And who should sashay into the room but Daphne, Tommy’s “dumb blond” friend from the Caymans. She wasn’t wearing a bikini top and cutoffs today. She was decked out in an all-white tennis outfit with embroidered bees where the polo ponies should’ve been.
“Hey, Daphne,” said Tommy, striking one of his manly poses. “How you doin’?”
This time, the charm wasn’t working. Daphne’s claws were out. Way out.
“These little brats bartered with Louie Louie, Momma. Gave him an African mask for that bee trinket. I was gonna do the exact same thing, but that one there…”
She pointed her nicely manicured talon at Beck. And judging by the crazed, homicidal look in her eyes, she was an even bigger psychofungalfreak than her mother.
“Why, she came after me with a double-barreled shotgun! And now y’all are gonna see how it feels to be terrorized.”
She smashed open a glass case mounted on the wall and pulled out an ancient Aztec sacrificial dagger. It had a beehive handle and a very long, very sharp stinger.
“Run!” I shouted.
This time, no one disagreed with my decision.
The four of us flew out the door, splashed across that reflecting pool, and leaped into the back of JJ’s surfmobile.
Daphne, screeching like a banshee, was maybe ten yards behind us.
“We need to boogie,” said Tommy.
“Chyah,” said JJ, stomping down so hard on the gas pedal I think the taco truck popped a wheelie.
We blasted off. Crazy Daphne chased after us with that bee dagger for about a quarter mile.
When we’d finally lost her, JJ turned to Tommy.
“So, who was that?”
“Just, you know, this flaky chick I met. Down in the islands.”
JJ just nodded. “She’s a little amped, huh?”
“Totally over the falls.”
I looked around inside the back of the truck. No knives, Aztec or otherwise. I figured if JJ ever went all Daphne on Tommy, she’d just bonk him on the head with a surfboard.
CHAPTER 49
As soon as we were back at the marina and safely aboard The Lost, Beck and I headed up to the bow pulpit.
I was still carrying the wooden crate holding the Grecian urn. Beck was still mumbling stuff like “We could’ve had a Picasso or a rare Rembrandt, but noooo. Bick wanted the bee queen’s old Greek honey jug.”
It was definitely time for Twin Tirade No. 432.
“What the heck happened back there, Bickford?”
“I followed the clue!”
“What clue?”
“Dad’s corny joke about the Grecian urn.”
“He never told it to me.”
“Yeah, well, Mom never gave me a pair of 3-D glasses to decode secret messages and maps, either.”
“So? Storm knew where The Key to The Room was hidden, and we didn’t!” snapped Beck.
“Big deal,” I snapped back. “Tommy knew where the college fund was hidden!”
“So what?” screamed Beck. “You think Mom and Dad gave us each some kind of special clue that they didn’t give to anybody else?”
“Yes, now that you mention it, I do think that!” I screamed back.
“Well, I thought it first.”
“I know you did.”
“That’s why I said it before you did.”
“I know.”
“Okay.”
“Good.”
“We’re cool?”
“Totally.”
We both took a breath.
“What’s that?” said Beck, pointing to something on the side of the urn’s crate I couldn’t see. I flipped the wooden box around.
There was a stencil spray-painted on one of the wooden slats: a copper-colored silhouette that kind of looked like a very pudgy, one-legged rhinoceros. Or a pork chop someone had been chomping into. Beneath the copper inkblot were two crossed olive branches.
Fortunately, while Beck and I were staring at the strange marking, Storm wandered up to the bow. “Interesting,” she said, studying the stencil mark. “Guess that Grecian urn was originally supposed to go to Cyprus before someone stole it and shipped it off to Aunt Bee’s Antiques Theft Show.”
The instant Storm said that, Beck and I took over.
“Of course,” said Beck. “It’s the silhouette of the island of Cyprus.”
“The silhouette is copper,” I said, remembering Mom’s homeschool World Flags lecture, “because the name Cyprus comes from the Greek word for ‘copper.’ ”
“What’s going on, you guys?” said Tommy, who had just said buh-bye to JJ in the marina parking lot.
“Bick is a genius!” said Beck.
“Nah, that’s Storm’s department.”
“True,” said Storm with a shrug. “No brag. Just fact.”
“This has to be the object Dad wanted us to swap for,” Beck continued.
“It was supposed to be shipped to Cyprus,” I chimed in. “Where those thugs have Mom.”
“This could be the key to getting her back,” said Beck.
I tipped the crate so I could look between the slats nailed to the top of the box and peered down into the mouth of the jug.
“Guys! There’s something stuffed inside the urn! It looks like an envelope.”
“Bring the box back to the stern,” said Tommy. “I’ll grab a pry bar.”
Beck and I carefully toted the crate to the rear of the boat. Tommy came up from the hull cabins with a crowbar.
“Don’t shatter the urn,” said Storm.
Tommy pried off the four wooden slats on the top of the crate. Once that was done, Storm used our hot dog tongs to remove the envelope from inside the ancient piece of pottery.
I was immediately confused.
“What are provenance papers?” I asked.
“Documents that help you prove a valuable piece of art isn’t a fake,” said Beck.
“So this urn is valuable?” I said.
“There’s only one way to find out for sure,” said Beck. “Get an expert to authenticate it.”
“Dr. L. Lewis,” said Storm. “Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology, Eighth Floor, Schermerhorn Hall, Columbia University, New York, New York, 10027.”
“On it,” said Tommy. He climbed up to the wheelhouse and plotted our new coordinates.
Ten minutes later, The Lost was back out on the ocean, sailing north to New York City.
It was time to meet Dr. Lewis.
CHAPTER 50
When we slipped into New York Harbor and made our way past the Statue of Liberty, there were so many boats—barges, cruise ships, pleasure craft, sailboats—any one of them could’ve been following us.
Or we might’ve just been paranoid.
Learning that both of your parents work for the CIA will do that to you.
We sailed up the Hudson River and docked at the West 79th Street Boat Basin, not too far from Dr. Lewis’s office on the Columbia campus near West 118th Street. When we tied off at the pier, the wheelhouse computer bonged with an e-mail alert.
It was from Uncle Timothy:
Chatter in Charleston suggests you have moved closer to achieving your objective. Congratulations. I have arranged, through friends, for you four to spend the night at the Plaza Hotel.
The Plaza Hotel is the fanciest hotel in all of New York City.
It’s also where Mom and Dad spent their honeymoon and where we all stayed a couple of times back when we were one big, happy family.
So Tommy wrapped the Grecian urn in a soft (and stinky) sweatshirt and stuffed it into a gym bag. We hailed a taxi and headed across town to check into the luxurious hotel.
“Time for our horse ride!” said Beck.
“Definitely,” said Tommy.
Carriage drivers always wait just outside the hotel, a kind of castle near the southern edge of Central Park. In fact, Dad always joked that the Plaza costs more than most hotels because “it has more horsepower.”
Yeah. Dad liked
a good corny pun.
As we clip-clopped up a winding hill in Central Park, we were all totally silent for a long, long time.
I was thinking about Dad and Mom and the last time we took this same carriage ride. I guess everybody else was, too.
“I’d rather be sitting on Dad’s lap,” said Beck.
“With Mom naming all the statues and junk,” added Tommy.
“And then, at night,” whispered Storm, “they’d sit with me on the hotel room floor and help me memorize the subway map.”
“Hey,” I said, trying to change the subject before everybody (including the carriage driver and his horse) started sobbing. “After the carriage ride, let’s go grab something to eat.”
“Serendipity!” everyone shouted at the same time, including me. Serendipity 3 was Mom and Dad’s favorite restaurant in New York, probably because they served this awesome dessert called “Frrrozen Hot Chocolate.”
There were all sorts of family memories packed inside the famous restaurant’s wildly decorated walls. So even though we were sipping the happiest ice-cream-and-chocolate concoction ever created, we were all feeling sort of sad.
But halfway through dessert, Beck leaned over and whispered something in my ear: “Don’t worry. The next time we’re here, there’ll be two more straws in the whipped cream. One for Mom.”
I finished her thought: “And one for Dad.”
CHAPTER 51
Early the next morning, after a swanky Plaza Hotel breakfast of bacon, eggs, and toast that cost thirty-three dollars (per person), we headed off to Columbia University with the Grecian urn packed inside Tommy’s bulky gym bag.
But the instant we stepped out of the grand hotel’s even grander doors and walked down the extremely grand red-carpeted steps to the sidewalk, I felt like we were being watched.
“You guys?” I said, nudging my head at three young dudes in sunglasses, board shorts, and Hawaiian shirts—the baggy kind that hide shoulder holsters. All three of them had curly-pigtail wires coming out of earpieces, making them look like Secret Service agents on a tropical vacation. All three were focused on the four of us.
“Stay cool,” said Tommy, who was toting the gym bag. “We need to lose these hiddie dodes.”
(I had no idea what my big brother had just said. JJ the surfer chick had taught Tommy a ton of surfer slang during their brief time together.)
To avoid the “hiddie dodes,” we strolled around a grand and gurgling water fountain and headed over to Fifth Avenue.
The three New York City surfers headed that way after us.
“Come on,” Tommy said when we hit East Fifty-Seventh Street. He led us down the block to the arched glass front of Niketown. Not because he needed a new pair of kicks. Because he knew the place would be jam-packed crowded.
We darted into what was basically the New York City Sneakers Museum. All sorts of mannequins were decked out in cool Nike gear. The walls were splashed with shoes in more colors than the inside of a jumbo bag of M&M’s. Throbbing music blasted through the five-story-tall atrium.
“We need to lose those three,” I said. “I think they’re surfers.”
“Nothing wrong with surfers,” said Tommy. “JJ was cool.”
“Yeah,” said Beck. “But the three tailing us look like trouble.”
“We could take the escalators to the fifth floor and duck out the fire exit to take the steps back down to the street,” said Storm, who had already memorized the store’s fire-evacuation floor plans.
“Let’s ‘Just Do It,’ ” said Tommy, quoting the Nike slogan plastered everywhere.
Storm got on the escalator first, with Beck and me right behind her. Tommy brought up the rear—after he spent a couple of seconds checking out some gnarly water shoes.
Riding up the escalator between the second and third floors, I saw a short guy in a “Hang Twenty” T-shirt heading down on the other side. He had his hair pulled back in a ponytail. A very familiar ponytail.
I looked at Beck. She looked at me.
“Move it, you two,” whispered Tommy, coming up behind us. “We need to lose ponytail.”
I agreed. The little dude might want us to buy him a new scuba tank to replace the one we’d speargunned back in the shark-infested waters.
We started taking the escalator steps two at a time. Until we bumped into Storm. She wasn’t budging.
“What’s your problem, Bick?” she asked.
“Pirates,” I said through clenched teeth. “The ones we left for the sharks to clean up.”
“Impossible. Do you know the odds of surviving a shark attack?”
I never got to hear the answer.
Because when we reached the third floor, we saw another familiar face. This one had a tiny triangle beard on its chin. Laird, the pirate leader. His arm was in a sling, and from the way he glowered at us, I was guessing he could still feel the sting of the salt water in the shoulder wound we gave him.
CHAPTER 52
Laird touched his left ear with his right hand (because his left arm was the one in the sling).
He had an earpiece like the three guys in the sunglasses and Hawaiian shirts, who, when I looked behind us, had just reached the second floor and were talking into their shirtsleeves.
“Welcome to New York City, little duders,” said Laird. “Home of Wall Street brokers and other assorted land sharks. Mr. Collier needs to have a word with you four.”
“Okay,” I said, “here’s the word: run!”
The four of us tore through the store like wild things.
“Out of our way, people!” Storm shouted. “Move it or lose it! Coming through!”
Laird came limping after us. I figured one of those sharks had chomped on his leg (or nibbled on his toes) before he and his pirate pals had somehow escaped.
“Whoa!” said Tommy, bringing up the rear. “Check out those shoes!”
Figures. We might be running for our lives, but that didn’t mean Tommy couldn’t admire the cool merchandise displayed all around us.
“Hey,” shouted one of the Nike workers as we raced past a whole row of soccer mannequins. “You can’t run in here!”
“Of course we can!” I shouted back. “In fact, that’s what we’re doing right now.”
“We want to make sure our new running shoes work,” added Beck. “So far, so good!”
Storm led us to the elevators and jabbed the Down button.
The doors whooshed open.
We hopped in.
The doors whooshed shut.
Just as Laird and his three surfer buds lunged into view.
“They’ll take the stairs,” I said. “Or the escalators. Either way, we’ll beat them to the lobby.”
“Then what?” said Storm. “More running?”
“Definitely,” said Tommy. “You up for it, sis?”
“Totally.”
The doors slid open, and we flew toward the exit.
“Hey, no running!” shouted another Nike person.
“Sorry!” I shouted back. “We couldn’t find any walking shoes.”
We slammed out the front doors.
“Taxi!” shouted Storm.
Unbelievably, there was one parked right at the curb.
“This is our lucky day!” said Beck.
Except, in the nanosecond it took for her to say that, a businessman in a trench coat grabbed the door handle and stole our cab!
“West,” said Storm. “We need to head over to Broadway and hop on the subway up to Columbia.”
We were about to take off when I heard skateboard wheels rumbling over concrete behind us.
I turned around and saw another twentysomething guy in sloppy clothes surfing up the sidewalk on a skateboard. The guy was gunning straight at us.
It was Jadson, Laird’s second-in-command.
CHAPTER 53
At this point, I’d like to apologize to the hot dog vendor whose cart we knocked over as we raced down Fifth Avenue past Trump Tower: Sorry about that, sir. But if
the five-second rule applies on the streets of New York, I hope you were able to grab all those wieners out of the gutter and sell them to folks who like crunchy stuff for lunch.
Fortunately, Jadson wiped out when the hot dog wagon’s umbrella toppled over and tripped him up.
When we hit East Fifty-Third Street, we ran across Fifth Avenue and were, suddenly, on West Fifty-Third Street.
“That’s just how they drew the map, Bick,” said Storm, when she saw the look of confusion on my face. “Deal with it.”
Unfortunately, on the steps of Saint Thomas Church, on the north side of the street, I saw three more surfer-guys, in blousy Hawaiian shirts and Ray-Bans, working their cell phones.
They’d seen us, too.
“Man,” I said. “I’m really starting to hate surfers.”
“This way,” said Beck. “The Museum of Modern Art is right up this block.”
“And that’s helpful, how?” I asked.
“Hey, if we’re gonna die, we might as well do it in front of Van Gogh’s Starry Night or Monet’s Water Lilies.”
We hurried up the crowded sidewalk, hurdling over this unbelievable chalk masterpiece a guy had spent all morning drawing on the concrete.
The three surfer goons were right behind us. Looking over my shoulder, I could see their blond heads bobbing up and down above the mob of side-walk art lovers as the surfer dudes tried to keep tabs on where we were headed.
We pushed through the MoMA’s big glass doors. (MoMA means “Museum of Modern Art,” not “mother,” by the way. Beck also tells me it’s pronounced moh-mah, not momma. I just told her I don’t really need to pronounce stuff to write it down. She just suggested I get a life.)
There were about a million people waiting in a long line snaking through the museum lobby and back out to the sidewalk.
A guard in gray slacks and a blue blazer came up to us.
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