The Tell-Tale Start

by Gordon McAlpine

  Now the boys held the book between them. It was heavy in their hands.

  “This clearly contains a special message for us,” Allan said.

  “Yes, but if you consider all the writing in it, there are thousands of messages,” Edgar observed.

  “So how do we figure it out?”

  Whoever had left it behind had used a tourist brochure, like those in the motel office, as a bookmark. The volume opened to a story called “The Purloined Letter.” It began with a short quote in Latin:

  Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio.

  Of course they knew the translation: “Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness.”

  They looked at each other.

  “That can’t have anything to do with us,” Allan said.

  Edgar agreed. “We’re clever, but not excessively clever.”

  “Actually, we’re just clever enough.”

  They kept reading.

  “The Purloined Letter” was one of their great-great-great-great granduncle’s most famous stories. In it, a detective is challenged to locate a valuable stolen letter that has been hidden in a particular room. Experts have already searched the room, tearing it apart but finding nothing. The detective immediately realizes that the letter must be hidden in plain sight. And he is right—there it is, in a rack full of visiting cards below the mantelpiece, not hidden at all. Simple! And yet only a genius would think to look in the open for a “hidden” object.

  Just as only a genius would look in the open for a “hidden” message.

  The twins looked around the room for whatever wasn’t hidden.

  The problem was that everything they saw wasn’t hidden.

  “It’s not so easy when you don’t know what you’re looking for,” Edgar said to his brother.

  Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio, they thought.

  “Yes, maybe we are being ‘too clever,’” Allan said.

  “OK, so what’s the most obvious thing in this room that the message of ‘The Purloined Letter’ is pointing us to?” Edgar asked.

  They looked again at the open book.

  Why had it opened to that particular story?

  The bookmark!

  Might the tourist brochure be more than just a bookmark? Might it be the actual object they were supposed to notice? Might it be the “purloined letter,” the message? They set the book down and picked up the brochure:

  THE AUTHENTIC

  DOROTHY GALE FARM & OZITORIUM

  Coincidence? No way.

  The boys recalled the grainy, black-and-white fax from Professor Marvel that their aunt Judith now had in her purse. This glossy, full-color brochure had a different headline: THIS YEAR CELEBRATING THE CENTENNIAL OF L. FRANK BAUM’S CLASSIC, THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ! Edgar and Allan knew the vital facts about most major American books, so they knew in a flash that this brochure dated back twelve years.

  Edgar read aloud: “‘Visitors will discover on our grounds no mere reproduction of the home of Dorothy Gale, famous heroine of the beloved Oz books, but the actual house that Dorothy inhabited…’”

  Same baloney as the fax.

  “Wait, look there,” Allan said. He pointed to one of the photographs, which had been taken at the entrance to the OZitorium, a small, ordinary-looking theater. It showed a smiling group of tourists—among them, a young man and woman each holding an identical infant. The couple bore more than a mere resemblance to Mal and Irma Poe.

  “Is it them?” Edgar asked.

  “It looks like them.”

  “Then that would make the babies in the photo—”

  “Us!”

  For a moment, the boys were silent.

  “Gee, Mom and Dad sure look happy here,” Edgar said quietly.

  “Too bad we can’t remember being with them that day,” Allan said in a small voice.

  “Yeah.”

  Edgar looked at Allan.

  Allan looked at Edgar.

  Each had one small tear in the corner of his right eye.

  After a heartbeat or two, the boys wiped them away.

  “Look what it says underneath the picture,” Allan remarked.

  “Cool,” they said.

  Later that night, they took from the desk drawer in their room a complimentary Wagon Wheel Motel postcard (photographed decades before, when cars had tailfins and chrome bumpers) and wrote to their friends:

  WHAT THE POE TWINS DID NOT KNOW…

  LETTER SENT SEVEN YEARS EARLIER FROM THE

  BOYS’ FATHER TO PROFESSOR S. PANGBORN PERRY

  MAL POE

  Space & Aeronautical Design Specialist

  Dear Professor Perry,

  My wife and I have followed your recent criminal trial and we are glad to know you have been found not guilty. Nonetheless, what a terrible shock it must be for you to learn that it was your own mother who strangled your landlady. What a sad, sad story. You have our sympathies.

  However, in light of your recent dismissal from the university, we must now insist that you stop studying our twin sons. Over the past few years my wife and I have come to doubt your methods, particularly your need for secrecy in all your observations.

  Please do not mistake the friendliness of this letter for indecision or weakness on our part. Likewise, be assured that while my wife and I may be somewhat busy next week with the launch of the Bradbury Telecommunications Satellite, we will nonetheless set everything aside to ensure our twins’ safety. So stay away from them, forever.

  Sincerely,

  Mal Poe

  Mr. Poe in the Great Beyond

  Mr. Shakespeare burst into Mr. Poe’s cubicle. “A pox on you, Poe!”

  Mr. Poe looked up from his desk. “Well, good afternoon to you, too, Mr. Shakespeare.”

  “I’ll have you know that my afternoon has not been ‘good’ and yours is going to be even worse,” Mr. Shakespeare replied.

  Mr. Poe put down the pages he’d found that morning in his in-box. They listed the ordinary fortune-cookie fortunes he’d written this past week. Every one had been rejected by Mr. Shakespeare and his editorial committee.

  Mr. Poe was not surprised they’d turned down “Your corpse will wither and rot” or “The conqueror worms are hungry for you.” He had expected such squeamishness. Nonetheless, he’d been disappointed that they also passed on some of his more optimistic fortunes, such as “Death will come for you soon, cheerfully.” What was objectionable about cheerfulness?

  He had planned to take the matter up with Mr. Shakespeare. However, judging from his boss’s current mood, this seemed like the wrong moment.

  “Did you send more communications to your nephews?” Mr. Shakespeare cried.

  Mr. Poe shrugged. “‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’”

  Mr. Shakespeare stamped his foot in rage. Nothing got under his skin like having his own quotes used against him. Nonetheless, he pulled himself together. “Exactly what message did you send down?”

  There was no use lying. “‘The farm is a brilliant trap.’”

  “Trap?” Mr. Shakespeare put his hand to his forehead. Then he removed from the pocket of his sixteenth-century doublet a copy of the message that had actually gone through.

  “‘Trip’ instead of ‘trap’?” Mr. Poe muttered, worried.

  “A typographical error of just one letter and look what you’ve got. What you intended as a warning becomes the opposite.”

  “Oh, no,” Mr. Poe whispered, wringing his hands. “One little mistake…” Then he stopped, his expression brightening. “Still, all may not be lost.”

  “You also did something with a brochure and a book, true?” Mr. Shakespeare accused.

  Mr. Poe nodded. “Thankfully, that should straighten everything out.”

  “What, exactly, did you do?”

  Mr. Poe was proud of his cleverness. “I slipped an old brochure for the Gale Farm and OZitorium between the pages of my classic story ‘The Purloined Letter,’ which I k
new the boys would interpret to mean—”

  “And in that brochure there was an old photograph of the boys in the arms of their mother and father?”

  Mr. Poe nodded.

  “And beneath that photo?”

  “I inserted a line that could not be misinterpreted.”

  “And that line was?” Mr. Shakespeare prodded.

  “‘Stay far away!’”

  Shakespeare sighed and shook his head. “Another misprint, Mr. Poe.” He sighed. “Ah, who’d imagine two letters could change so much?”

  Mr. Poe swallowed hard, worry creeping in again. “So…what did the line in the brochure actually say?”

  “‘Stay for a day.’”

  “What!”

  “There’s nothing we can do.”

  “I’ll write another fortune cookie, and this time—”

  “You’ll be writing no more fortune cookies, Mr. Poe. You’re being demoted.”

  “But the boys are misled!”

  Mr. Shakespeare shrugged. “‘Fortune brings in some boats that are not steer’d.’”

  Shakespeare was quoting Shakespeare again. But that wasn’t really what made Mr. Poe angry. He was furious with himself. “Your quote is true enough, Mr. Shakespeare. But tell me what happens to boats that are steered in exactly the wrong direction?”

  “They crash on the rocks, Mr. Poe.”

  Mr. Poe stood and pushed past Mr. Shakespeare, heading for the exit.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Mr. Shakespeare called.

  Mr. Poe didn’t answer. He hadn’t the slightest idea. Still, there had to be something he could do….

  TOURIST TRAP

  THE next morning at breakfast in the Wagon Wheel Diner, Aunt Judith mashed the pile of strawberries and swirls of whipped cream atop her pancakes into a sweet, chunky mass. Uncle Jack did the same, whistling in approval at the sheer heft of the breakfast before him. In the meantime, Allan and Edgar poked holes into the yolks of their poached eggs, watching the yellow run over the slices of wheat toast before they drenched it all in rivulets of Tabasco sauce, which flowed red as blood over the whole thing. Sometimes watching the Poe family eat was like watching a horror movie.

  “How’d you sleep last night, boys?” Aunt Judith asked between bites of strawberry and pancake.

  “Sleep was OK,” Edgar answered.

  “But our waking hours were better,” Allan added as he dropped onto the table the brochure they’d discovered in the old book. “Have a look at this.”

  Aunt Judith picked it up. “It’s like the fax in my purse.”

  Allan shook his head. “This is an older version.”

  “What’s different?” asked Uncle Jack.

  “This picture,” Edgar said, pointing. “It’s us as babies with Mom and Dad.”

  “Mal and Irma?” Aunt Judith was intrigued.

  Uncle Jack took off his glasses in order to get a better look.

  Aunt Judith put on her reading glasses and leaned forward, bringing the brochure to within an inch of her face. “What do you know? It is Mal and Irma holding you boys!”

  Uncle Jack nodded. “They must have come through here when they took one of their crazy vacations.”

  “Oh, they loved these kinds of wacky roadside attractions,” Aunt Judith recalled, smiling. “They’d have surely stopped at that toy-robot museum back in Pennsylvania, or that world’s largest ball of human hair in Missouri, just like you two wanted to do. They’d send us postcards. And they’d buy T-shirts and give them away as joke gifts.”

  “They thought those places were funny,” Uncle Jack said.

  “They are,” the boys agreed, identical grins on their faces.

  Uncle Jack chuckled. “You’ve got their sense of humor.”

  Aunt Judith looked at her nephews. “Your mom and dad sure loved you two.”

  Edgar and Allan never knew what to say to things like that—things that somehow, mistakenly, made them feel a little undeserving.

  So they said nothing.

  Edgar took back the brochure, brushing off a spot of powdered sugar.

  “What a lovely coincidence,” Aunt Judith said softly. Her expression was a little misty.

  The boys didn’t bother reminding her what they thought of coincidence. Instead, they slipped the brochure back into the middle of the old book for safekeeping.

  “Did you call the professor to tell him we’re on our way?” Uncle Jack asked her.

  “I tried,” she answered as she put her reading glasses back into their case. “But his phone’s been disconnected.”

  Uncle Jack looked confused. “That’s strange.”

  Aunt Judith shrugged. “He probably forgot to pay the bill. It happens. Besides, when he called us at home he said to just come to his amusement park and we’d be sure to find him.”

  “He doesn’t just work there,” Edgar reminded his uncle. “He lives there too.”

  “What an odd duck,” Uncle Jack said.

  “Since he’s a professor, it’s probably more accurate to call him an odd ‘doc’ rather than an odd ‘duck,’” Allan observed.

  “Finish your breakfasts,” their uncle muttered, and retreated behind his newspaper.

  The front page immediately caught the twins’ attention—not a news story, but the printed name of the paper itself, which ought to have read

  Instead, it was misprinted:

  “A typo that actually spells the word ‘typos’?” the boys wondered aloud.

  “Can you believe such carelessness at a metropolitan newspaper?” Aunt Judith asked.

  “What’s journalism coming to?” Uncle Jack said, distractedly returning to the sports section.

  The boys glanced around the crowded diner. Across the room, a man at the counter was reading from the same morning newspaper, but the front page of his copy read KANSAS CITY POST.

  No typo.

  Just the Poes’ newspaper? Surely no mere coincidence.

  “‘Typos,’” the boys mused. “Not ‘typo,’ but plural.”

  “Well, it’s off to the Gale Farm,” Uncle Jack announced as he refolded the paper, grabbed the check, and began sliding out of the booth. “We’re off to see the Wizard, so to speak.” He chuckled at his own joke.

  Aunt Judith slid out after him. “Won’t Roderick be glad to see his boys! It’ll be just a couple hours now.”

  Edgar and Allan still hadn’t moved from the booth. Their brains had begun working to process this latest, strangest message:

  Typos…

  “Let’s go,” Uncle Jack said. “We haven’t come all this way just to sit in a diner.”

  “Boys?” Aunt Judith pressed.

  As if in a dream, they rose as one and followed their aunt and uncle out of the restaurant, their brains humming in perfect coordination.

  Typos…

  Then they stopped.

  Might some of the recent mysterious messages have contained typos?

  “Oh no,” they said in unison in the parking lot.

  In a flash, they grasped what this latest communiqué meant.

  “Wait!” they cried as their aunt and uncle opened the car doors to climb in.

  “What is it?” Uncle Jack asked.

  The boys processed it, working backward. They substituted letters here and there for every word in every mysterious message they’d received. One ordinary brain would have taken hours to go through all the possibilities—but Edgar and Allan, working together, took mere seconds.

  They turned pale when they realized that changing two letters under their old photo in the brochure turned a happy invitation into a dire warning: “Stay far away!” And worse, the “brilliant trip” to the farm was really a brilliant trap!

  Edgar and Allan looked at each other.

  Wasn’t this just about picking up the family cat from a kindhearted animal lover? Unless…

  The boys remembered the poster of the sleeping kitten: “Beware the cat napping.” Remove a space and the two words become one: cat
napping.

  Clear as moonlight.

  Roderick Usher had been catnapped to lure Edgar and Allan to the Gale Farm, a trap from which they should stay far away!

  But who wanted to trap them? And why?

  Uncle Jack stood impatiently beside the driver’s side door. “Get in, boys. What’s wrong with you?”

  Danger and deceit…That’s what was wrong.

  But how to explain this to their aunt and uncle?

  Even more pressing: what to do about it?

  Edgar and Allan knew there was still time to persuade Uncle Jack to turn the car around and safely return home. (Even if he refused, they could always reprogram the car’s GPS at the next gas station and be halfway back to Baltimore before Uncle Jack realized he was driving in the wrong direction.) But what then would become of Roderick Usher? The boys would never abandon their best friend.

  This journey, which had started as a mere retrieval of their cat, was now a full-blown rescue mission, requiring the boys to walk with eyes wide open into some kind of trap.

  Hadn’t they always wanted to match wits against an opponent more formidable than their school principal?

  “Why are you two acting so strange?” Aunt Judith asked with concern.

  The boys looked at each other. They knew that the disconnected brains of Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith didn’t work as fast as their own. So how to make them understand? Or might their guardians, natural worriers, be better off not knowing? Worry only made things more difficult. Besides, how truly dangerous could a villain be whose lair was a broken-down Wizard of Oz amusement park?

  “Oh, nothing to fret over,” Edgar and Allan said in unison.

  The gravel road that led from the highway to the Gale Farm and OZitorium twisted into a dense cornfield, winding among eight-foot-high stalks until soon all that was visible from within the car were walls of corn.

  “It’s like being in a maze,” Edgar said nervously.