Rachel pedaled across the stone bridge. On one side of the bridge was the pond with turtles, swans, and sparkling water. On the other side were wetlands that opened onto the bay. Throughout the wetlands, she could see docks jutting from several coves. Caleb Brewster could have hidden from the British in any of those coves. Maybe even right here near the bridge, where the fluffy wheat-like reeds hid the view of the water. She wondered what he’d have thought of her and Joon being on Nancy’s trail. Would he think two kids could uncover her secrets? Or would he have discounted them too? Like the British discounted Nancy?
It’s real, Rachel thought. We found a clue!
She liked imagining that Nancy would have been proud of them.
Rachel and Joon cycled past a pair of women walking their dogs, and an older woman power walking in a pink jumpsuit, as well as several more rabbits who vanished into nearby bushes. Crossing the street, they rode along the southern half of the pond down toward the Three Village Historical Society. It was only a few minutes away, but by the time they arrived, Rachel was beyond impatient.
They ditched their bikes by the fence, and Rachel ran toward the door. She reached it and tried the handle—locked.
“Sign says it’s closed today,” Joon said, pointing at the handwritten sign next to the door.
“But Linda was just here!” If they’d found the clue faster . . .
Rachel peered in through the front window. She could see some of the antique furniture, the map of Long Island on the wall, and half of one of the manikins in Colonial clothes. “The codebook is painted on the wall in the next room.”
“Let’s try another window,” Joon said. “Maybe we’ll be able to see it.”
They trotted around the corner to the side of the house and peered in. Rachel cupped her hands around her eyes to cut down on the sun’s glare. The codebook was—There.
“Wow, they really like painting on the walls,” Joon noted.
It was hard to read at the angle they were, but if she pressed her nose up against the glass, she could see most of it. On the left was a zoomed-in image of a spreadsheet showing a handful of codes, specifically the codes for all the male spies and George Washington, as well as a bunch of other words, like “camp,” “infantry,” and “letter.” But beside it, to its right, were painted copies of handwritten words in numbers in columns and rows—duplicates of pages from the codebook. It was obvious that the actual codebook contained many, many more words and numbers. It was equally obvious, though, that it was near impossible to decipher the scrawled cursive handwriting in the original documents, especially through a window.
“Hmm,” Joon said, face pressed against the glass.
“Yeah,” Rachel said, beside him.
After a few more minutes of both of them staring at the handwriting and only being able to decipher a few words here and there, he admitted, “I think we need help.”
Linda can help. Rachel reached for her phone.
“Hey, what are you kids doing?” a man’s voice called from the sidewalk.
Both of them turned.
Across the lawn by the street was the same grumpy man who’d yelled at them yesterday at the cemetery. And he was glaring at them in just the same way.
Not again! Rachel thought. Why does he care? We aren’t doing any harm.
“Where are your parents?” he demanded. “Do they allow you to just wander around, poking your noses where they don’t belong?”
Since Dave was the one who’d suggested the historical society, the answer was yes. But she didn’t think it would help if she said that. This kind of grown-up would just think she was being “fresh.”
“It’s history,” Joon pointed out. “It’s for everyone.”
“It’s private property,” the man said. “And it’s closed. First the cemetery, now here . . .”
“Are you following us?” Rachel asked. He was all the way across the front yard of the historical society, on the other side of the fence, so she wasn’t scared of him. But it was an unhappy coincidence that he was in both places.
“I work at the Setauket Presbyterian Church.” He pointed toward the Village Green.
Fort Setauket, Rachel thought.
“And I volunteer at the Three Village Historical Society. I have more right to be here than you do. This isn’t a playground.” He shook his head. “No respect for history or for private property.”
Wait, if he volunteered here . . .
“If you work here, can you let us inside?” Joon asked.
“We need to see the Culper codebook,” Rachel said. “Please. It’s important.”
He snorted. “Kids today. You want to see a book, go to the library.” Shaking his head again, he continued walking down the sidewalk.
Rachel and Joon looked at each other.
“That’s actually a really good idea,” Joon said.
Rachel had never felt such an overwhelming need to go to the library before. She pedaled as hard as she could past Patriots Rock—the library was between it and the school. “Hey, I just realized,” she called to Joon, “it’s between a rock and a hard place!”
Joon laughed and then said, “I hate that I laughed at that.”
She grinned. Even if it was only a matter of time before Joon’s parents called him home again, at least the two of them were together now. And the hunt was back on!
They parked their bikes at the rack outside and entered the library through the sliding doors. They headed straight for the catalog computers and typed simultaneously.
“No Culper codebook,” Joon reported.
“You look up the Culper Spy Ring. I’ll look up Anna Smith Strong.” Maybe the key to the clues would be found in Nancy’s own history.
He pulled two sharpened pencils out of his backpack and handed her one. A few seconds later, they both had a list of call numbers:
973.385
L.I. 973.385
J 973.385
JB STRONG
“Guess there’s a theme,” Joon said. All the Culper books should be somewhere in the same section of the children’s room, the nonfiction shelves upstairs, and . . .
“What’s the L.I. section?” Rachel asked.
“Ask,” Joon suggested.
She’d never asked a librarian in the adult reference section for anything before. She wasn’t entirely sure they wouldn’t shoo her back to the children’s room. But before she could object, Joon had already headed off in search of books.
A librarian was typing on a computer behind a screen of plexiglass, but he glanced up when she approached. “Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for these.” She showed him the numbers that she’d written on a piece of paper. “But I don’t know where section L.I. is.”
“Ah, that’s for Long Island.”
Okay, that made sense. She should have guessed that.
“All our books on local history are there. So you know, though, those shelves are reference only, which means the books can’t leave the library, but you can read them here.” He pointed to the far corner of the main room, beyond the library catalogue computers, on the other side of the study tables. “You’ll find them in that corner. Is there anything you’re looking for in particular?”
“The Culper codebook,” Rachel said. “And anything about Anna Smith Strong.”
He brightened. “Well, you’ll find plenty there. She’s a local hero. You should check out the portrait of Selah and Anna Strong that we have on loan from the Long Island Museum. Supposedly, she personally arranged for it to be painted many years after the war.” The librarian pointed toward the reading room, beyond the hallway full of DVDs.
Rachel had never been in the reading room before, and it felt like an entirely different world from the children’s room. It was all dark wood: wooden shelves filled the walls, a wooden staircase twisted up to a reading nook (all wood too), wooden beams crossed the ceiling. Magazines were propped up on the shelves as if they were artwork, and soft leather chairs were positioned next to the windows. A stained glass window shed colored light across the burgundy rug. On the wall beside the stained glass window, above the magazine shelves, was a portrait, lit by its own set of lights, behind a sheet of glass.
Stopping in front of it, Rachel looked up at the painting. A man and a woman were posed stiffly, looking straight out at the artist. Dressed impeccably in what was most likely the height of 1800 fashion, the man was seated, while the woman stood behind him, beside a chest of drawers. One of her hands rested on a wooden box that sat on the chest. On top of the box was what looked like a cow horn, etched with pictures, with a leather strap attached. It was an odd decoration choice, but what drew Rachel’s eyes the most was Nancy’s face.
This was her.
Really, really her.
Nancy herself was about sixty or seventy years old and reminded Rachel of the historian with all the wrinkles, minus Linda’s enormous smile. Her white hair was pinned beneath a bonnet, and she gazed out above Rachel’s head.
She looked like the kind of woman who could keep a secret.
“Hi,” Rachel whispered. “We’re going to solve your clues.”
She snapped a picture with her phone to show Joon, then she scurried back out to the reference room and the Long Island history corner. Scanning the shelves, she searched for books with the label 973.385. Sure enough, there were tons of them, as well as books on Setauket historic sites, walking paths, and . . . She pulled out as many old-looking ones as she could carry and carted them over to an empty study desk. Stepping back, she stared at the stack.
Maybe they’d bitten off more than they could chew.
We can do this. Nancy wants us to do this.
Imagining Nancy was watching her from the reading room, Rachel sat down and flipped to the table of contents of the first book, a thick tome about Washington’s spies, then to the index. She scanned for Anna Smith Strong, and she began to read. The first page she read was about Nancy’s husband and his stay on a prison ship—Nancy pleaded for his release, turning to her Loyalist relatives in Manhattan for help.
Soon, Joon joined her with a stack of books so high it reached to his nose. “Got a few that probably won’t help, but better more than less, right?”
Rachel felt her jaw drop at the enormous stack added to her own massive tower of books. “You know, we can’t stay here forever. Eventually, the sun will set, the library will close. . . .”
“We don’t need to read all of it,” Joon said. “We just need to find the full codebook.”
“Also, anything about Nancy that could give us a hint to understanding the clues.” She showed the photo of the portrait to Joon. “That’s Nancy and her husband, Selah. He was arrested in January 1778 for ‘surreptitious correspondence with the enemy.’ I think that means secret? He was put on a prison ship or in a sugarhouse, whatever that was. Anyway, no wonder she didn’t like the British—they took her house and took away her husband.”
“What’s that weird horn thing beside her?” he asked.
“No idea,” Rachel said. “Maybe Colonial people had weird taste? Or maybe it’s her favorite weird horn thing. I don’t know. There’s too much we don’t know.”
“Then let’s fix that.”
Side by side, they searched through book after book. She read a picture book with illustrations of Nancy with her clothesline, Austin Roe the courier on his horse, and Caleb Brewster in his whaleboat, and she skimmed through several thicker books about famous spies throughout American history that included the Culpers. She picked up a plain rusty-red book called True Tales that looked like a bunch of pamphlets bound together. A local historian named Kate Wheeler Strong, a descendant of Anna Smith Strong, had collected tales from the area, including one she called “Nancy’s Magic Clothesline” that matched the story Rachel knew.
But not every book had Nancy in it.
One picture book with really pretty illustrations showed Woodhull meeting Brewster in a cove to hand off intel, but there wasn’t a single mention of Nancy or her clothesline. One of the adult nonfiction books said Agent 355 was a “fashionable woman” who lived in New York City and had tea with British officers. Yet another said her identity remained unknown but suggested she was a friend of a different Culper spy, Robert Townsend, from Oyster Bay. Not Nancy, a certain woman from Setauket.
This is what Linda was talking about. Rachel flipped through another book. “Not everyone thinks she was a spy.”
“She has to be,” Joon said. “If she wasn’t, then she wouldn’t have left a treasure hunt.”
“Exactly what I think.” Rachel waved a book in the air. “But this one says there’s no proof that she was involved at all.”
“Well, there wouldn’t be much proof,” Joon said. “She was a spy. It’s not like you’re supposed to go around announcing that. No one was ever supposed to know what she did.”
That instantly made Rachel feel better. “True. You know she was there because if she wasn’t, you’d have a hole in the story. An Anna Smith Strong–shaped hole. She’s the link.” Without Nancy, the spy ring didn’t work. Rachel wanted to argue with all the books that excluded her. “She’s how Woodhull knew where to meet Brewster.”
“Don’t get distracted,” Joon said. “We still need to find the full codebook.” He gestured at the stack of books. “All of these talk about the codebook. And most of them have some of it. But none of them have all of it. We need six-three-three.”
He was right. They had to stay focused on their purpose:
Find the codes. Find the clue.
Find Nancy.
Rachel flipped through another book. She turned the page, and there was a Culper letter, quoted word for word, with a photo of the actual handwritten letter beside it. Her eyes landed on a sentence:
I intend to visit 727 before long and think by the assistance of a 355 of my acquaintance, shall be able to out wit them all.
She shoved the book in front of Joon, open to the key page. “Look, three-five-five!”
At the same time, he twisted the book he’d been reading to show her. “I found the full code! There’s a copy at George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon.” Taking the book back, he snapped a photo of each page of the codebook, then he checked the numbers. “Seven-two-seven means New York. And three-five-five is ‘lady.’”
Rachel translated: “‘I intend to visit New York before long and think by the assistance of a lady of my acquaintance, shall be able to out wit them all.’ It’s from Abraham Woodhull to George Washington, dated August 15, 1779.”
“Cool,” Joon said. “But how do we know ‘lady’ means Nancy?”
Puzzle pieces, Nancy thought. Linda believed Nancy was 355. Why? “Well . . . he said ‘of my acquaintance.’ Not many people lived in Setauket then. And she was his closest neighbor.” Rachel had seen the maps in the exhibit.
Joon considered that. “Cool.”
She read on. “‘Nancy accompanied her farmer-turned-spy neighbor Abraham Woodhull into New York City on at least one of his trips to gather intelligence. The British had patrols all along the fifty-five mile route. He’d been stopped and questioned when he traveled by himself, but with Anna Smith Strong beside him, posing as his wife, he passed by all the checkpoints without any problem.’ That’s what the letter means.”
“Very cool.”
So, Nancy could have done even more than her magic clothesline. I knew she’d been underestimated. Rachel flipped to the next page. Nancy had Loyalist relatives in Manhattan, the book said. She could have even spied on them herself. “What does the codebook say six-three-three is?”
He ran his finger down the table. “Time.”
“Huh.”
“Mmm.”
“Time . . .” Joon mused, then his eyes widened. “Time!”
She leaned forward, excited. “You know what it means?”
“No, but I forgot the time!” He yanked out his phone. There were a string of texts, blocking his lock screen photo of a pirate with a parrot. “Oh no.” He jumped up. “I have to go. They found another house to tour, but they need me home right now to make it in time.”
“You can’t leave!” Rachel cried. “We’re so close!”
The woman at the next study table glared at them. “Shh.”
Joon bolted for the lobby and out the door, and she followed him. Jumping on his bike, he waved to her. “I’ll be back soon!” he called. “You find the clue!”
She watched him ride away from the library.
And just like that, she was on her own again. How was she supposed to figure it out without him? Every clue so far, they’d solved together. She didn’t want to have to figure it out alone, and she didn’t want to have to go through sixth grade—and all the grades after that—without Joon.
Just a little more time, she thought. That’s all we need. They just needed to find the treasure before his parents found a new house far away from Rachel, from the clues, from everything. If they could solve this . . .
She didn’t know what it would change. She didn’t know if there was a treasure at the end of the clues or, even if there was, if it would keep Joon from moving away, but she did know that she wanted the two of them to see it through.
And she couldn’t help feeling like Nancy would want it that way too.
We just need enough time.
Time, time, time . . .
What could it mean?
Were they supposed to go somewhere at a specific time? Or was the clue something associated with time? Like a watch? Or a clock?
Had Nancy owned a clock?
Huh.
She didn’t think any of these books would hold an answer to that question, but . . . it was something that a historian might know, especially one who loved Nancy as much as Rachel did.
Sitting on the front steps of library, Rachel reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. Hoping she’d at last landed on the right question, she typed a text: “Did Anna Smith Strong own a clock?”
It’s a reach, she thought, but it’s possible.
Three dots appeared.
Rachel waited.
And then a single word: “Yes.”
The phone rang. Startled, Rachel nearly dropped it. She answered it, and the historian’s voice, with the background hum of a car, trumpeted through. “My fellow Nancy fan! I hadn’t expected to hear from you so soon! How lovely to get your text!”
“Hi. Um, yes, you, um, said she had a clock?”
“Yes, indeed. Preservation Long Island—that’s another nonprofit like the historical society—owns several pieces of furniture from St. George’s Manor. They have them on display at the Sherwood-Jayne House, along with furniture from the Sherwood and Jayne families. A quilt, I believe. A front-fall desk. And they also have a tall case clock.”
Yes! “Could I see it?” she asked eagerly.
Linda laughed. “I love your enthusiasm, but I’m on my way to my daughter’s—”
“Tomorrow? Please! It’s important.” She wanted to explain why, but hesitated again. What if Linda thought this was just a silly game? Rachel couldn’t stand the idea of being dismissed when she felt so close to the next clue—and to Nancy. “It matters more than I can say.”
“I do need to stop off and talk to the curator. . . .”
Rachel held her breath.
“Can you be there at ten o’clock tomorrow morning?”
“Yes!” And then she did a little dance on the pavement outside the library, before running back inside to the towering stack of books, both those with and those without her hero.