26 Another Clue

Chapter 26 ANOTHER CLUE As soon as Coke and Pep got out of the water, their parents were all over them, like bats under a bridge. "Where have you two been all day?" "We told you to meet us outside the museum!" "Why were you in the river?" "What were you thinking?" "You had us worried sick!" "We were scared to death!" "We filed a police report!" Pep looked to her brother, as usual, to do the talking. "Okay, here's what happened," Coke tried to explain. "We were kidnapped from the museum by these guys in bowler hats. They locked us in a

room all afternoon. Then they tied us up and brought us out to the river. They put us in a boat and the bats came out and—" "Don't give me that, mister!" Dr. McDonald shouted. "We've heard enough of your wild stories!" The parents were even angrier when they found out the twins no longer had their cell phones. Not a word was spoken in the car on the way to the Econo Lodge Arboretum in North Austin. Coke and Pep knew that any excuse they could come up with wouldn't fly with their parents. "You are not to leave this room tonight," Dr. McDonald said coldly after they had checked into the hotel. "You are not to turn on the TV. You are not to take anything out of the minibar. Do you understand me?" "Yeah," both twins replied glumly. "In case of emergency—and there better not be an emergency—your father and I will be listening to music at Antone's on Fifth Street,"

said Mrs. McDonald. "You two can sit here and think about what you did." After their parents left, Coke and Pep took showers and changed into dry clothes. They tried reading for a while, but it was hard to focus after what they had been through. "Want to watch TV?" Coke asked. "Mom and Dad told us we weren't allowed to watch TV." "How are they gonna know?" "They'll know," Pep said. "There's probably a chip in the TV that records what we watch." "You're paranoid." There was nothing else to do. A thought popped into Pep's head. They had received a new cipher when they were at the Museum of the Weird. She didn't remember it, but her brother would. She got out her notepad and had him write the cipher down: 7-14-12-4-14-5-19-7-4-2-17-8-2-10-4-1912- 0-18-19-4-17

Coke looked at the numbers and shook his head. It was impossible. "Think of it this way," Pep said. "Each number probably stands for a letter. We just have to break it down and figure out which one." Pep wrote out the alphabet, and then put the numbers 1 through 26 under the letters. "This would be the simplest solution," she continued. "The number 7 is under G, so 7 probably means G. The number 14 is under N, so the second letter is N." "There aren't many words that start with GN," Coke noted. "Gnat, gnome..." Pep went on, and decoded the first ten letters. It spelled GNLDNESGDB. "I made a mistake somewhere," she said, looking up. "This doesn't make any sense."

"Maybe you put the wrong numbers under the letters," her brother suggested. Pep looked at the letters and numbers for a few minutes, and then crossed out everything she had written. Below, she wrote the alphabet out again, this time starting with a zero under the letter A, number 1 under the letter B, number 2 under the letter C, and so on. "So now the 7 is under the letter H," Pep said. "So 7 must mean H. And 14 is under the letter O, so 14 must mean O. The first two letters are H-O." "M is above 12, so 12 means M," Coke said. "E is above 4, so 4 means E." "The first four letters are H-O-M-E," Pep said, writing them out excitedly. They continued like that, matching up the numbers with the letters directly above them.

Soon they had the whole message: HOMEOFTHECRICKETMASTER "Home of the cricket master!" Pep exclaimed. "That's what it means! But what's a cricket master?" "There used to be a video game called Cricket Master," Coke recalled, "I think I played it once at somebody's birthday party." Pep went to the other side of the room to get her mother's laptop computer. They were told that they weren't allowed to turn on the TV. Nobody said they couldn't use the computer. She Googled "Cricket Master." Naturally, twenty-seven million results came up. A lot of them concerned the video game Coke had mentioned. There was also a British cricket player named Jack Hobbs, who was known as "the Master." But none of the results seemed to mean anything important. "We struck out again," Pep said. "'Cricket master' has nothing to do with anything." "Nothing has anything to do with anything!"