fun thing to do with Boone.
The twenty paces led us to what looked like a pumphouse cover like some people still used in rural Virginia. It was wooden and stood about three feet high, and when Boone took a lap around it, he found the little golden lion stamped on the bottom right corner at the back. “Clearly, this is our next marker.”
“It would help if there were things to pick up or something at each location,” I said. Then, I took out my phone and snapped a picture of the lion. “A picture is worth a thousand words, right?” My nerves were getting to me, and all I could think about was Beattie and Adaire tied up in that warehouse. Was Frye giving them food? Water? Had they been able to go to the bathroom?”
“Hey, Poe, come back.” Boone put his hand on my arm. “I lost you for a second. You okay?”
“I just keep thinking about Beattie and Adaire. What if—”
Boone interrupted me. “Nope, we don’t think about that. Think about BB instead. You know he’s in that wheel spinning his little heart out. I gave him some papaya last night, by the way. I think we’re besties now.” He smiled when he saw my reaction.
I did as he suggested and imagined BB eating papaya, which actually helped. I took a minute and pictured the early morning sun on his golden-orange fur. Thought about the way his little eyes blinked when he was sleepy. About how he snored just loudly enough for it to be sweet. I gathered all those details in my mind and focused my energy there. Now, I could go to BB when I started to feel anxious. “Thanks,” I said to Boone.
“No problem,” he said. “Okay, so I have a guess at this one, but I want your confirmation.”
He handed me the next stanza from our cipher. “Serenity is ahead if you fly toward the rising sun,” I read out loud. “Serenity now,” I said with a giggle.
“Oh no, now you’re quoting Seinfeld. We’re in trouble,” Boone said with a chuckle.
I opened the map on my phone and zoomed in to where we were. Then, I pulled back the scope slowly, looking east from where we were. The phrase as the crow flies had come to mind, and I had the feeling that’s what the clue was referring to.
Sure enough, almost exactly due east from where we stood, there was a place called “Sereno Estates” on the map. I pointed to it on my screen. “This where you were thinking?” I asked Boone.
“Exactly. Did you bring your wings?”
I patted my pockets. “Alas, no. You?”
He shook his head, but at least we had Uber. He tapped his phone and then walked around to sit down on the wooden box. After I joined him, he said, “At least we know the clues are pretty literal.” He stared off across the road a few feet in front of us. “It’s almost like this person wants whatever they’re hiding to be found.”
“I was thinking the same thing. If they wanted to actually hide this thing, why make a map at all? It’s not like we’re in the Old West where they have to bury something and then make themselves or their compadres a map to find it again.”
“Did you just use the word compadres in a serious sentence?” Boone said with a smirk. “That’s the best.”
I shook my head, but then I heard tires on the road in front of us. “Someone’s coming.”
“Down,” Boone said as he grabbed my hand and pulled me to the dirt before putting his hand on the small of my back and pushing me flat to the ground.
Just then, a small, white hatchback drove by slowly, and I could just make out the driver’s face looking left at us as they drove by. I couldn’t see who it was though, but they had clearly known to look over here. I just hoped the short grasses around us and kept us hidden.
As soon as the car was gone, Boone popped up. “You up for a sprint?”
I started down the road at my fastest pace without answering. Boone was right behind me and typing into his phone. “We’re going to need a different pickup location,” he said as he caught up.
Fortunately, adrenaline made me run faster, so we made it to the intersection just south of us in a few minutes. While I was super winded when the car with the Uber sticker pulled up, I was also exhilarated, especially when we got into the back seat of our ride and closed the door just as the white hatchback came down the lane behind us.
We quickly ducked in the backseat until the car passed. When I sat up and saw our driver’s puzzled expression, I said, “We’re playing a game of hide and seek.”
She didn’t look any less confused, but she also didn’t ask any questions. I’d take it.
“Do you think they saw us?” I asked Boone as the driver turned around and headed back the way the white car had just gone.
Boone shook his head. “If they had, I don’t think they would have kept going.” He studied the road ahead of us. “Did you see the driver’s face?”
“No, I tried, but I couldn’t see through the glass. You?”
“Nope. But it’s time to call Frank and broaden the scope of his work this morning.” He picked up his phone. “Aaran will be calling in a couple of minutes, too.”
I glanced down at my own phone. 5:50. It was going to be a long day.
After Boone gave Frank the added responsibility of keeping an eye out for a white hatchback near the hotel, we rode in silence until the driver pulled up at what looked like a 1970’s apartment complex. The stone sign by the entrance to the parking lot said, “Sereno Estates.” We were here.
Boone paid the driver, and as we stepped out of the car his phone rang. Aaran. He took my hand as he answered, and when he led me to a wall at the side of one of the apartment buildings and then leaned one arm against the wall beside my head, I felt like I was in one of those teen movies where the girl is getting hit on by the hot guy.
“Okay good,” Boone said. “Let’s meet back at your room at four. That should give Poe and me enough time.” He glanced over at me and leaned in a bit. “Meanwhile, you’ll check in on your brother.”
I didn’t know exactly what that meant or how Aaran was going to see if Beattie and Adaire were okay, but I was glad that someone was at least trying to keep an eye on them. I was feeling a little bit guilty about enjoying this treasure hunt, even though I knew it was the key to saving them.
Boone hung up, put his phone in his pocket, and then framed me with his arms. This was definitely a 1980s teen blockbuster happening here. “You okay?”
I nodded and then looked from one of his arms to the other. “Want to explain what’s happening here?”
“Blending in.” He leaned forward and kissed me softly. “Two random people just loitering in a parking lot would be suspicious he said against my lips.
My heart was pounding so hard that while I heard what he said I wasn’t processing it very well. “Uh-huh.”
Boone kissed me again. “Do you mind?” He asked after a few moments.
I shook my head just a little. “I don’t mind,” I said breathlessly, but then I forced the cloud of pheromones from my mind and smiled. “Good plan, though. Very smooth.”
“That is literally the first time anyone has given me that compliment,” he said as he spun and leaned against the wall next to me. “A case of work and pleasure converging in the best way.” He smiled over at me. “Aaran has the other set of books, so he and Ivan are going to look for a cipher on those pages.”
“And he’s going to check on Adaire?” I asked to reassure myself.
“Last Ivan was there, they were both fine. Sleeping, it looked like, and unharmed.” Boone was scanning the parking lot and buildings around us as he spoke. “Frye is honoring his word. That’s good.”
I nodded and then stood up straight. “Now what do we do?” I was scouting for the location of our next lion, too. My eyes alighted on the complex sign, and I started to walk over there, taking Boone’s hand for good measure. Measure for my own pleasure or for cover, I wasn’t about to try to parse that out.
When I reached the sign, I sat down on the ground facing the back of it and pulled on Boone’s hand to get him to lean against the sign, a reversal of our positions from a moment before. As he did, I studied the back of the sign, trying to catch the glint of gold from a lion’s head. And there it was, on the bottom right of the sign, just visible above the dirt.
I kicked my eyes in that direction to let Boone know I’d found it, and when he nodded, he said, “So always on the bottom right. And signs seem to be a theme.”
“Seems so,” I said and waited as Boone unfolded his notes and read the next line of the cipher.
It didn’t take long for us to figure out, using the map on my phone again, that our next stop was the German International School just north of where we were. Deutsch and Arctic were just not words that typically went together. Given that the school was just a bit over a mile away, we decided to walk. It would be just as fast as waiting for a car to come get us.
Boone stood and put out his hand to pull me up, and when he did, he tugged me right into his chest. “Got to keep the cover intact,” he said as he kissed me again.
This time, I pulled away. I wasn’t about to let myself get swept up again, especially when I couldn’t be sure that, for Boone, this wasn’t just all about the mission. I needed to keep my head on straight.
The walk to the school was beautiful. Lovely houses, parks, views of the mountains ahead. We were in a part of the city that was very much home to the people who lived here, and as we approached the school, I confirmed my own suspicion that this was one of the wealthier neighborhoods in the city. The Olympic-sized swimming pool by the school’s entrance was kind of a hint.
Beyond the entrance, the campus looked quite large, and I thought about how wonderful it must be for the children who got to go there. I hoped they had sliding scale fees, like I knew many of the private schools in the States did, so that children from a variety of backgrounds could attend. With a pang of sadness, I remembered that’s how Xavier had been able to go to the best private school in Baltimore, when his parents had jobs at the post office and as an office manager. That opportunity had given him the leg up he needed to get a full college scholarship and then a TA’s position for graduate school. It had put him ahead… until he’d made some bad choices.
I pushed Xavier from my thoughts, cold as it felt to do that. I didn’t have time or energy just then to think about anything but the next clue and saving Beattie. Hopefully, doing that would also help us figure out who killed Xavier. But the living always took precedence over the dead.
Given that our mapmaker had relied on signposts so far, we didn’t even bother trying to make our way onto campus. The space looked pretty secure, which was a good thing, of course, but if we’d had to go inside, we might have met our first real obstacle. Again, I thought about how relatively easy this trail was to follow now that we had the full set of riddles.
Now, our undercover personas had to take on a more posh air, so I let my hair down and forced myself to walk with a slight sway in my hips, like a woman who knew her beauty but didn’t need to flaunt it. I tried to channel Jennifer Aniston or Rihanna on those days when they went out au naturel and looked all the more beautiful in photos because they seemed to have been caught unawares.
Boone and I discussed the school’s campus and talked about how Aubrey and Evangeline would love it here, all the while making our way around to the back of the large wooden sign that announced the school’s name.
Beyond the entrance, I could see a woman in a uniform watching us, and as we walked around the back of the sign, trying to act as if we were simply getting a closer view of the campus itself, she picked up a phone. “Time to go,” I said just as I spotted the lion head on the back of the sign. “We’re about to get some attention.”
We walked quickly back out onto the sidewalk and had just begun to walk away when the woman approached in a golf cart. “Excuse me. May I help you?” she asked.
I smiled at her and leaned down. “Oh, I’m sorry if we disturbed you. We’re just thinking of sending our children here in a couple of years and wanted to take a look at the campus while we were out for our morning stroll.” That seemed like a feasible explanation for our behavior, perhaps less skulking behind the school sign.
“I see,” she said and smiled. “Would you like a tour? I’m about to ride the campus, and I’d be happy to tell you a bit as I go.”
I started to say yes, only to avoid suspicion, and had opened my mouth to say so when Boone put his hand on my arm and said, “Honey, remember, I have that call at 7:30. Another time?” he said as he turned to the guard.
“Of course,” she said and smiled at both of us. “You can always call admissions and schedule a tour, or if you’re out walking again, come by. I’ll take you myself.” She waved and did a U-turn back onto the campus proper.
“That was nice of her,” I said as we walked just a bit faster than before.
“Hmm, yeah,” Boone said and took out his phone. “Time to move along.”
I glanced at him sharply. “You think she was suspicious of us, that she may be working with the mapmaker?”
“It could have just been that we seemed odd enough to warrant her attention. Or maybe she really is just kind.” He shook his head. “But I doubt it.
We walked to the next intersection and had just turned the corner when I saw a familiar car approaching from ahead. “You were right,” I said as I grabbed Boone’s hand and dove down a short slope onto some sort of sports field below.
Once we stopped rolling, we both lay there, staring up at the clear sky. “You okay?” I said.
“You saw them?” Boone asked as he turned onto one side and looked at me.
I nodded. “Same car.” I could feel people watching us and realized we had just rolled down to the sidelines of what appeared to be an early-morning cricket match. “Kiss me. We need to keep our cover.”
He leaned down and kissed my cheek quickly before standing and helping me to my feet once again. “Darling, you must watch where you are going,” he said in an English accent. “You almost killed us both.”
I blushed and then looked over at my shoulder to the men who were now returning to their match. Apparently clumsy women were not that remarkable. Sometimes the patriarchy was useful, I supposed.
We made our way over to a low bench beneath some trees at the corner of the field, still well below street level and thus pretty well hidden from view, except for the cricket teams.
“Time for the next clue?” Boone asked.
I nodded. “More than time.”