“ ‘You can always find another way,’ ” said Jake, reading what Grace had written with the rocks. “Of course!”
“Of course what?” said Kojo.
“There never was a fire pit! Your ancestor was a genius, Grace. A math prodigy. The cabin boy knew how to do plane geometry and trigonometry, maybe even better than Mr. Keeney. All along, there was only one way to find his buried treasure! With math!”
Grace and Kojo measured the distance between the two rock pillars.
Jake found a rocky ledge, sat down, and jotted their findings in the small notebook he’d stuffed into his back pocket before leaving home. He’d remembered to bring a pencil, of course, and a plastic pig-shaped pencil sharpener. (He’d borrowed it from Emma.)
“There are more word stones in this second rock pillar,” reported Grace.
“What do they say?” Jake called across the cavernous chamber.
“The same thing. ‘You can always find another way.’ ”
“So that’s the only measurement we can take,” said Kojo. “From rock pillar A to rock pillar B. The rest is up to you, Jake.”
“And Eduardo Leones,” added Jake. He had written the full text of the cabin boy’s clue on the inside of the notebook’s front cover.
Jake went to work.
It took ten minutes for him to re-create the solution he’d figured out with Mr. Keeney, this time factoring in the actual spacing between the two rock pillars which had been missing until now.
By one a.m., he was ready to transfer the data from his pencil sketch map to the actual cave floor. He started pacing through the sea of chunky gravel.
“Let me know when to start recording video again,” said Kojo.
Jake didn’t answer. He was laser-focused on the map, which he could see without even looking down at his notebook. It was as if his eyes had a fighter pilot’s head-up guidance system projected in front of them. He could see the grid, the intersecting lines and triangles, glowing green on the floor.
He could see the X from the geometry puzzle.
He stopped on the spot.
“Grab your shovels, guys. This is where we dig.”
* * *
—
Jake swung the pickax to break up the gravel, which had cemented itself together with caked dust.
“Roll camera!” shouted Grace.
Kojo set his phone on a rocky outcropping on the nearest cave wall and started recording.
“Welcome to our glorious treasure recovery, folks!” he said to the camera. “Stay tuned for pirate booty, baby.”
Grace and Kojo grabbed shovels and moved load after load of crushed stone up and out of the way. They sank their blades into the sea of stone—loosened by swings of Jake’s pick—and heaved it backward in a pitter-pattering shower of gravel. It took time, but soon, working together, they dug a four-feet-wide, two-feet-deep hole in the floor.
“How much deeper?” asked Kojo, swiping sweat off his brow.
“Eduardo didn’t tell us,” said Jake, busting up another chunk of stone with the sharp metal tip of his tool.
He heard a tink.
Metal hitting metal.
He looked at Grace, who looked at Kojo, who looked back at Jake.
In a flash, the three friends fell to their knees. They scooped up pebbles with their bare hands and tossed them up over the edge of the hole.
“It’s a metal trunk!” shouted Kojo when its dusty top revealed itself. “A treasure chest!”
They scraped away more stones until the entire top was uncovered.
There was a rusty hasp—a slotted hinged metal plate—fitted over a loop for a lock, but there was no lock.
“Pry it up,” said Jake. “We can use the hasp as a lever to open this lid.”
Grace used the pointed edge of her shovel to pop up the hasp.
The three friends scrambled out of the shallow pit so they weren’t standing on top of the treasure chest’s lid.
“You do it, Grace,” said Jake. “After all, the cabin boy is your ancestor. This treasure belongs to you and your family.”
“Minus ten percent,” added Kojo.
Grace reached down. Grabbed hold of the hasp. “This is for you, Great-to-the-eighth-power Uncle Eduardo. You too, Uncle Charley. Hang on. We’re coming!”
She pulled with all her might.
The lid squealed open.
“Wow!” the three friends gasped.
The giant metal box was overflowing with glittery, twinkling treasure. Stacks of shimmering gold coins. Mountains of sparkling jewels. A silver candelabra, an emerald necklace, and even a diamond-encrusted crown.
And that was just the top layer of treasure in the very deep chest.
“We did it, baby!” Kojo shouted to where he knew his phone camera was watching. “We just dug up Dog Breath’s booty!”
Grace joined him, tossing two handfuls of gold coins up into the air. “We sure did!”
Jake added a “Woo-hoo!” to the camera, showing it the emerald necklace he’d plucked out of the treasure chest.
The three laughed so hard they had tears in their eyes.
They sank to the floor, scooping up loot and plopping it by the handfuls into their laps.
“Uncle Charley can retire,” said Grace. “He can buy his own private island!”
“I’m going to buy a new chemistry set,” said Kojo.
“I’m going to pay for Mr. Farooqi to get his PhD!”
“This treasure has to be worth millions!” exclaimed Grace. “We can definitely help fix up the school.”
“Heck,” said Kojo. “You can fix up two schools. Maybe three. You could build a brand-new school on top of the old school.”
Behind them, Jake heard beads clacking.
“No, children,” said a very familiar voice. “That is not going to happen.”
Mrs. Malvolio had just crawled into the chamber.
Mr. Huxley and the notorious treasure hunter Eriq LeVisqueux came crawling out right behind her.
LeVisqueux was brandishing a sword.
He was, as the FBI had predicted, armed and dangerous.
“Zees is my favorite way to hunt for zee treasure,” laughed LeVisqueux, swishing his saber in the air. “Let some other fool find eet, and zen steal eet out from under zem.”
“Thanks for doing our digging, kids,” chuckled Mr. Huxley.
“I’ll make sure you all get extra credit for it,” joked Mrs. Malvolio.
“We found the treasure,” said Grace. “Therefore, it’s ours.”
“Not if we steal it from you first,” said Mr. Huxley. “You see, little girl, this treasure belonged to my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Alonso Mieras.”
“Whoa,” said Kojo. “That’s a lot of greats. I mean, can any grandfather be that good?”
“Silence, foolish boy!” Eriq LeVisqueux slashed his blade through the air again.
“My bad. Please continue, sir.”
Huxley took a dramatic step forward. “My grandfather’s name was Miguel Mieras. His ancestor, Alonso, was the pirate known and feared across the seven seas as Capitán Aliento de Perro! Captain Dog Breath!”
When he made that proclamation, Mrs. Malvolio fanned the air beneath her nose. “Did somebody step in that bat guano in the other room?”
Mr. Huxley ignored her. “This treasure you claim to be yours? It belongs to my family.”
“No, it doesn’t!” said Grace. “Your ancestor, Dog Breath, stole it in a mutiny from the real captain of the ship—my ancestor, the brave buccaneer Angel Vengador Leones!”
“So?” said Mr. Huxley. “They were pirates. They stole stuff. My ancestor stole it last!”
“No, the real captain’s son, Eduardo, did.”
“Aha! You admit
he was a thief!”
“He was a pirate!”
“None of that matters,” said Jake. “We found it first. And, if I might cite the common law principle governing this sort of treasure salvage, it clearly states—”
“Sacré bleu!” shouted LeVisqueux. “Enough! We must move swiftly.”
“True,” said Mrs. Malvolio, checking her watch. “It’s nearly two o’clock in the morning. I have to be at the Imperial Marquis for that silly Quiz Bowl competition in less than seven hours. I think I’ll resign as principal right after my poor, tumbledown school embarrasses itself at the state finals. Oh yes. We’re going to lose. Because our champion Quiz Bowl team—poof—disappeared.”
LeVisqueux dumped the contents of his knapsack on the floor: a rope, some pinions, a pair of pulleys, and a stack of nylon tote bags with drawstring tops.
“Did you children bring bags and rope to haul out zee treasure?” he asked. “No. Of course not. You are zee amateurs. I am zee professional. Zees is zee only way to haul all zee gold and jewels out of zees chamber. Quickly now, load up zees bags with everything you have found.” He wiggled his sword. “Do eet now—or else!”
Grace, Kojo, and Jake reluctantly loaded up the bags. It took over an hour to pack everything into the bulging sacks. The whole time, Jake was hoping his big brain would come up with a way out of this jam. So far, it hadn’t.
LeVisqueux attached a pulley to a pinion he’d staked into the cave floor, then looped a cord through the pulley’s wheels. He worked up a sweat and wiped his brow with a knit cap he pulled out of his pants pocket.
“I will take zee line to zee other side of zee crawl space. You two—tie zee treasure bags to zee rope and I will pull zem into zee far chamber with me.”
“I’m going with you,” said Mr. Huxley, sounding as if he didn’t trust LeVisqueux. “Patricia? Grab the sword and keep an eye on the kids.”
“What’d you creeps do to Uncle Charley?” Grace blurted.
“Oh, he’s fine,” said Mrs. Malvolio. “I’m sure he’d be coming down to rescue you if he weren’t sound asleep and all tied up at the moment. Probably will be until somebody goes looking for him. Of course, nobody is coming to school today. I sent out an email blast. School is cancelled so everybody can go support you three at the Quiz Bowl. Too bad you won’t be there to hear them cheer you on.”
Jake couldn’t believe they were being forced to help the bad guys steal the treasure.
But they didn’t have a choice.
Half an hour later, fifty nylon bags filled with gold coins, jewelry, rare gems, and precious artifacts had been shuttled out of the chamber through the crawl space.
“Thank you all for your assistance,” giggled Mrs. Malvolio. “Hopefully, you will be happy in your new middle schools since, after Riverview’s miserable showing at the Quiz Bowl and the tragic outcome of your unchaperoned adventure down here in these dangerous caves, aided by, of all people, the vice principal, the school board will have no choice but to shutter Riverview and bulldoze it to the ground!”
She chuckled maniacally.
“Oh, who am I kidding? You three are never going back to school. But your deaths shall not be in vain. We will use all this treasure to finance the most spectacular high-rise condo this city has ever seen. It will be our castle in the sky!” She crouched down, keeping the tip of the sword pointed at Grace, then Kojo, then Jake, then back to Grace. “Uncle Heath?” she hollered into the crawl space. “Haul me out of here. Fast!”
“Grab hold of the line!” Huxley shouted back. “Pull, Eriq, pull!”
“Oui, monsieur, oui!”
Mrs. Malvolio flopped onto her back. She dropped the sword so she could grab hold of the moving rope with both hands. She slid out of the chamber like one of the lumpy treasure sacks, bouncing along over the bumpy cave floor.
“Ooh,” she cried. “Ouch. That hurt. Oooh again.”
“This is our chance!” said Kojo, racing across the floor to grab the weapon.
“Leave it!” Grace and Jake both shouted.
Kojo skidded to a stop.
“Get away from the mouth of that passageway!” said Jake.
“Why?”
“Because, you idiot,” shouted Mrs. Malvolio, safe on the other side. “We also brought dynamite!”
“Dynamite?!”
Kojo dashed back across the chamber as fast as he could and dove behind the first pillar of stones. Grace and Jake ducked behind the other one.
A tremendous KABOOM! roared out of the crawl space, followed by a cannon blast of dust and debris. The narrow passageway’s ceiling splintered and crumbled. There was an avalanche of boulders inside the slanted tunnel.
The exit was completely blocked. Sealed.
There was no way out.
“Okay,” said Kojo when the dust finally settled. “I’m wishing I would’ve dragged some of those survival crackers down here with me.”
“Did your phone survive the explosion?” asked Jake.
“Why are you interested in his phone when we’re about to die?” wondered Grace.
“Because that phone is video evidence that we found the treasure first. That Mrs. Malvolio and her uncle stole it from us.”
“With a little help from their Frenchy friend,” added Kojo, who’d gone to the rock ledge to examine his phone. “It’s all good,” he reported. “We got the whole thing on video. I wish I could email it to my friends at the FBI, but the Wi-Fi down here is terrible. Cell service, too. There is none.”
“I hope Uncle Charley is okay,” said Grace.
“Mrs. Malvolio said he is,” said Jake. “They wouldn’t kill him.”
“But he can identify them,” said Grace.
“Doubtful,” said Jake. “Remember, LeVisqueux is a pro. My guess? He probably wore the ski mask he used to wipe sweat off his brow and he blindfolded your uncle before Huxley and Malvolio even entered his office. It’ll just look like a botched burglary. They don’t want a murder on their hands.”
“Except ours,” said Kojo.
“Uncle Charley will tell the police that we’re down here,” said Grace eagerly. “When he wakes up, he’ll call nine-one-one. We’re going to be rescued!”
“Maybe,” said Jake.
“Um, what do you mean by ‘maybe’?” wondered Kojo.
“Mrs. Malvolio seemed super confident that we weren’t going to crawl out of this cave and testify against them. Therefore, logic forces me to conclude that they brought down more dynamite to seal up more of the cave.”
Just then, as if on cue, the cavernous chamber’s walls shuddered. A few stalactite spears lost their grip on the ceiling and plummeted, shattering on the rock-strewn floor like falling icicles in a thaw. One or two barely missed Jake and Grace. Kojo’s hair was full of dust.
“Do you have to know everything?” said Kojo. “I think I liked you better when you were just, you know, you.”
Jake nodded.
Even though he didn’t agree with what Kojo just said.
If he wasn’t the smartest kid in the universe, he might not be able to figure out an alternate escape route.
Which he hadn’t done yet.
But he was definitely working on it.
Hours passed.
To conserve their batteries, Jake suggested that everybody turn off their flashlights.
The chilled stone chamber, which felt like some kind of tomb, was plunged into total darkness. Jake could hear Kojo sobbing. Grace sniffled some, too.
None of them said much. They were lost in their thoughts.
A new one percolated up in Jake’s brain.
You can always find another way.
The message written in stone from the rock pillars. Both of them.
Why had Eduardo Leones repeated himself like that?
The first “anoth
er way” was the math problem. If there never was a fire pit, the cabin boy knew that to find his treasure, his descendants would need to explore another way of solving the problem. They’d have to use the plane geometry solution. They could imagine a virtual fire pit at any random point. Its true location was irrelevant to finding the treasure.
But what was the second “another way”?
Wait a minute.
Jake’s buzzing brain made another connection, another leap.
If the bad guys had to ferry the loot out of the treasure room in fifty nylon tote bags attached to a rope-and-pulley system, how the heck did young Eduardo Leones haul a heavy metal treasure chest the size of an old-fashioned steamer trunk into the room?
The thing was a four-by-four-by-four cube. No way could it fit through the crawl space.
You can always find another way.
Another way into the chamber.
Which, of course, meant there was also another way out of the chamber.
The fire pit!
The missing point in the puzzle. Maybe it never was a fire pit. Maybe that was just Leones’s clever code for an escape hatch.
Jake flicked on his flashlight.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to be burning batteries,” said Grace, snapping hers on, too.
“I need to do some more math,” Jake explained. “I think there is a fire pit, only it’s not really a pozo de fuego. More like una escotilla de escape. An escape hatch!”
Kojo’s flashlight clicked on. “What’s this about an escape hatch?”
“I think there’s a second entrance and exit in this room,” said Jake. “How else could Eduardo Leones have dragged that treasure chest in here?”
“You’re right!” said Grace. “It’d never fit through the crawl space.”
“Exactly. I think the escape hatch is where the puzzle says the fire pit should be.”
“Can you find it?” asked Grace.
“Yes. I just have to work the same sort of plane geometry to find another point not labeled on our map.”
This time, it took Jake less than five minutes to complete the complex series of equations and find his vectors.
The Smartest Kid in the Universe Page 16
