The Hundred-Year Mystery

by Gertrude Chandler Warner

  “May we borrow some of these photos?” asked Violet. “We promise to return them.”

  “It’s the least I can do after the sorry way I treated you yesterday.” Anabel slipped the photos into a plastic bag and gave them to Violet. “Just promise to let me know what treasure you find.”

  Outside, Jessie opened the journal to the next clue.

  We “caught,” as you now plainly see,

  How we had fun when we were free

  But Ty and I could never play

  Before our work was done each day

  At early morn—in heat and cold—

  I earned my keep with papers sold

  I hawked the news of town and nation

  Near the Main Street “filling station”

  “AJ sold newspapers?” said Henry. “He was a paperboy like me?” Henry had a morning paper route delivering the Greenfield Gazette.

  “Except,” said Jessie, “you deliver the newspapers by bike. This clue says AJ was ‘hawking news.’”

  “A hawk? He used big birds to carry the newspapers?” Benny asked.

  Jessie smiled. “It would be fun to have an eagle deliver our paper. But what AJ means when he says ‘I hawked the news’ is that he stood outside and yelled the headlines to try to get people to buy newspapers.”

  “Like the paperboys in those old movies Grandfather watches,” Benny said. He pretended to hold up a newspaper. Then he strutted around calling, “Ex-tra! Ex-tra! Read all about it!” He looked so funny they all started laughing. A couple of cows in the pasture turned to look.

  Henry said, “You’re going to make a great paperboy.” He climbed onto his bike.

  “Where are we going?” asked Benny.

  “To the Main Street filling station,” said Henry.

  “What’s that?” asked Violet.

  “It’s an old-fashioned name for a gas station,” said Henry. “And there’s only one gas station on Main Street.”

  The Paperboy’s Clue

  Gus’s Gas Station stood on the corner of Main Street and Tucker Avenue. The children found Gus working under the hood of a truck. The cheerful man often fixed Grandfather’s car, and he always invited Henry to watch.

  “When did the first gas station open in Greenfield?” Henry asked.

  Gus chuckled. “Now there’s a question I don’t hear every day.” He wiped his hands on his work rag. “I guess it would be when my grandpa Gus opened this place about eighty years ago.”

  “But it needs to be a hundred years ago,” said Benny.

  Gus squinted one eye, thinking. “Nope,” he said. “Sorry, Benny. A hundred years ago, cars were a pretty new invention. They were expensive and always breaking down. Greenfield was mostly farmland back then, and farmers used horses to get around. There wouldn’t have been gas stations in town.”

  “But a few people must have owned cars,” said Henry. “Where would they buy gas?”

  “Oh, they’d probably drive over to a bigger town like Elmford,” Gus said. “There’d be more cars there needing a fill-up.”

  The smell of hamburgers drifted by. Benny’s stomach rumbled. “I need a fill-up,” he said.

  “You’re in luck,” said Gus. “My wife’s barbecuing in the lot next door.”

  Cook’s Corner was a big metal grill set up along the Main Street sidewalk. The chalkboard menu listed hot dogs, hamburgers, and corn on the cob. A few picnic tables with umbrellas were set around the lot. At the grill, a woman in a chef’s hat chatted with customers. The Aldens quickly checked their money. They had enough for each of them to have a nice big ear of corn. Benny watched as the corn grilled. “I could bring a hundred ears of corn for my hundred-day project,” he said.

  Henry ruffled Benny’s hair. “I don’t think you have enough money for that idea. You’ll come up with something though. Keep trying.”

  Honk! Honk! The yellow Levi’s Lumber truck pulled up to the curb. Circles of tree trunk filled the back of the truck like giant checkers. Levi climbed out. “Want to see what the inside of a giant tree looks like?”

  “I do!” said Benny, running over. Levi lifted him up to look at the pieces of wood. Each slice had circles inside. The circle at the center was the smallest. The one around it was bigger. The one around that was bigger still. The Aldens gathered around.

  “These rings are sort of like the candles on your birthday cake,” said Levi. “Candles show how old you are. A tree grows a ring every year to show how old it is.” Benny reached out and touched the rings. Then Levi set Benny down. “I’m dropping these at the furniture maker,” he said, climbing back into his truck. “I’ll be cutting more circles in a little while. Come watch if you’re out near Wintham Manor.” He waved as he drove away.

  “I’d like to see him cut the tree,” Benny said.

  “It would be interesting,” Henry said. “But what about finding the treasure?”

  “Oh,” said Benny, “I want to do that too!”

  “First things, first,” said Jessie. They took their corn to a table along Main Street. “First we eat, then we look for the next clue, then we try to see Levi cutting up the tree.”

  The children began pulling the husks off their ears of corn. Jessie peeled hers slowly, thinking. This riddle seemed so much harder than the others. “If there wasn’t a gas station on Main Street a hundred years ago,” she said, “what could the Main Street ‘filling station’ be?”

  “We’re filling up with corn,” said Benny. “Maybe it was a restaurant.”

  They began eating as they tried to solve the riddle. Jessie always ate her corn straight across—neatly biting two rows at a time. When she finished, not a single niblet was left on the cob. Henry turned his cob round and round, eating in circles. Violet bit her corn into V’s. And Benny ate his corn every which way until the cob and his face were a very big mess.

  Jessie finished and set her corn aside. “Maybe it will help to go through the clues.” She took out the journal and turned to the first clue. “So far, every one of AJ’s riddles gave us the information we needed.”

  Go to where the sun’s first ray

  Shines just east of town each day

  “We did that,” said Jessie. “We found that tall finger rock that Henry climbed.”

  Then plumb a line both straight and true

  And dig there for your second clue

  “Henry dropped down the horseshoe on a string,” said Jessie. “We dug up the book AJ buried—The Only. That’s how we found out he was an orphan. And that led us to the library to find where Greenfield’s orphanage was.”

  She looked at the next clue.

  I hope that this next clue still waits

  Inside my neighbor’s friendly gates

  I asked that Tyler please pass down, my

  Brownie treats that caught our town

  “The ‘neighbor’s friendly gates’ was Daisy’s Dairy, where Tyler lived. In the attic, we found the chest with AJ and Tyler’s photos of our town—their ‘Brownie treats.’” Jessie sighed. “But we can’t figure out this next part.”

  Hawking news of town and nation

  Near the Main Street “filling station”

  Violet took AJ’s photos from her backpack. Main Street looked so different back then. Now the street was paved and wider. It had bright streetlamps and new stores and cars instead of horses. A large round planter full of flowers stood in front. She stared at one photo, then looked across the street at a redbrick building. “Look,” she said, “the Greenfield Gazette building is still on the same corner it was a hundred years ago.”

  “That’s where I pick up the newspapers for my paper route,” said Henry. “I wonder if that’s where AJ sold his newspapers.”

  Jessie looked at the photo, then at the building. “The Gazette looks the same,” she said, “except there’s no flower planter in AJ’s photo. There’s just a water fountain.”

  Henry looked at the photo then at the Greenfield Gazette. “Hold on, hold on,” he said, quickly shuffling th
rough the pile of AJ’s photos. He pulled out the photo of AJ and Tyler pretending to drink from the horse’s watering trough. Then he looked across the street. “I think I found our filling station!”

  Henry reached the planter first. He lifted the leafy vines aside. Violet gasped. “It’s the same trough!”

  Henry smiled. “Welcome to AJ’s Main Street filling station,” he said. “This is where horses filled up with water.”

  Benny let out a whoop and galloped around, pretending to be a horse. “We did the trick. We did the trick. I can’t believe we did the trick!”

  Violet ran her fingers along the stone. “A hundred years ago,” she said softly, “AJ touched this exact same trough.”

  Henry pictured AJ standing right here. “A hundred years ago,” he said, “AJ sold newspapers on this corner.”

  The children grew quiet. “I feel like AJ is one of us,” said Violet. “An orphan like us whose journal brought us here. Where does he want us to go next?”

  Jessie opened the journal and said, “This is his last clue.” Then she read out loud:

  At eighteen years I left my home

  The North, South, East, and West to roam

  While selling those which I loved best

  Before returning here to nest

  ’Twas then I thought that I might dare

  Create a way, my love to share

  I bound my passion and my pleasure

  Into types of golden treasure

  “Gold! Treasure!” cried Benny.

  “Hush,” said Violet. “Listen.”

  Jessie continued:

  Now follow where these waters flow

  A milestone to the east will show

  A backward way to reach the hope

  Awaiting at my climbing rope

  Once up, just turn, and you will see

  My treasure trove imPRESSing thee

  Violet could not understand what all the words meant. The poem had so many ideas and mysteries all at one time. But one phrase did sound very beautiful. “How can we ‘follow where these waters flow’?” she asked. “There is no river here, no creek.”

  Henry lifted more vines aside. A rusty spout stuck out. “This is how water flowed into the trough. If too much water filled the trough, it would flow over the sides and run downhill.” Henry looked up and down Main Street and pointed. “This road goes downhill to the east. That’s the way we need to ride.”

  The excited children ran to the corner. The stoplight was green, and cars whizzed past. The Aldens waited. And waited. It seemed the light would never turn red so they could walk. “The poem said ‘milestone,’” said Benny. “What’s a milestone?”

  Jessie thought. “Well, it can be a really important moment in your life. Like your first day of school. Or when you learned to ride a two-wheeler. Those were milestones.”

  “But sometimes,” said Henry, “a milestone is a real stone or flag or something that marks one mile. Like the flags along the three-mile race I ran last week.”

  Finally, the light changed, and they ran to their bikes.

  Henry’s compass led the children east out of town. In the distance, the fingerlike rocks reached for the sky. Soon, the children pulled up to the rocks and stopped.

  “Could this be the milestone?” asked Benny.

  Henry bit his lower lip, thinking. “No, we’re more than a mile from town.”

  Benny remembered the first time he’d come here. The others had ridden far ahead of him. He’d stopped to look at the rocks. “I saw some weird writing on this stone.” Benny bent down and pointed to the markings near the bottom of the tallest rock. “But I can’t read it.”

  Violet studied the stone and said, “Jessie, say the clue again.”

  Jessie read from the journal:

  Now follow where these waters flow

  A milestone to the east will show

  A backward way to reach the hope

  Awaiting at my climbing rope

  Suddenly, Violet rolled her bike off the path and over to the tallest finger. She turned the bike so that it was facing away from the rock. Then she sat down on the seat and adjusted the mirror on her handlebars.

  Jessie laughed. “You look like you’re taking a selfie.”

  Violet jumped up. “Try it!” Jessie quickly sat down on Violet’s bike. She tilted the mirror so she could see the strange letters behind her. But when she looked at the letters in the mirror, they weren’t strange at all. Henry and Benny tried it too.

  “That’s called mirror writing,” said Violet. “The writing is backward unless you look at it in a mirror.”

  In the mirror, the backward letters said 1MILETOAJWM.

  “This is the milestone in the clue!” said Henry. “It doesn’t mean one mile from town. It means one mile to someplace.”

  “Someplace called AJWM,” said Jessie.

  “What’s one mile away from here?” Benny asked, looking all around.

  They thought of where they had ridden their bikes the first time they passed these rocks. And, suddenly, every one of them knew exactly what was one mile away.

  “It’s one mile to AJWM,” said Henry. “AJ Wintham’s Manor.”

  Now they knew who hid the capsule in the cornerstone.

  “AJ wasn’t a stonemason who laid the cornerstone,” said Jessie.

  “He wasn’t a construction worker who helped build the manor,” said Henry.

  “AJ was Alfred J. Wintham!” said Benny. “And his treasure is waiting for us at AJ’s house—Wintham Manor!”

  AJ’s Treasure

  Ella opened the manor door and the Aldens burst in, all talking at once. “Mr. Wintham wrote the journal!” “He’s AJ!” “He carved a backward clue on a rock!”

  Ella’s head turned from one child to the other. Her silky hair swished as she tried to keep up. Laughing, she held up her hands and said, “Hold on, hold on. One at a time.”

  The children explained how they followed the clues in AJ’s journal. “All the riddles lead back to this manor,” said Henry.

  Benny could hardly sit still. “The treasure is here!”

  “Are you sure?” asked Ella. “How can that be?”

  “You know the manor better than anyone,” Jessie said. “Can you think where a treasure might be hidden?”

  Ella tapped a finger against her lips. “Hmm,” she said. “Hmm. The only part of the manor I’ve never seen is high up in the tower.”

  “Rapunzel’s tower?” asked Violet.

  “That must be where the treasure is,” said Benny. “It must be! But…but the rope ladder is gone. How can we climb up?”

  “There’s a ladder in the basement,” Ella said. She took the children downstairs, but the ladder was too small to reach the beam high in the tower. They searched for rope they could knot into a ladder. But all Ella had was a ball of kitchen twine and some fuzzy knitting yarn.

  Whirrrr. Bzzzzzz. Whirrr. The sound of Levi’s chain saw startled them. “That’s it!” said Jessie. “I know how we’ll climb up into the tower.”

  Circles of tree trunk lay all around the yard. Whirrrr. Bzzzzzz. Levi had almost finished cutting the old tree trunk into slices. He looked surprised to see Ella and the Alden children rushing toward him. He was even more surprised when they told him what they needed.

  Levi went to his truck and took out a small ladder. “That ladder will never reach the top of the tower,” said Violet. “We need the tall ladder you used when you cut down the tree.”

  “Well then,” said Levi, “we’d better use some magic.” He wiggled his fingers over the ladder and said, “Abracadabra, hocus-pocus!” And, with that, he gripped the top step of the little ladder and pulled. The ladder grew longer and longer. It would reach very high.

  “My telescope slides open like that,” said Henry.

  Levi grinned. “That’s why they call this a ‘telescoping ladder.’” He closed the ladder and said, “Lead the way.”

  The excited group hurried up the staircase and into the
twisty attic rooms. Levi could barely squeeze through the low doorways and narrow passages. Finally, they reached the tower.

  Levi expanded the telescoping ladder. It went up and up and up. Finally, it reached the beam where the rope ladder used to be. Levi rested the ladder against the beam. He leaned his weight against it to make sure it would hold firm.

  “Okay,” he said, “who’s climbing?”

  Four hands flew up. “We all climb trees in our backyard,” explained Henry.

  Henry started, and the others followed. One by one they reached the platform that circled around the high tower. A strong metal railing ran all around. Carefully, each child stepped off the ladder onto the platform. Hundred-year-old dust swirled around their feet.

  “Look,” said Jessie, pointing across the tower. “Rapunzel’s window. You can see all of Greenfield from here.”

  “Ohhh,” said Violet, “that’s the view AJ painted on the mural downstairs.”

  “And it’s also like the view from the top of the rock,” Henry said, “where he read his books.”

  Ella called up to them, “Did you find anything?”

  “Not yet,” said Henry. He turned to Jessie. “What did the clue say?”

  Jessie recited, “‘Once up, just turn, and you will see my treasure trove imPRESSing thee.’”

  The children turned. There was nothing up here but the walkway. All the walls were brick. Violet held on to the railing and walked around the platform. She noticed a rectangle of bricks darker than the others. She thought, My treasure trove imPRESSing thee. Violet pressed against the dark bricks. Nothing happened. She pressed again. Still nothing. The others came to help. All four children pressed together. A brick door swung open. They jumped back.

  It was black as night inside. The air smelled of dust and age. The only light came from the doorway.

  Benny stepped back. “I don’t want to go in,” he said.

  “Let’s wait until our eyes adjust to the dark,” said Henry. After a minute, they could see a small table in the middle of a small room.