16 Ghost Busters

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Ghost Busters Distilled Water (noun). Steam that has been trapped from boiling water and then condensed back into water. This water is super pure because it doesn't have stuff like calcium and iron in it. Basically, all the minerals are heavier than water so they stay in the pot of boiling water. NEXT TO THE STEAMER WAS a giant bottle of distilled water. Distilled water is frequently used in science labs. "I bet that's why Ms. Daly had a bottle on her desk. Remember? We need to use it to turn water into steam." With my fingers, I traced along the body of the steamer to see if anything easily popped open. With a snap, the top came off. "Oh, there's already water in here," I said, feeling excited. Grabbing the plug, Birdie jammed it into the outlet. A blue light turned on. "Hurry up, hurry up!" I cried. "We only have about thirteen minutes."

"Did you find anything?" asked Jeremy, peeking through the doorway. "We've made a discovery," said Birdie. "This thing should only take a minute or two to heat up. We need it." "It's a steamer," I explained. The steamer began sputtering and coughing. "Oh no. Is it broken?" asked Jeremy. "It does that right before it's ready," said Birdie. Steam puffed out, curling upward. "It's like a ghost," I shrieked. "Oh. Wow. This is the ghost. A ghost is in the WC!" "Great," said Jeremy. "We already did the Ghost demo." He waved his flashlight so a disk of yellow light bobbed up and down. "Wait," I said to Jeremy. "Do that again." "Do what again?" he asked. "Wave the flashlight over the mirror. I thought I saw something." He stepped farther into the WC. And there on the mirror was a secret message. It said 2 pockets. "Wow. That's cool," Jeremy said. Birdie and I looked at each other in pure astonishment. "The steam revealed the letters!" I cried. "Someone must have written the message with their

bare hands, and then the steam condensed around the oils left from their fingers! Just like the phone said. A ghost in the WC! We found another clue." "That's great," said Jeremy. "We've got to find two pockets!" The three of us raced back into the lab. "We've got to find pockets," Birdie repeated. Everyone checked their lab coat pockets. But nobody found anything. We even checked our jeans pockets. I spun around the lab, "Does anyone see any pockets?" "I think I might," said Memito. He pulled out a little green spiral pad from the bookshelf. "A pocket notebook." Jeremy high-fived him. "You rock." Memito flipped through the pages. He shrugged. "I dunno. Just a bunch of equations that make no sense." "Those numbers could be the key to cracking the code." I waved at the lock on the front door. "And getting us out of here." Elijah flipped through some more pages. "Hey, there's a message." He held it up and in big block letters it said, YOU'LL NEVER FIND THE IMAGE OF THE VIRUS. "That's not a happy thought," said Birdie, glancing longingly at the very locked front door.

"Wait. What if that message wasn't for us?" said Phoenix. "What if it was for the bad guy, Dragas? Rosalind Franklin left clues for us so we could hand the image of the virus over to Blanche before Dragas gets here. But she couldn't make the clues obvious. Otherwise—" she shook her head. "The virus could get into the wrong hands." "Wait. Hold up," said Memito. "On the very last page, there's one word over and over." He jabbed his finger onto the paper. "Tube." I snapped my fingers. "Like test tubes, I bet." Then I groaned. "But I've checked every test tube in the lab." "Yeah," said Elijah, staring at the cardboard tube he had kept for a drumstick. The one he had spotted by the telephone. "Guess what, I think I just found something!" He opened the cardboard tube by pulling off the plastic cap, then pulled out a rolled-up something white. "I didn't see it before because it's so thin." He flattened the image, which looked like a photograph, and Jeremy shone the flashlight on it so we could see even better in the dim room. There was a gray image of what looked like a pile of some weird sticks. "The image of the virus!" I shouted, high-fiving Elijah. "You're a genius."

Birdie gazed at the image with a look of wonder. "Who knew that viruses could look like... art." Then Elijah flipped the image over. "Look, there's a code on the back, just like the note!" "Read it aloud!" shouted Phoenix. "And I'll write it on the whiteboard." "32-73-5-57-19-3-52," called out Elijah, and then rolled the image back into the tube. "I'll put it here for safekeeping." He stuffed the tube back in the right pocket of his lab coat. "We did it!" I shouted. "Not quite," said Jeremy. "We still need to get out of here. And the clue in the WC said two pockets. We need to find another pocket." Memito held up the stopwatch. "The clock is ticking. We now only have ten minutes!" "We've got to get going," I admitted. But Birdie didn't move from her spot. Instead, she stared dreamily at the periodic table on the wall. "You know, I think it'd be cool to have one of those in my room. But to make some art project out of it." "Okaaaaay," said Jeremy. "I think we're getting way off track here." For once, I knew exactly how Jeremy felt. Right now was not the time to think about room decorations.

"There are numbers there," Birdie said. "And some of them are just like the numbers in the secret message on that paper." I snapped my fingers so hard I thought I could light a fire. "Birdie, that's amazing! That could be it. Each element on the periodic table has a number. For example, oxygen or O is the eighth element. That's why there's a number eight over it." Phoenix wiped the whiteboard clean and winced. "Okay, let's try this out." "Does your hand still hurt?" Birdie asked. She shook her head. "I'm fine." I glanced up at the periodic table. "The number thirty-two is germanium. That's Ge," I said in a rush. Phoenix wrote that down. "And seventy-three is Ta, which stands for tantalum." "Got it," said Phoenix. "The fifth element is boron. B," said Jeremy. "Fifty-seven is lanthanum or La," I said. "And nineteen is potassium, K. Number three is lithium, which is Li. And finally, fifty-two is tellurium, which is Te." We all stood there scanning the letters to see if we could made sense of them.