Spotting the preschool driveway, Rachel pulled in, knowing the parking lot would be deserted on a Saturday. Joon halted behind her. “What did you find?” he asked.
The fizzing feeling was rushing through her, making her want to laugh out loud as she pulled the key out of her pocket and held it up. She half expected trumpets to blow triumphantly, or the key to glow in the sunlight, but it was just a tarnished old key. It didn’t do anything extraordinary. She felt extraordinary, though, and that was enough. “Any idea what it opens?”
He held his hand out, and she passed it to him. “A lock?”
“Helpful.”
“It seems small for a door.”
“Unless it’s a small door?”
He turned it over and squinted at it. “There are words on the stem. Wish we had baking soda and vinegar.” Giving it back to her, he dropped his backpack to the ground and began rooting through it. He pulled out an eyeglass-cleaning cloth.
She tried it, rubbing the key until some of the crust cleared. Two words appeared:
“Find us.”
“Huh,” she said. A repeated clue. Almost.
“Us?” Joon asked.
“Nancy and the other spies?” Rachel guessed. If the first clue had pointed to Nancy’s grave, maybe this clue pointed to several? “Check where the others were buried.”
He pulled out his phone and typed. “Abraham Woodhull, behind the Setauket Presbyterian Church. Caleb Brewster . . . Fairfield, Connecticut. Austin Roe in Patchogue, here on Long Island. Robert Townsend in Oyster Bay, also on Long Island but west by, like, an hour.” He shook his head. “It can’t mean their graves. They’re nowhere near each other. Plus, Nancy wouldn’t have had any say over what was carved on them. She wasn’t their family.”
Rachel studied the key, turning it over to see if there were any other markings, such as another three-numbered code or a date or a word or a phrase. But it just said “Find us.” “Maybe she means her and her husband? Could there be a clue on his grave? He’s buried near her. If he died first, she could have decided what it said on his gravestone.”
He checked his phone again. “He died after her.”
It was unlikely there would be two clues that both led to the same cemetery anyway. What would be the point of that? No, it had to mean find “them” in a difference place. But where? She chewed on her lip, thinking hard. A car passed by on the street, but no one turned into the preschool driveway. Nearby, a bird sang, hidden in the branches of a pine tree.
“Maybe their house?” Rachel guessed. “St. George’s Manor?”
More typing, then he showed her his phone. “I think this is St. George’s Manor.”
It wasn’t a photo. It was a sketch of a house, slightly but not much better than what she could draw herself. She scrolled down. “It says it’s an engraving of St. George’s Manor from the October 1792 issue of the New-York Magazine, ‘greatly injured’ by the war. Anything more recent?”
He searched some more. “I think it burned down.”
She’d half expected something like that. It wasn’t their graves, and it wasn’t their house. Where else could Nancy and Selah be found together? she wondered. Think, Rachel. You can do this.
It had to be something that was distinctly theirs. And something meant to last. Either something as permanent as a rock or something with value that would be protected—a family heirloom, like the clock.
Oh.
The portrait.
In the library.
She clutched Joon’s arm.
“You have an idea?” he asked.
“The next clue is in the portrait.” She showed him the photo she’d taken with her phone. Grim-faced, Nancy and Selah stared out at them. Maybe the clue was written on the back of the canvas. Or maybe there was something in the portrait itself that—
Joon pointed next to Nancy—at the box. “Look at that.”
Of course. She should have remembered noticing it. The wooden box displayed next to Nancy had an old-fashioned keyhole. She felt her heart thump faster. “That could fit a small key.”
“We need to find that box.” Joon began searching on his phone again. He shook his head. “Looking for the name ‘Strong’ and the word ‘box’ . . . it’s too generic. I’m not going to find anything. It could be just a few steps away inside this preschool, and I wouldn’t know.”
Rachel zoomed in on the photo and showed him the engraved horn that was lying on top of the box. “What about that? Specific enough?” According to the librarian, Nancy herself had arranged for the portrait. She could have chosen which items to include, just like she could have specified in her will what to put on her gravestone.
“Oh yes. I can find that. Whatever that is.” With renewed enthusiasm, he searched further. In a few minutes, he had it. Paraphrasing, he read, “It’s a powder horn, used for storing gunpowder.”
Yeah, she’d been right. It was a weird choice.
“‘Sometimes they were elaborately engraved and kept as family heirlooms after the war,’” he read. Both of them stared at the photo.
A family heirloom would have made an excellent choice for a clue. She felt herself beginning to smile. This felt right. There had to be a reason that Nancy chose those two items for her official portrait.
He typed more. “According to this, the powder horn that belonged to Captain Selah Strong, Revolutionary War hero, is on display at the Long Island Museum.”
They grinned at each other.
“I did tell Dave we were going on an epic bike ride,” Rachel said.
Joon’s grin faded. “My folks won’t be happy.”
“You can tell them it’s educational,” she suggested.
He brightened. “It is a museum.” Quickly, he texted them, and then he shoved his phone back in his pocket so that he wouldn’t see their reply. “Let’s go.”
Rachel spotted the huge red carriage house before she saw any signage. As soon as they turned the corner, though, there it was: LIM, the Long Island Museum, as well as a brown street sign with the words “Washington Spy Trail” and an image of a stagecoach.
How had she never paid attention to those signs before? Just seeing the word “spy” should have been worth a few questions. But it had never felt real before. It was just a story. Nancy was a hero, not a real person. Now, though . . .
They parked their bikes and bought tickets across the street (Joon paid, and she promised to pay him back in cookies), before heading into the museum itself.
Unlike some museums, it wasn’t just a single building. There was the carriage museum—the primary structure, which looked like a red barn—to one side, and then there were a slew of historic buildings: a one-room schoolhouse, a blacksmith shop, a barn, even an outhouse. Between them on the grounds were modern art sculptures, including two white plaster heads that were either majestic or creepy. Rachel couldn’t decide which. Also, several of the trees were wrapped in colorful yarn all the way up to their branches, as if they were wearing sweaters. A garden with a fountain sat in the center of it all.
“Guesses on where a powder horn would be?” Joon asked.
Not the schoolroom. Or the outhouse. “Inside with the carriages?” It certainly wasn’t outside with the twenty-foot plaster heads.
Passing by a sweater-wearing tree, they went inside the red barn, which didn’t, on the inside, look anything like a barn. Straight ahead of them was a trolley-like wagon suspended in the air. Painted red and yellow, it looked like it had once belonged in a circus. Carpeted ramps led up and down to various exhibits.
A docent leaned against a pole near the flying wagon. He wore a shirt with a museum logo on it and had a walkie-talkie at his hip. “If you’re looking for the Culper letter, it’s up the ramp and to the right.” He waved in that direction, past an exhibit of carriages with the label “Going Places” in a Wild West kind of font.
“How did you know—” Joon began.
“This is Culper Country,” he said with a shrug.
When Rachel and Joon exchanged glances, the docent explained, “It’s our most popular exhibit. It holds the newest Culper letter discovered. It was acquired by the museum in 1951 but wasn’t identified as a spy letter until 2020.” He recited this with the air of someone who’d said it three thousand times.
“Yeah, we’re here to see the letter.” Rachel pulled Joon up the ramp toward the exhibit. She rounded the corner, and there it was. Just like that. Encased in glass, it was displayed on a pedestal in the center of the room.
A real Culper letter!
She approached it reverently.
It was written in the same kind of cramped scrawl as the samples of the codebook on the historical society wall. She wondered if it was by Tallmadge too. Peering at it, she tried to read the handwriting, but it was just as illegible. She made out a few words here and there. Circling to the back, she saw the signature: John Bolton. She was pretty sure she remembered that was Tallmadge’s alias.
“One of the real letters,” she breathed.
A week ago, she would have walked past it without a glance. Just an old scrap of paper that she couldn’t even read. But now . . . She knew what it meant. She knew it mattered. This very piece of paper, or ones exactly like it, had been sent across the Long Island Sound to George Washington after—and only after, she thought—Nancy had used her magic clothesline.
Joon tugged on her sleeve. “Look over there.”
On the wall was a display case filled with items, such as a silver tankard, a heart-shaped badge embroidered with the word “Merit,” a folded-up soldier’s uniform, a portable writing desk . . . and a curved bull’s horn with a leather strap attached.
Rachel pressed her nose against the glass, trying to see the powder horn better. It had been etched all over with sketches and words. She thought that some of the images were trees. A few were houses, maybe. Was it a landscape? Or a map? And what did the words say? “Can you read it?” The letters were minuscule and, worse, in unreadable cursive.
“It says, ‘For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible,’” Joon answered.
“Wait, how did you—”
He pointed to the signage next to the case. There were paragraphs for each of the items on display, including the powder horn, which said the horn had belonged to Selah Strong, captain in the New York militia, delegate to the New York provincial congress during the American Revolution, and local Setauket landowner, blah blah blah. It had been donated by the Strong family in 1973 and so forth, but the key part was that it showed—in clear, easy-to-read type—the illegible text that was etched onto the powder horn.
“Do you think it’s another code?” Joon asked.
They tried to form a word using the date in the ring, like they had in the cemetery, then they tried with the numbers 633 and 355. None of it made sense.
Joon’s pocket binged. He pulled out his phone and then scowled at it.
“Your parents?” Rachel asked.
“Yes,” he said shortly. But he didn’t elaborate, and before she could read what the text said, he had the phone’s browser open and was typing in the words on the horn.
A match popped up instantly: Colossians 1:16, King James Bible. “Colossians? As in, colossal people?” he asked. “Wait—never mind. It’s a book of the Bible. Like a chapter. And the numbers mean what section of the chapter.”
Rachel guessed it was from the New Testament since she’d never heard of the chapter or the quote either. It wasn’t one of the hugely popular quotes that showed up on pillows and in memes. “Maybe it’s a riddle? ‘For by him all things . . .’ What’s the rest?” She read the sign again. “‘For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible.’ Anything sound like a location?”
“‘Earth’ doesn’t really narrow it down,” Joon said. “Nor does ‘heaven.’” He shifted over to study the horn itself. “Maybe the drawings are the clue, not the words? See anything spyish?”
Anything spyish . . .
Spyish . . .
One word did pop out at her as extremely spyish:
“Invisible.”
“I don’t know if this is possible,” she said slowly, “but did the Culper spies ever use invisible ink in their letters?”
Both of them turned around to look at the real Culper letter on display.
Examining it, Rachel walked around it in a circle. It was flattened between glass plates and displayed upright to show off both sides. It didn’t look like anything was invisible—Okay, she asked herself, how could anything look invisible? Obviously, if they had used invisible ink, the message either would have been made visible already or still be invisible.
Joon squinted at it, his nose an inch from the glass. “Invisible ink sounds like a modern spy thing. Like lasers. And cars that morph into planes.”
Rachel crossed to the opposite wall, which had signage that described the letter. She skimmed it. And then in the third paragraph, next to a photo of a portrait of Benjamin Tallmadge . . . She felt her heart beat faster as she read out loud: “‘In this coded letter, Tallmadge asks that Townsend refrain from using invisible ink for private conversations between them that do not need to go to George Washington.’ They did use invisible ink!”
Joon pointed to the paragraph at the bottom. “‘As a private letter between two spies, it’s noteworthy for mentioning the challenges of using invisible ink.’ You’re right!”
Rachel grabbed Joon’s hands and twirled him in a circle. Yes! This was it!
She hurried to the next sign, the transcription of the letter, as Joon read, “‘I must again remind you not to write to me on private business with the Stain, as I have none of the Counterpart to decipher it and of course it must go on to 711.’”
“Seven-one-one is George Washington,” Rachel supplied.
Joon grinned at her. “That is so cool.”
She grinned back.
His phone binged again, and he ignored it.
“Aren’t you going to check that?” Rachel asked.
Ignoring her and the phone, he went back to the letter itself. He squinted at the scrawled writing. “Here’s where it says 711.” He pointed at the line in the letter with the numbers. “The Stain must be what they called their invisible ink.”
“But they didn’t have much of whatever they used to make it visible,” Rachel mused. “So what if Nancy’s next clue is written in invisible ink?”
Joon nodded enthusiastically. “Yes! Visible and invisible. That could be what the quote is telling us—we need to make visible whatever is written in invisible ink.”
“But . . . where’s it written?” Rachel asked.
They hurried back to the powder horn.
“Colossians one sixteen,” Joon said. “It’s telling us the exact number in the Bible.” He pulled out his phone again just as another text came in, but still ignoring it, he opened up Google again. “What if Nancy had her own copy of the Bible and left the message in it?”
She peered over his shoulder.
“People back then had family Bibles,” Joon said, reading from his screen. “They’d use them to record the births and deaths of family members. A family tree. So they were definitely heirlooms . . . And the Strong family Bible is not in any museum. If it’s anywhere, this says, it would be with a member of the family.”
Another text popped in.
Joon sighed. “Speaking of which . . . I have to answer my family.” He read the text, and his eyes bulged like a frog’s. “Uh-oh.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I missed a bunch of texts—guess while we were biking here. My parents said they’ve already left. They couldn’t wait for me any longer—they have an appointment with their real estate agent—but when they get back, we’ll talk.”
That did not sound good. “Yikes.”
Joon couldn’t get grounded now!
There was only one solution: they had to solve Nancy’s clues and find her treasure before his parents got back and eliminated all his free time. And she had an idea for how to do that. It wasn’t an idea she particularly liked, but it was an idea. “Tell them you’ll be at my house,” Rachel said.
“I will?” he asked.
“Anna Smith Strong’s family might have her Bible, you said. Then that means we have to talk to one of her descendants.” Rachel swallowed hard. Dave had said just this morning that she could talk to him about anything. “I just hope he isn’t too mad.”
It was time to tell Dave—and that certainly meant Mom too—everything.