16 Hub City

Chapter 16 HUB CITY Did you ever have a really bad day when just about everything was going wrong? That was the kind of day Coke was having. So far, a cow had been dropped on him and he was almost run over by a couple of motorcycles. And it was still early afternoon. There's a little hill on the north side of Elm Street in Dealey Plaza near some concrete steps. It's referred to as "the grassy knoll." Many Kennedy assassination experts believed at least one of the shots that hit the president came from this spot and not from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Coke and Pep went over and sat down on this grassy knoll to regain their composure. They had about ten minutes until it was time to meet their parents

in the parking lot. "Are you going to be okay?" Pep asked. "Yeah. I'm indestructible. You know that." "That was a really dumb thing you did," Pep told her brother. "I know." Coke lay back on the grass, looking up at the sky. His T-shirt was ripped and his knees were scraped from crawling across the street. "So... what did you see?" Pep asked him. "Huh?" "Just before those motorcycles came, you told me there was something written in the X," Pep reminded him. "What did it say?" "Oh, yeah," Coke said. The near miss with the motorcycle had almost made him forget that he had bent down to look at the words on the street. "You're gonna laugh. It said BUY ITCH." "BUY ITCH?" "It must be some kind of an ad," Coke said. "I guess they're selling an anti-itch cream. Can you believe that? Companies will advertise

anywhere, even in a place like this." "Not necessarily," Pep replied. "Maybe BUY ITCH is an anagram that we're supposed to figure out." "Are you serious?" Coke said, sitting up. "You think somebody would send us a cipher by putting letters on an X in the middle of the street?" "Why not?" Pep said. "They put one at the bottom of a swimming pool, remember? They put one on the radio. When we were in Chicago, they put one on the scoreboard at Wrigley Field!" "But what could BUY ITCH mean?" Coke asked, as he juggled the letters around in his head. Pep took her notepad and pencil from her pocket and wrote BUY ITCH at the top of a page. Then she got to work, writing down every possible combination of those letters. "CUT BY HI," she said softly as she wrote. "No, that can't be it. I CUB THY... CHIT

BUY..." It was just nonsense words. It didn't seem like BUY ITCH could possibly mean anything besides BUY ITCH. Coke looked up at the passing cars, while his sister continued working on new letter combinations in her head. "Wait a minute!" she said suddenly. "I think I've got it!" She wrote this on her pad: HUB CITY "Hub City?" "'Hub City' is an anagram for BUY ITCH!" she told her brother. "We need to go to Hub City." "Oh, great," Coke said. "Now all we have to do is find out where Hub City is." When the twins met their parents in the parking lot, Mrs. McDonald took one look at Coke and went into "Mom Mode." "What happened to your shirt?" she asked.

"It ripped." "I can see that!" said Mrs. McDonald. "How did it rip? I left you on your own for less than an hour, and now you look like you got run over by a truck." "Funny you should say that, Mom," Coke told her. "You see, I was standing on the X in the street where President Kennedy was shot when these two motorcycles came out of nowhere and almost ran me over. So I jumped up in the air and flipped around, and—" "Ha-ha! That's a good one, son," said Dr. McDonald. "How do you come up with this stuff?" "I guess I just have a vivid imagination, Dad." They got in the car and Dr. McDonald paid the parking attendant. But Mrs. McDonald wasn't finished nagging Coke. "I wish you would take better care of your clothes," she told him. "We just bought that shirt the other day, and now it's ruined." "I'll try, Mom," said Coke, who knew from

experience that it was always better to agree with his mother than to argue with her. They got back on the road and after a few minutes everyone had calmed down a little. "Can we borrow your computer, Mom?" asked Pep. "We need to look something up." "What for, sweetie?" Mrs. McDonald said from the front seat. "It's an assignment for school," said Coke, who was always the better liar of the two. "You're working on schoolwork over summer vacation?" Dr. McDonald asked, turning around so he could see it with his own eyes. "Are you feeling okay?" Mrs. McDonald handed her laptop back, warning the kids to be careful with it because her entire website—her entire career—was stored in that little box. Then she turned the radio back on. "How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away" was playing, and Dr. McDonald turned it up loud. Coke took the laptop and Googled "Hub