“CPG 872!” Sadie yelled.
“Well, what do you know?” Dr. Gomez said. “You just made our search a whole lot easier, Merle.”
“It’s the least I could do, considering Pearl’s my wife,” Merle answered.
Dr. Gomez parked, and the five of them crept toward the entrance of the hotel.
Before they even reached the reception desk, Michael spotted the man in the suit and sunglasses talking on his phone in the lobby. “That’s him!” Michael whispered a little bit too loudly. Sunglasses Man started to turn around, and they all scrambled to take cover behind various chairs and potted plants. The man scanned the room and then turned back around, still talking on his phone.
Dr. Gomez shushed Michael as they poked their heads out from behind potted ferns on either side of the lobby entrance. “Let me hear what he’s saying.”
The man was speaking in a language he probably thought no one in a hotel lobby in Tennessee would understand. He was mostly right—except Dr. Gomez understood Hebrew perfectly. After a few moments, Dr. Gomez motioned for the kids and Merle to join him. They all slunk or scampered over to his giant fern.
“Okay, guys, listen,” Dr. Gomez said seriously. “It sounds to me like this guy is a hired gun. He’s working for an artifact collector. Black market tomb raider kind of stuff.”
“Tomb raider?!” Michael whispered, alarmed.
“Yes, a tomb raider is someone who steals ancient artifacts,” Dr. Gomez explained.
“Kind of like you did, Michael,” Sadie joked.
“Hey, I’m no artifact!” Merle protested.
“Plus, they usually sell their stolen goods to collectors. That’s what our squirrelnapper here is trying to do,” Dr. Gomez continued. “Merle, you and Pearl would be extremely valuable to such a collector.”
“I suppose two-thousand-year-old talking squirrels are fairly rare?” Merle said.
Dr. Gomez nodded. “That they are.”
“Pearl must be in his hotel room, don’t you think?” Sadie asked.
“I’m sure she is.”
“How can we find out which one?” Justin asked.
Merle motioned toward the front desk. “Maybe we ask that guy?”
“No, he won’t tell us,” Dr. Gomez replied.
“Let’s split up and look for her,” Michael said. “We can each take a floor.”
“I don’t think so, Michael. This guy is dangerous.”
“Which means Pearl is in danger!” Michael insisted. “We have to save her!”
Dr. Gomez sighed. “All right. I’ll stay here in the lobby and keep an eye on him while you all spread out and look for Pearl. I’ll come find you if he heads upstairs. Be careful!”
CHAPTER 16
Sadie started down the hall of the first floor while Michael and Justin took the elevator up to floors two and three. Merle headed outside to use his climbing skills to peek in windows.
DING! The elevator door opened on the second floor. Justin exited and headed down the hallway to the left. A cleaning cart was parked outside one of the rooms, and the door was propped open. Justin peeked in and looked around. No sign of Pearl. Just then, a woman in a uniform with an armload of clean sheets popped up from behind the cart.
“AHHHHH!” Justin yelped.
“Hello!” the woman said cheerfully.
“Uh . . . hi,” Justin said. “Umm . . . have you seen anything . . . suspicious today?”
“You mean besides you?” the woman asked with a smile. “No. Just another day at the office.”
“Thanks.” Justin continued down the hallway.
Meanwhile, Merle was busy outside, bounding from windowsill to windowsill. Since it was the middle of the day, most of the curtains were wide open, and Merle had no trouble peeking into the rooms. Not every room was empty, but there is nothing very alarming about seeing a squirrel on your windowsill. Unless you are a dog.
The Chihuahua was hardly any bigger than Merle, but it still surprised him and sent him springing backward into the branches of a nearby elm tree.
“Why you gotta scare me like that?!” Merle yelled at the dog. “I’m already having a bad day!”
“YAP YAP YAP!” the Chihuahua responded.
On the first floor, Sadie stopped a maintenance worker. “Did you happen to notice anybody carrying an animal in a small cage?”
“I haven’t seen any cages, but someone’s got a Chihuahua on the third floor,” the man said. “I’ve been hearing that thing yapping off and on all day.”
“Thanks.” Sadie continued down the hall.
Up on the third floor, Michael pressed his ear to the door of room 302, listening for any sound that could be Pearl. Nothing. All he could hear was the barking of a small dog directly across the hall in room 303. As he turned to look, he caught sight of tag hanging from the door handle of room 317, near the very end of the hall. It was the only door on the floor with a Do Not Disturb sign. Interesting, Michael thought. He walked toward room 317 to investigate.
CHAPTER 17
Dr. Gomez sat in a deep, puffy lobby chair, pretending to read a complimentary USA Today while listening to the man in the suit and sunglasses carry on his conversation in Hebrew.
“Don’t worry,” the man said. “I’ll have the other squirrel within 24 hours.” After that the conversation got less interesting and soon came to an end. Then the man was quiet for a long time. Dr. Gomez lowered his newspaper slightly to take a peek at what he was up to. Not a good move. The man was looking right back at him! The man gave Dr. Gomez a suspicious glare, put his phone in his suit jacket pocket, and headed toward the elevators. Dr. Gomez waited for him to pass, then sprang up and ran for the stairs.
Sadie, wandering the first-floor halls, saw Dr. Gomez opening the stairway door. “What’s up?” she whispered.
“He’s going up!” Dr. Gomez sprinted up to the second floor.
“Oh no!” Sadie said helplessly, shaking her hands as she ran in place.
Dr. Gomez popped his head out of the doorway on the second floor to see Justin with his ear to the door of room 210. “Hide!” Dr. Gomez said, then zipped back to the stairway to run up to the third floor.
“Hide where?” Justin looked around at all the closed and locked doors.
On the third floor, Dr. Gomez spotted Michael listening at the door of room 317.
DING! The elevator doors started to open!
Dr. Gomez waved frantically at Michael, signaling to him to hide.
Michael dove behind a cleaning cart parked outside of room 316. Dr. Gomez ducked back into the stairway just as the man in the suit and sunglasses stepped off the elevator and turned toward Michael’s hiding place!
CHAPTER 18
As Merle got close to the back of the hotel, he spotted a window on the third floor with the window cracked open and the shades drawn. Most of the windows he’d seen were closed with the shades wide open.
What do we have here? Merle wondered. He bounced from windowsill to tree branch to windowsill until he reached the room near the very back. Squirrels are quite agile and can fit through very small openings, so Merle had no problem squeezing in through the cracked-open window. Once inside the room, he poked his nose though the curtains. It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the darkened room, but soon he was able to make out a cage on top of a desk. Inside sat . . . Pearl! “PSSSSST! Pearl!” Merle whispered loudly.
“Merle!” Pearl jumped up. “You found me! Thank goodness!”
“It wasn’t easy!” Merle said as he leaped over to the cage. “Actually, come to think of it, it wasn’t that bad.” He unlatched the cage and swung the door open.
Pearl jumped into Merle’s arms. “My hero!” she said. No sooner had the words left her mouth than the room door swung open—revealing the man in the suit and sunglasses! The next word out of Pearl’s mouth was . . .
“AAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!”
In the hall, Michael recognized Pearl’s scream and sprang into action! He jumped up and pushed the cleani
ng cart into the room.
As the man in the suit and sunglasses came toward the terrified squirrels, a cleaning cart appeared in the doorway behind him.
“AAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!” Michael yelled as he barreled the cart into the man’s back, sending him flying face-first onto the bed.
Thinking fast, Merle and Pearl jumped onto the cleaning cart and each grabbed a dirty sheet. With the speed of a spider wrapping a fly in silk, the two squirrels covered the squirrelnapper’s head in used bedding.
“AAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!” yelled the man in the suit, sunglasses, and dirty-sheet helmet.
“Let’s get out of here!” Merle yelled. As the man struggled to free his head, Merle and Pearl leaped out the window, and Michael took off running down the hall toward the stairs.
CHAPTER 19
Pearl absolutely loved the new supersized hamster home Mrs. Gomez had made for her and Merle. “This is just lovely, Mrs. Gomez!” Pearl marveled as everyone gathered in Michael’s room (everyone except Mr. Nemesis, of course).
“I’m so happy you like it, Pearl. Welcome home!” Mrs. Gomez said.
“Yes. Welcome home,” Merle repeated. “It’s good to have you back. You had us worried there for a while.”
“Believe me, I was worried too!” Pearl said. “Who is that man, and what does he want with Merle and me?”
“He wants to bring you back to the Dead Sea to sell you to a collector,” Dr. Gomez said.
“We don’t want to go back to the Dead Sea!” Merle pleaded.
“You know we’re not even from there?” Pearl added. “It’s no place for squirrels.”
“It’s too hot, too dry, and waaaaay too salty!” Merle added. “We like it much better here!”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the squirrels, Dad,” Michael apologized. “I’m sorry, Pearl—if I would have let my dad know about you and Merle sooner, maybe you wouldn’t have gotten into so much of a mess.”
“Maybe not,” Pearl said. “But it’s always best to tell the whole story. The whole truth.”
Michael nodded.
“Speaking of which . . .” Pearl looked at Michael.
Michael knew it was time to come clean. “Yeah, I know.” He turned to his parents and sister. “Mom, Dad, Jane—I broke the elephant table. I was playing soccer in the house and accidentally knocked it over with the ball. I glued it back together, and it was still drying when Jane put her cupcake on it.”
“My cupcake didn’t break the elephant?” Jane asked, shocked.
“How could a cupcake break an elephant?” Dr. Gomez asked.
“I assumed Jane was playing with the ball in the house.” Mrs. Gomez hugged Jane. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, sweetie.”
“Well, it was me playing ball in the house,” Michael said. “I should have told you what really happened, but I didn’t want to get in trouble.”
“So you let your sister get in trouble instead?” Mrs. Gomez gave him a look.
“Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry, Jane. I’m sorry, Mom.” Michael hung his head. “I’m grounded, right?”
“He’s such a smart boy,” Justin joked.
“Figured that one out all on his own.” Sadie grinned.
Dr. Gomez laughed. “Right. Grounded until further notice. It’ll give you a chance to think about what can happen when you don’t tell the whole truth.”
“Yes, sir,” Michael said.
“And we all need to think about how we’re going to keep Pearl and Merle safe,” Mrs. Gomez said. “Harboring two-thousand-year-old talking squirrels smuggled out of a foreign country is a big deal, and we’ve got a lot to figure out. We’ve all got to watch our steps!”
Outside Michael’s window, unseen by anyone in the room, a white Toyota rolled slowly down the street.
MICHAEL GOMEZ is an adventurous and active 10-year-old boy. He is kindhearted but often acts before he thinks. He’s friendly and talkative and blissfully unaware that most of his classmates think he’s a bit geeky. Michael is super excited to be in fifth grade, which, in his mind, makes him “grade school royalty!”
MERLE SQUIRREL may be thousands of years old, but he never really grew up. He has endless enthusiasm for anything new and interesting—especially this strange modern world he finds himself in. He marvels at the self-refilling bowl of fresh drinking water (otherwise known as a toilet) and supplements his regular diet of tree nuts with what he believes might be the world’s most perfect food: chicken nuggets. He’s old enough to know better, but he often finds it hard to do better. Good thing he’s got his wife, Pearl, to help him make wise choices.
PEARL SQUIRREL is wise beyond her many, many, many years, with enough common sense for both her and Merle. When Michael’s in a bind, she loves to share a lesson or bit of wisdom from Bible events she witnessed in her youth. Pearl’s biggest quirk is that she is a nut hoarder. Having come from a world where food is scarce, her instinct is to grab whatever she can. The abundance and variety of nuts in present-day Tennessee can lead to distraction and storage issues.
JUSTIN KESSLER is Michael’s best friend. Justin is quieter and has better judgment than Michael, and he is super smart. He’s a rule follower and is obsessed with being on time. He’ll usually give in to what Michael wants to do after warning him of the likely consequences.
SADIE HENDERSON is Michael and Justin’s other best friend. She enjoys video games and bowling just as much as cheerleading and pajama parties. She gets mad respect from her classmates as the only kid at Walnut Creek Elementary who’s not afraid of school bully Edgar. Though Sadie’s in a different homeroom than her two best friends, the three always sit together at lunch and hang out after class.
DR. GOMEZ, a professor of anthropology, is not thrilled when he finds out that his son, Michael, smuggled two ancient squirrels home from their summer trip to the Dead Sea, but he ends up seeing great value in having them around as original sources for his research. Dad loves his son’s adventurous spirit but wishes Michael would look (or at least peek) before he leaps.
MRS. GOMEZ teaches part-time at her daughter’s preschool and is a full-time mom to Michael and Jane. She feels sorry for the fish-out-of-water squirrels and looks for ways to help them feel at home, including constructing and decorating an over-the-top hamster mansion for Merle and Pearl in Michael’s room. She also can’t help but call Michael by her favorite (and his least favorite) nickname, Cookies.
MR. NEMESIS is the Gomez family cat who becomes Merle and Pearl’s true nemesis. Jealous of the time and attention given to the squirrels by his family, Mr. Nemesis is continuously coming up with brilliant and creative ways to get rid of them. He hides his ability to talk from the family, but not the squirrels.
JANE GOMEZ is Michael’s little sister. She’s super adorable but delights in getting her brother busted so she can be known as the “good child.” She thinks Merle and Pearl are the cutest things she has ever seen in her whole life (next to Mr. Nemesis) and is fond of dressing them up in her doll clothes.
So now you’ve heard of the Dead Sea Squirrels, but what about the DEAD SEA Scrolls?
Way back in 1946, just after the end of World War II, in a cave along the banks of the Dead Sea, a 15-year-old boy came across some jars containing ancient scrolls while looking after his goats. When scholars and archaeologists found out about his discovery, the hunt for more scrolls was on! Over the next 10 years, many more scrolls and pieces of scrolls were found in 11 different caves.
There are different theories about exactly who wrote on the scrolls and hid them in the caves. One of the most popular ideas is that they belonged to a group of Jewish priests called Essenes, who lived in the desert because they had been thrown out of Jerusalem. One thing is for sure—the scrolls are very, very old! They were placed in the caves between the years 300 BC and AD 100!
Forty percent of the words on the scrolls come from the Bible. Parts of every Old Testament book except for the book of Esther have been discovered.
Of the remaining 60 perc
ent, half are religious texts not found in the Bible, and half are historical records about the way people lived 2,000 years ago.
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is one of the most important archaeological finds in history!
About the Author
As co-creator of VeggieTales, co-founder of Big Idea Entertainment, and the voice of the beloved Larry the Cucumber, MIKE NAWROCKI has been dedicated to helping parents pass on biblical values to their kids through storytelling for over two decades. Mike currently serves as Assistant Professor of Film and Animation at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, and makes his home in nearby Franklin with his wife, Lisa, and their two children. The Dead Sea Squirrels is Mike’s first children’s book series.
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