Lily ran back down the hillock to the camp. She carefully fished out the There and Back Again™Guide to Greater Delaware from Jasper’s pack. She also took a notebook and a pen.
Bntno was muttering in his sleep as usual. His pillow was over his head. Jasper was snoring slightly, his arms sprawled in the grass. Lily left them and made her way back to Katie’s side.
“Okay,” said Lily. “I wonder if we can’t work out which mountain is which through deduction.” She flipped open the notebook. She thumbed through the There and Back Again™. She passed it to Katie. “Read this part out loud again,” she said.
Katie looked at a couple of the pictures on the page—both of women sitting smiling on top of heaps of grain—and then read: “‘Though the Four Peaks look the same height, trekkers will find that Mount Minndfl is actually considerably shorter than the nearby peak covered with deceptively inviting pine woods. English explorer and adventurer Leslie Arbuckle-Smythe climbed both that forested peak—despite its imposing height—and Mount Bdreth because he was too superstitious to climb near the ancient, rune-inscribed pillar that stands on one of the other mountains.’”
“Okay?” said Lily.
“Okay,” said Katie. “What now?”
“We have four mountains. Called?”
“I don’t know,” said Katie. “They all sound like someone hawking loogies into a metal trash can.”
Lily leaned over and read the guidebook over her friend’s shoulder. She said, “Tlmp, Bdreth, Drgsl, and Minndfl.”
“Right. Loogies.”
Lily said, “So now let’s write down what we know about them.”
She wrote (and read):
“1. The monastery of Vbngoom is on top of Tlmp.
2. Lesley Arbuckle-Smythe climbed Mount Bdreth and the mountain with the pine forest because he was too superstitious to climb the mountain with the pillar.
3. Mount Minndfl is shorter than the mountain with the pine forest.”
“Okay,” said Katie. “Now I’m completely confused.”
“So am I,” said Lily. “So let’s try this.” On her tablet, she made a kind of tic-tac-toe grid, four columns by four rows. Across the top, in each column, she wrote the name of one of the mountains: Drgsl,Bdreth,Tlmp, and Minndfl. Then she continued, “Okay. Now, we have four mountains in front of us: the pillar mountain, the lake mountain, the pine mountain, and the glacier mountain. And we have to figure out which is which.” In the rows going down, Lily wrote pillar,lake,pine forest, and glacier. Her chart looked like this:
“Now, we can try to figure out which mountain is which by a process of elimination.” Lily looked at the clues for a minute and then thought out loud. “Okay. Okay. We know from clue number two that Mount Bdreth is not the mountain with the pine forest or the mountain with the pillar.”
“How?”
“Because it says that this man climbed Mount Bdreth and the mountain with the pine forest instead of the mountain with the pillar. So Mount Bdreth must not be either of them. So we write X’s in the Bdreth column, next to pillar and pine forest. Because Bdreth can’t be either one.” She scribbled down the X’s, so her chart looked like this:*
“Oh, yeah…,” said Katie. “Now it’s too bad we don’t know the heights of the different mountains, because then maybe we could figure out which one is Mount Minndfl.”
“We don’t need to know the heights,” said Lily. “That third clue at least tells us that Mount Minndfl is not the pine mountain. So we put an X where the Minndfl column meets the pine mountain row.”
“So what do we have?”
“Well, Mount Tlmp could be any of them…so can Mount Drgsl. Mount Bdreth could be either the lake or glacier. And Mount Minndfl could be the glacier, the lake, or the pillar.”
Katie looked at this set of clues, her interest clearly piqued. “Hmm,” she said. “We need to know more.”
“We need another clue,” said Lily.
Luckily they were not living in a world where there are rarely enough clues, and we wander around sadly in our trench coats, kicking at tired grass in empty lots as the greasy rain falls. They were in a book where the final clue always comes to you, and you snap, and say—
Lily snapped. “I’ve got it!” she said. “I just thought of something!”
“Uh-huh?” said Katie.
“The menu at that restaurant we went to had deep-fried Mount Drgsl Squid on it!”
“You’re not talking about breakfast, are you?”
“No—so there must be water on Mount Drgsl. Mount Drgsl must be the mountain with the lake on it!”
Katie’s mouth was open. “Oh, yeah!” she said, with admiration in her voice. “Yeah! Because the squid’s there! Write that down!”
“Okay,” said Lily, looking over her notes. “So we know that Mount Drgsl is the lake. I can put an O there. That means that…” (She crossed things out.) “Mount Bdreth, which we said could be either the glacier or the lake can’t be the lake. The lake is ruled out. So Mount Bdreth must be the glacier…”
Katie leaned over to look at the notebook, grabbing Lily’s shoulder. “And that means that Mount Minndfl must be the pillar!”
“And so Mount Tlmp—,” said Lily—and they both exclaimed together, “must be the mountain with the pine forest on it!”
They gave each other a high five.
They looked up at Tlmp, towering above them, the peak snaring clouds.
“Jasper will be so excited!” said Lily.
“Yeah,” said Katie. “I feel kind of bad for being a jerk to him.”
“He understands,” said Lily.
“That I’m a jerk?”
“No, you’re not a jerk,” said Lily. “You’re a wonderful friend.”
“Not always.”
Lily smiled. “You saved me from cannibals.”
Katie thought about this. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, yeah. The cannibals. I think I just pulled on your arm a lot.”
“That was good,” said Lily.
“The cannibals would have pulled on your arm too. Except they would have had buffalo-style hot sauce on it.”
“Your pulling kept me running. And you slowed down your own running for me. So I wouldn’t fall behind.”
“No I didn’t.”
“You know you did.”
“Lily…”
“I know I’m slow.”
“You’re not slow.”
“I’m kind of slow. Thank you for slowing down.”
“Can we not make this into one of those conversations where everyone talks about how pathetic they are?” said Katie. She stood up. “Let’s go wake up the boys and tell them we’ve figured out where the monastery is.”
They grinned at each other.
Together they ran down the hill and toward the camp.
When they got there, both Jasper and Bntno were still in their sleeping bags. Bntno was still muttering under his pillow.
Katie tiptoed over and prepared to seize Jasper by the shoulders and wake him up with a start, screaming, “Fire!” She stood with her fingers massaging the air.
Then she looked up at Lily. Lily had walked near Bntno’s sleeping bag and was frozen strangely in place. Lily put her finger to her lips.
So Katie was very quiet when she reached down and shook Jasper and whispered, “Jas…Hey, Jas, we figured out which mountain is which.”
She looked again at Lily for approval. Lily was frantically waving her hands and shaking her head. Lily pointed to Bntno’s sleeping bag.
Katie didn’t know what was going on, but she froze. They both listened.
“Come in, Ministry of Silence…,” Bntno was muttering. “Here, Agent Bntno…Ministry of Silence, please come in…”
Bntno was a spy!