Chapter 14

CHAPTER 14 This is terrible! Amy thought, staring at Dan's tombstone rubbing. We can't dig up Shakespeare's grave! We can't! It wasn't like the Clue hunt hadn't forced them to be grave diggers before. But this was William Shakespeare…. "Amy," Dan said very, very softly, so no one else could hear. "If we don't do this, one of the others will. Eventually, they'll find the rest of the poem or just start digging because they can't think of anything else to try." Amy looked around. Just ahead of them, Jonah was saying into his cell phone, probably to one of his parents, "Yeah, saw the tomb. Even got a drawing of it from Dan. And I've got a report ready to send you." If Jonah Wizard decided to dig up Shakespeare's grave, he'd probably buy the

church first, have it torn down, hire a bunch of bulldozers and backhoes to do the digging… and then just throw away Shakespeare's body when he was done. If the Holts dug up Shakespeare's grave, they'd probably use his skull for football practice. Oh, they wouldn't plan to. But with the Holts, everything ended up being about sports. If… Amy couldn't go on imagining dire possibilities. "Why do so many things in the clue hunt come down to deciding between bad choices?" she asked Dan. "I knew you'd agree to do this!" Dan said, beaming. "We'll be respectful about it," Amy said. "We won't disturb anything we don't have to. We'll put everything back the way we found it—" "Except the next clue," Dan said. Fiske Cahill and William McIntyre sat in a private room in a restaurant on the banks of the river Avon. The view was lovely— the trees, the sky,

the boats bobbing gently in the water— but neither man was paying attention. Mr. McIntyre was talking on his cell phone. Fiske Cahill was wishing that his bold, decisive sister Grace were still alive. This was not a new wish for Fiske— he'd missed his sister desperately ever since she died. But the Clue hunt was winding toward its most dangerous moments. Fiske himself would have to make judgments that could help save or ruin everything. "You were always better than me at that kind of thing, sis," he whispered. He reminded himself that so much more depended on Dan and Amy than on him. But how was that fair? Mr. McIntyre said, "Yes, thank you. Good-bye," and shut his phone. "Our friend at the church says everyone has departed now," Mr. McIntyre reported. "He believes that master Dan was the only one who found the lead. But someone from each of the other teams was there. And no one was fighting." Fiske nodded once, curtly, accepting this.

"So it was not too risky tipping off each team to go to the church," Mr. McIntyre added, almost sounding cheerful. Fiske stood and went over to stand by the window. He wished he could have seen how Amy and Dan had looked, coming out of the church. Were they happy? Confident? Excited? Or was the Clue hunt wearing on them? Could their bright young lives be destroyed as their parents' had been destroyed? "This round isn't over yet," Fiske said. "Look what happened when we handed out all those tickets to the Globe." "You know we have to keep forcing the branches together," Mr. McIntyre said. "There's no other choice. What's the Shakespeare quote? 'There is a tide in the affairs of men/Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.' We had to memorize that whole speech in school. This clue hunt— it's like that tide for the Madrigals. This is our best shot in five hundred years for reuniting the Cahills. And, as you know, it's more important than ever that we succeed." His

expression turned grim again. "It's our last chance." Fiske had never done well in school. He'd been too shy and awkward to feel comfortable sitting in class, or even just with a private tutor. But he was pretty sure that Shakespeare's next line after 'leads on to fortune' was something about miserable failure. "You do know the play that that line's from —Julius Caesar—you do know that it all ends in tragedy," Fiske said. "Don't you?" "We've got to tell Nellie," Amy whispered. "And get some supplies back at the hotel," Dan whispered back. "And by then it will be dark and we can sneak back into the church," Amy said, finishing their plans. They waited for the others to get far ahead of them and then they took a circuitous route back to the hotel. The whole village of Stratford seemed to be closing up for the night. A block from their hotel, they rounded a corner

—and saw Nellie on the sidewalk, talking to Alistair. "Well, that's very kind of you to invite us to join you for bangers and mash for dinner tonight," Nellie was saying. Amy and Dan began frantically shaking their heads at Nellie, behind Alistair's back. "But we're all really tired," Nellie said, without changing her expression. "I think we'll just order room service and go to bed early." Amy and Dan nodded and darted back around the corner. They walked all the way around the block to get to the hotel. At each corner they flattened themselves against the wall and looked first, just in case. In the room, Saladin let out an angry Mrrp! that clearly meant, What? You left me alone all day and now you're going to abandon me again? Dan grabbed a flashlight. Amy grabbed the best tool she could find in a rush: a metal nail file. As they started to leave the hotel, she pulled out her phone to call Nellie. "Didn't you see how close Alistair was standing