The Eagle's Quill

by Sarah L. Thomson

  Jed made a grab at Abby, who dodged. Theo seized the second candlestick. Marty, though, had a different idea. In two steps she was at the wall where Josiah Hodge’s musket hung, and she grabbed it. “Hands up!” she shouted, swinging the musket around to point at the two intruders. “Or I’ll shoot!”

  It was ridiculous, but the two men were so startled that they stood still for a second, blinking with shock. And a second was all Theo needed to use his candlestick to crack the one with the bloody nose across the side of the head, knocking him to the floor.

  Jed, recovering from the shock of finding himself on the business end of a two-hundred-year-old antique, swore and lunged at Theo. Marty yelped in alarm and threw the musket straight at him. It thumped into his shoulder, and he staggered, his bad knee giving way under him. He fell, and Theo leaped out of his way.

  “Follow me! Now!” Abby shouted, charging for the door a second time.

  Sam was on her heels, with Marty behind him and Theo bringing up the rear. Jed scrambled up and followed, just in time to whack into the door as Theo slammed it shut behind him. Theo braced his back against the door and dug his heels into the floor. Sam heard the thump and saw the door shake as Jed threw his weight against it.

  “Does this—lock?” Theo gasped, and Abby darted back to his side and did something to the doorknob.

  “There!” she said, and Theo stepped away. A heavy body clobbered the door again, and the hinges groaned, but the lock held.

  They were in a hallway Sam did not recognize. He was pretty sure it hadn’t been on Abby’s tour yesterday. Abby took off running again, and they followed her as something hit the door for a third time. They heard wood crack.

  Halfway down the hallway, Abby stopped. She slammed her palm flat against a patch of wall that, to Sam, looked no different from any other part of the hallway.

  “Abby, what—?” Sam wheezed, coming up behind her.

  A section of the wall slid aside, revealing a dark rectangle of doorway. Sam was startled enough to jump back, stepping on Marty’s toe.

  “In!” Abby disappeared through the doorway. Sam followed, with Marty and Theo close behind. The door slid shut with a heavy, solid thud, and lights came up all around them just as gunshots exploded in the hallway outside.

  “Look,” Abby said, pointing to a screen over the doorway. It was a clunky-looking monitor, covered with dust, and on it a grainy black-and-white movie was playing. A huge man with a scarred face, a pistol in his left hand, kicked open a ruined doorway and stepped through it. He looked around blankly and started running down a hallway, favoring one knee. In moments he’d shoved his way through a doorway at the far end and disappeared.

  “That was Jed,” Marty said, amazement ringing in her voice. “He—he didn’t see the door, I guess.”

  Abby shook her head. “It’s very hard to see, unless you know where it is. And anyway, he couldn’t get in. That door is reinforced seven ways from Sunday. Bulletproof too.”

  Sam turned to stare at her. What kind of a girl was Abby, who could break a bad guy’s wrist with one kick? What kind of a place was Caractacus Ranch, with a secret hideout straight out of James Bond?

  The room had more than a bulletproof door, he realized as he looked around. There were multiple screens on the walls, each showing a different view of the house. There were shelves with bottles of water, canned goods, and boxes of protein bars and chocolate bars. There were cots and blankets, winter coats and boots, sweatpants and hoodies folded neatly on a shelf. There was even a shelf with board games—Boggle, Scrabble, checkers, chess, Monopoly.

  You could survive a siege in this place.

  “Abby?” Sam asked. “What is all this?”

  But Abby was not listening. She was looking up at the screens, and she made a sharp little whimpering sound.

  Sam looked up quickly too, and Theo let out his breath between his teeth.

  One of the screens on the walls showed a view from outside the front entrance to the ranch. One next to it had a view of the door that led from the kitchen out the back. Sam saw that both doors just—didn’t exist anymore. There were merely holes in the walls where they had been. That had been what awakened them, Sam realized—the doors being blown to bits.

  But that wasn’t what had captured everyone’s attention. Another screen showed the octagonal hallway near the front door, and there, standing near a pile of rubble that had once been a wall of the house, were Abby’s parents and Evangeline.

  “My mom and dad,” Abby whispered, her voice quavering.

  “It’ll be okay,” Sam said to her. Which was about the stupidest thing he could have said. Everything was clearly very far from okay, and all four of them knew perfectly well that things might not be okay ever again.

  Charley Hodge had his arm around his wife. Evangeline stood stiffly by herself, her face cold and angry. Men in black jackets surrounded them. Another man stood a little distance away. He seemed to be talking on a cell phone, and Sam recognized him. He had dark hair, a rugged face lined from sun and wind, and thick eyebrows drawn down in a scowl that seemed permanent.

  “Flintlock!” Sam whispered. Marty gasped. Theo just stared, his eyes narrow, his whole body as rigid as if he’d been carved out of stone.

  They’d met Flintlock in Death Valley. He wasn’t just hired muscle, like Jed and the others who’d chased them through the ranch. Flintlock had brains, and even worse, he had a close relationship with his boss. If he was here, Gideon Arnold could not be far behind.

  Flintlock nodded and put his phone away. Sam could see his mouth moving, but there was no sound. It was easy to guess what he’d said, though, from what happened next.

  Flintlock’s men took hold of Abby’s parents and Evangeline, and tied their hands behind their backs. The three adults were forced to sit down against a wall that was more or less in one piece, and two men with guns stayed to guard them.

  “Leave them alone,” Abby whispered angrily, her hands clenched into fists by her side. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare . . .”

  But they did dare. The rest of Flintlock’s men fanned out all over the house.

  The screens showed what was happening. The men kicked open cupboards, hauled down bookcases, and knocked furniture over. In the bedrooms they yanked everything out of the closets. In the kitchen, they dumped shelves of food on the floor. Wherever they went, they kicked at the walls and seemed to be listening to the sound. They were looking for the safe room, Sam realized. His throat felt tight, and it was hard to swallow. They’re hunting us down . . .

  “They won’t find us,” Abby said, her eyes still on the screen. “Yeah, good luck, you slimy pieces of trash. You aren’t going to get in here.”

  “I really, really hope you’re right,” Sam told her.

  The search seemed to go on for hours, but a digital clock on the walls showed that it had only been about forty-five minutes when Flintlock’s men returned to the octagonal hallway, shaking their heads.

  Flintlock frowned. He took out his cell phone again, made a quick call, and nodded.

  Then, with one hand, Flintlock picked up a small table that was lying on its side, set it upright, and pulled a piece of paper out of a pocket. He wrote on the paper and then looked up. He smiled.

  Flintlock must have spotted the security camera that was giving them their image. He walked toward it, his face looming larger and larger. Sam fought the urge to step backward. He knew Flintlock couldn’t get to them in here, but still . . .

  Flintlock held up the piece of paper. They could clearly read the words he had scrawled on it.

  Don’t call the police, or things will get messy.

  Flintlock held the paper up long enough to be sure they had gotten a good look at his message. Then he crumpled it and dropped it to the floor. He took something black and rectangular out of his pocket and held that up for them to see. Then he laid it on the table where he had written his message.

  Flintlock walked toward the hole in the wall, jerki
ng his head at his men.

  The armed men pulled Evangeline and the Hodges to their feet and shoved them outside. Abby gasped. Sam swung his gaze to a different screen, one that showed Flintlock getting into a van parked in the driveway. He and the others watched as Evangeline and the Hodges were forced into the back of a second van. Doors were slammed shut. Slowly and sedately, with no spinning wheels or scattered gravel, the vans drove away.

  Back in the safe room, Sam was slowly shaking his head, trying to get his brain around everything that had just happened. He’d been sleeping peacefully in a comfortable bed, thinking that everything was going to be—well, not easy, maybe, but more or less okay. And then explosions, panic, and finally disaster. What were they going to do now?

  He looked around at the others. Marty had her arms hugged tightly around herself. Theo’s face was expressionless; he might have been furious or terrified or thinking about his ten favorite Netflix movies. Sam just couldn’t tell. Abby flopped down against a wall, her head drooping down, hiding her face. Sam thought he saw her shoulders shaking.

  “Hey.” Awkwardly, Sam knelt down next to her. “Hey, Abby, look. Try not to worry. I know you’re scared, but—”

  “Scared?” Abby’s head came up, her blond hair whipping back. “Scared? Forget scared. I am going to kill those guys. I swear I’ll kill them. They wrecked my house. They took my parents. I’m going to make them pay.”

  “Whoa.” Sam sat back a little. Apparently Abby didn’t really need comforting. “Okay. Right. Making them pay, I’m on board, sure.” He decided not to mention that Abby’s super-powered karate kicks might not be enough.

  “Should we . . . go out?” Marty said, a little shakily.

  Theo shook his head, his eyes still on the screens. “Wait. It could be a trap.”

  Sam sighed. He reached up to one of the shelves and pulled down a box of Milky Ways. If they had to sit around and wait . . .

  “Sam, really. Now?” Marty scowled at him.

  Sam ripped off a wrapper. “You have a better idea? Want to play Monopoly? I’ll let you be the shoe.”

  Marty sat down against a different wall, as far from Abby and Sam as she could get.

  “So, Abby,” Sam said around a mouthful of chocolate and caramel. “You’ve always had this room here? In case there’s a nuclear war or a zombie apocalypse or something?”

  Abby was glaring up at the screens, along with Theo, but at Sam’s questions she looked over at him and nodded.

  “I didn’t know about the safe room until last year,” she said. “My dad told me then. He told me about the Quill too. He takes it seriously, Sam. He said we had to be prepared for anything.”

  Sam looked around at the shelves stocked with survival gear. They were prepared for anything, all right. “And did he teach you all those black belt moves?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Brown belt, actually. I’ve been going to martial arts classes since I was a kid. My dad always insisted. I never really knew why. Now I do.” She sighed, staring up at the wreckage of her home on the screen. “Give me one of those candy bars, Sam.”

  Sam obliged.

  “And tell me who that guy is. The one who has my mom and dad.”

  “His name is Flintlock,” Sam said, swallowing the last of his candy. “He works for a man named Gideon Arnold.”

  They watched the screens while Sam told Abby a short version of what had happened to them in Death Valley, and how they’d escaped from Benjamin Franklin’s vault, narrowly avoiding capture by Flintlock and Arnold.

  In the black-and-white images on the monitors, a light wind blew dead leaves and scraps of paper through the open space of the octagonal hallway. Apart from that, nothing moved.

  “Theo?” Sam said at last. “We can’t stay in here forever.” He looked around at the stocked shelves. “Or, well, we could, but . . .” But they couldn’t. Not when Flintlock and Gideon Arnold had Evangeline and Abby’s parents in their clutches.

  “It could still be a trap,” Theo said.

  “Yeah, it could.” Sam nodded. “But if we haven’t spotted the trap by now, I don’t think we’re going to. See, either there’s no trap, or there’s one we can’t figure out. So we go out and it’s fine, or we go out and we deal with the trap once we find out if there is one. Because we can’t deal with it in here.”

  Theo looked at Sam as if he were a little bit surprised. “Sam Solomon logic,” he said, shaking his head.

  “It’s unique, but it does do the trick sometimes,” Marty said, getting to her feet. “He’s right, in that bizarre Sam way. Come on.”

  Abby nodded, getting up as well. She flipped a switch on the wall near the door, and it slid smoothly open.

  They picked their way through the disaster that had been Caractacus Ranch only a few hours ago. Nobody jumped out to grab them. No bombs exploded, no trap doors opened beneath their feet. Sam felt jumpy enough to be ready for anything, but when nothing happened he felt . . . even jumpier.

  They gathered in the ruins of the octagonal hallway, and the four of them stared at the object Flintlock had left on the small table for them to see.

  “Is it a walkie-talkie?” Sam asked, picking it up.

  “Sam!” Marty yelped. “That could have been booby-trapped. Don’t be an idiot!”

  “It’s a satellite phone,” Theo said.

  The phone rang.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sam jumped and nearly dropped the phone. He couldn’t help it. The sudden noise, together with Marty’s comment about booby traps, had rattled him. It rang again. “What do I do?” he asked, as panicked as if he’d never seen a phone before.

  “Answer it, you moron!” Marty told him.

  Sam blinked at the phone’s screen and poked at a flashing green button. The ringing stopped. He cautiously lifted the phone to his ear.

  “Um, hello?”

  “Mr. Solomon, I presume.”

  Sam felt something cold and heavy, like a hard-packed ball of slush, thud into the pit of his stomach. He’d know that smooth, precise voice anywhere. Gideon Arnold.

  “Hold on. Let me put you on speaker,” Sam said. He couldn’t believe what an idiot he sounded like. He pushed another button. Arnold’s voice rang out into the ruined hallway.

  “Find the Quill,” Arnold said, and somehow the fact that his words were so few made them even more menacing. “If there are puzzles, solve them. If there are traps, disarm them. I have no interest in difficulties or excuses. Once you have the Quill in your possession, use this phone to call me. If you do all of this, you may see your friend and relatives alive once more.”

  And the phone went dead.

  “What? Wait!” Sam stared at the phone and shook it, as if that would bring Arnold back.

  “Give it to me.” Theo held out a hand. He tapped at the phone’s buttons. “There’s one number in the contacts section. It must be Arnold’s.”

  “Great. So we can call the psychopath anytime we want,” Sam said, shaking his head.

  “We’ve got to do it.” Abby was staring at the phone as if it might jump out of Theo’s hand and bite her. “We’ve got to find that Quill! He’s going to kill my parents!”

  “It’ll be okay, Abby,” Marty said, turning to her. “Just calm down. I know this is all really crazy, but—”

  “I do not want to calm down,” Abby answered, narrowing her eyes at Marty. “That guy has my parents. He’s the one you met in Death Valley, right? The one whose ancestor was Benedict Arnold?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one,” Sam agreed.

  “So he’s really insane.” Abby turned to Sam. “He’d really kill my parents. And your friend, Evangeline—he’d kill her too?”

  Sam hesitated.

  “Gideon Arnold will kill anyone who gets in his way,” Theo said. “Never doubt that.”

  “Then we’ve got to do what he said.” Abby looked fierce. “Come on! Let’s go!”

  “Let’s go where?” Sam asked, bewildered.

  “Look for c
lues,” Abby answered. “This house has been here since Josiah Hodge brought the Quill out west. Somewhere there’s a clue. And we need to find it.”

  So they looked for clues. It wouldn’t have been easy if the house had been in decent shape, since they didn’t have a single idea of what they were looking for. But as it was, they were looking for something in a house that looked as if an earthquake had hit it. It was hopeless.

  They picked up fallen furniture, collected scattered papers, and looked inside broken knickknacks. While they did all this, Marty talked. Sam had known Marty less than a week. But it was long enough to realize that Marty reacted to stress with words. Lots of words.

  “Thomas Jefferson died on the Fourth of July. Did you know that?” she asked. Sam was picking up books from the living room floor while Abby crawled into empty cupboards, tapping the walls to look for a secret hiding place.

  “Nope.” Sam dropped a thick book on fly-fishing onto a pile he was creating of “Things That Are Not Going to Help at All.”

  “So did John Adams. The exact same day. Isn’t that bizarre?”

  “Uh-huh.” Sam picked up another book, a Civil War history. Theo heaved a bookcase upright so Sam would have somewhere to put the books that were not going to help.

  “So Caractacus Ranch is designed to look like Monticello, right, Abby?” Marty went on. Abby grunted a yes as she crawled out of a cupboard. “Josiah Hodge had seen Monticello, probably. He would have known what it looked like. It’s an amazing place. I went there on a school trip last year. Beautiful. Jefferson was really into geometry. Shapes and angles. Well, you can’t design a house without caring about geometry, obviously . . .”

  Thomas Jefferson was starting to sound like a real geek to Sam. But even as he shared a sideways glance and an eye roll with Abby, he had to admit that geometry wasn’t so bad. It could help solve a puzzle, that was for sure, if you knew how many degrees were in a right angle or how to calculate the radius of a circle.