Chapter 9

M.E. sank down to the floor and rested her chin in her hand. “We’re doomed,” she said. “I knew we shouldn’t have come in here.”

“I’m so sorry,” Daisy said, tears welling up again.

Cody turned to Daisy. “It’s okay. Now back to the Escape Code. What if it helps someone find their way out? I’ll bet even Sarah Winchester got lost in this mansion sometimes.”

Quinn looked at the others. “Cody’s right. We’re Code Busters, remember? There’s always a logical way to solve a puzzle—or escape a maze—but we have to figure out her code.”

“Or we could just make a lot of noise,” Mika said. “Maybe someone will hear us.”

Cody glanced around. “There’s no listening tube in here—just a bunch of old torn wallpaper with faded flowers. If there was, we could yell into it and someone could hear us.”

“Let’s try looking for hidden doors,” Luke suggested. “Some of the other rooms had them, so maybe this one does too.”

Everyone searched for a way out, with no luck. Cody began to feel this was more like a prison than another room in a mystery house.

“Guys,” she said to the others. “Sarah was super­smart, right? She was logical, and everything in this house seems to have a plan or purpose. At least to her.”

“Seriously?” M.E. asked. “Staircases that go nowhere and hallways with dead ends? That doesn’t seem so logical to me.”

“You’re right, M.E.” Cody said, “but just because it doesn’t make sense to us doesn’t mean it didn’t make sense to her. I mean, she must have designed the house with something in mind. What about all those spiderwebs and the number thirteen? They must have meant something to her.”

“Hmmm,” Quinn said. “I wonder if the Fibonacci sequence has anything to do with the design of the house.”

“Why do you think that?” Mika asked.

“Well,” Quinn said, scratching his head, “she was interested in it, remember? And her favorite number—thirteen—is a Fibonacci number.”

“What’s a fibronashy?” Daisy asked, wiping tears away.

“It’s pronounced fib-o-natt-chi,” Quinn said. “It’s a sequence of numbers discovered by a famous mathematician named Leonardo of Pisa.”

Quinn pulled a pencil out of his backpack, then got down on his knees, shined his light, and drew a small square on the floor. Inside it, he wrote the number one. Next to it, he added another square and entered the number one again. On top of that, he drew another square and, this time, wrote the number two. He continued drawing squares and adding numbers until he reached the number thirteen.

“These are Fibonacci numbers,” he explained. “They follow a sequence. Each number after the first two is the sum of the two preceding ones.”

“Huh?” Daisy said, clearly confused.

“Look,” he said. “One plus one makes two, right?”

She nodded.

“One plus two makes three,” he continued. “Two plus three makes five. And so on—eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four, fifty-five, eighty-nine, one hundred forty-four—”

Daisy held up a hand. “I get it!”

“You can also make a Fibonacci spiral out of the squares,” Quinn added. He demonstrated by drawing arcs inside each of the squares. Cody recognized the snail shell shape.

“Yeah, but what’s this got to do with anything?” Daisy asked, shaking her head.

“So,” Quinn continued, “the Fibonacci spiral is found in all kinds of things, even in nature, like on fern leaves, pineapple sprouts, artichokes, pine cones, an ocean wave—it’s the perfect spiral. It’s even in this wallpaper.” He pointed to the wall.

Cody squinted at the shabby paper covered with once-bright flowers, now looking faded and neglected. There was the snail shell design, repeated throughout the wallpaper!

Daisy shook her head. “I still don’t—”

Quinn cut her off. “I think it has something to do with the number thirteen.”

“Like a code,” Cody said, “to help her find her way out?”

“What kind of code?” Mika asked.

The kids were quiet. Cody began searching the room. The others joined her, and soon Mika spotted something. “Hey, guys, does this look like a code?” She shined her light on a spot on the wallpaper. Ten tiny dots formed a circle. Two of the dots—one at the top and one on the right—looked like tiny black spiders.

“This is like the steganography code we learned,” Cody said, “where coded messages were hidden in artwork. Maybe this is a coded message that blends into the wallpaper.”

“Like a clock dial?” M.E. suggested.

Cody shook her head. “A clock would have twelve dots in a circle. This has only ten dots.” She pulled out her collection of decoder cards and went through them. None of them reminded her of the circle with the dots—except one—the Telephone Code decoder card. “Look, it has ten numbers.”

“You think she used the Telephone Code?” Quinn asked.

“Did they even have telephones back then?” M.E. asked.

“Dude, these dots are in a circle, not like phones today,” Luke said.

“That’s right,” Cody said. “Remember, Sarah Winchester lived in the early nineteen hundreds. Back then, telephones had round dials with numbers and letters on them. We saw one in Sarah’s Attic.”

“So?” Quinn asked, still sounding skeptical.

“I think this is a code Sarah left for herself,” Cody explained. “See those spiders? They’re right where the numbers three and one would be on an old telephone dial.”

“Thirty-one?” M.E. asked.

“Or thirteen,” Cody suggested.

“Thirteen!” Quinn said, his face lit up with excitement. “Part of the Fibonacci sequence.”

“She must have put that code there for a reason,” Mika said. “But what does it mean?”

Cody ran her fingers over the circle and felt bumps where the two spiders had been drawn. She pressed them.

Click.

Another hidden door opened.

“Amazing!” M.E. whispered. “It’s a way out!”