History in the Faking

by Andreas Oertel

  CHAPTER 16

  “I THINK I’M going to throw up,” I said.

  “Too many hot dogs for lunch?” Eric asked.

  “Don’t be silly,” Rachel scolded. “This is serious.”

  After the press conference we pedalled our bikes back to the river. We needed to think and be away from bustle of Sultana, and our lookout across from the washout was as good a place as any. We’d dropped our bikes and were now sitting in the shade.

  I rolled onto my back. “I’m seriously going to puke,” I said again.

  Eric tried to be positive, “Don’t worry, Cody. Everything is still going according to plan. People are coming to Sultana, the restaurant is busy, and we don’t have to move away.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know . . . I think it’s getting out of control—way out of control.”

  “So what?” Eric said. “The hoax is still working.”

  “But at what cost?” Rachel said. “People are wasting a lot of time, and a ton of money investigating the tablet . . . for nothing.”

  “It’s not for nothing,” Eric said. “It’s so we won’t have to leave home.”

  Rachel’s voice got real quiet. “You know what I mean, Eric. This doesn’t feel right anymore. It’s wrong.”

  We were all silent for a minute.

  Then Rachel spoke again. “Mrs. Webb was actually crying.”

  “Maybe she was chopping onions,” Eric said, “before she went to the hall.”

  Rachel and I laughed.

  “Okay,” Eric said, “so how do we get out of this mess, without being sent to Alcatraz prison?”

  Rachel smiled at her brother. “They closed that place a long time ago, but maybe they’ll open it again just for us.”

  I sat up and pointed across the river. “Let’s go over there right now and confess.”

  “Just spill the beans?” Eric said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “like yanking out a tooth. We’ll get it over with fast.”

  Rachel stood up. “I agree.”

  “Shouldn’t we bring a lawyer with us?” Eric said. “You know, in case we have to cut a deal.”

  “You watch way too much TV,” Rachel said.

  WE CROSSED THE bridge and stopped at the police check point.

  “Should we tell the cops,” Eric whispered, “or one of the experts?”

  Just then a van pulled up and eight people climbed out. One of them was Dr. Peabody.

  “May as well tell the expert,” I said.

  Rachel nodded and rolled her bike toward the van. Eric and I followed.

  We stopped halfway between the police and the group, knowing they’d have to walk past us to get to the site. I felt like the whole mess was my responsibility, so I set down my bike and waited for the Egyptologist.

  “Hi!” I shouted, when he finally got close.

  He smiled politely and kept walking.

  “WAIT!” I yelled.

  I must have startled him, because he and a bunch of other students from the van jumped.

  When he turned around, I burst out, “We made the tablet!”

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  “It’s a hoax,” I said. “It’s just a joke. Sorry about everything.”

  A few of the researchers laughed and continued on toward the police check point.

  This wasn’t going well at all.

  “Go home, son,” said Dr. Peabody.

  “We made the tablet,” Rachel said, “in Cody’s garage. And now we’re admitting we did it.”

  The Egyptologist just smiled politely and waited for his students to move along. Eric, frustrated by Dr. Peabody’s lack of interest, decided to help. “Look, we’re willing accept full responsibility for the crime, as long as the punishment doesn’t mean going to jail.”

  Dr. Peabody suddenly lowered his voice and said, “This isn’t funny anymore. If you want your names in the local paper, you better think of something else. No one’s going to believe that you three kids reproduced an ancient artifact.”

  “But . . . but we really did make it,” Rachel said as he stormed off into the bush.”

  “This is nuts!” Eric cried.

  “No kidding,” I said. “We can’t even seem to do the right thing, when we’re trying to fix the wrong thing,”

  “Well, we tried,” Eric said.

  “We have to try harder,” Rachel said. “Someone has to take us seriously.”

  Just then, a car door slammed behind us. We turned around to see the cowboy reporter, Mr. Miles, adjust his giant hat.

  “Why the long faces?” he asked.

  We didn’t say anything, so he speculated, “Researchers won’t let you get close to the site, huh? Well, don’t be too hard on them.”

  “We’re not being hard on them at all,” I said. “We’re trying to help them.”

  Mr. Miles squinted down at me for full minute. “Hey, I recognize your voice,” he said. “You’re the kid who called in the tip about all this, right? Cory?”

  “Cody,” I said. “Cody Lint.”

  He grinned. “You kids should be thrilled. Sultana is going to be world famous soon.”

  I looked at Eric and Rachel, and they stared back at me . . . waiting.

  “The thing is,” I said, “we made that tablet last week, but no one will believe us.”

  “You three made that plaque,” he said, “the one they were showing at the press conference?”

  We all nodded.

  “I guess we made it too good,” Eric said.

  “We tried to own up to it,” Rachel said, “but Dr. Peabody didn’t believe us. In fact, he was rude to us.”

  I pulled the broken corner of our tablet from my pocket. “I was about to show him this,” I said, holding up the chunk, “but he never even gave me a chance.”

  I placed the piece in the reporter’s outstretched hand.

  “That’s the corner from our phony artifact,” Eric said. “We broke it off before we buried it, to make it look more real.”

  Mr. Miles examined the fragment carefully, turning it over and over and over. “And he was rude, was he . . . ?”

  Rachel nodded.

  “The whole thing was supposed to be a hoax,” I said, “to get people to come out to Sultana.”

  “You know,” Eric said, “like for tourism.”

  The reporter passed the fragment back to me and stared off in the distance. He probably didn’t believe us either, and now we were boring him.

  “We’re sorry for wasting your time,” Rachel said, “and everyone else’s.”

  He suddenly snapped out if his daydream. “A situation like this,” he said, “requires diet root beer.”

  He spun around, opened the back door of his car, and pulled out a small cooler. After giving us each a can of diet root beer, he said, “I think I can help you.”

  Eric wiped some root beer froth from his lips. “You can?”

  He nodded.

  Rachel beamed. “So you believe us?”

  He nodded again. “Yup, but a good reporter always needs the facts first.” He pulled a notebook from his back pocket. “And we may as well start with the tablet. How on earth did you make it?”

  So we told him. We explained the slate backing was a roofing shingle. We told him how we found the clay at an excavation site outside of town. And we summarized our research on pictographs, and how Rachel carved them into the clay.

  Mr. Miles was scribbling like mad in his book, trying to keep up.

  When I told him Rachel’s last name, he stopped. “Is your mom the artist, Cheryl Summers?”

  Rachel and Eric nodded.

  He wrote some more and said, “But that tablet looked ancient. What did you do to age it, to make it old?”

  “My neighbour, Mr. Jelfs, has a sandblaster,” I said. “So we used that to weather it.”

  “Brilliant,” he said, still scrawling notes. “And Dr. Murray—he was in on the whole thing?”

  “No,” I said, “we just placed the tablet exactly w
here we knew he’d find it. He was the key to making the hoax authentic.”

  “Nicely planned,” the reporter said with admiration.

  “We thought so,” Eric said.

  Rachel elbowed him in the ribs. “Don’t be so smug.”

  Mr. Miles closed his notebook, “And you tried to explain all this to the Egyptologist, but he rudely brushed you off?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Very rudely.”

  He scratched his stubble again. “Do you happen to have another one of those roofing shingles?”

  Eric nodded.

  “And could you perhaps get a bit more clay?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  The reporter grinned. “Would you like to hear my plan now?”

  “Yes,” Rachel said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Sure,” Eric said.

  CHAPTER 17

  WE DIDN’T HAVE time to worry on Tuesday. We were too busy working on the plan that would get us out of the mess our first plan created. I wasn’t entirely convinced Mr. Miles’s scheme would work, but we had to try something.

  He said we were free to explain everything to our parents now, but he also thought it might be better for everyone if they didn’t know anything about the hoax, or our attempted confession.

  And since I’m on the subject of confessions, I may as well tell you that that’s what we were going to do at the second press conference. I mean, we weren’t just going to stand up and confess (been there, tried that). We were going with the plan Mr. Miles had outlined, and it sounded safe and reasonable.

  But would it be enough to get us out of this predicament? I guess we’d find out soon enough.

  THE COMMUNITY HALL parking lot was jammed with even more vehicles for Wednesday’s press conference. I guess everyone wanted to know if additional artifacts had been found, and if the tablet had been carbon dated.

  We met Mr. Miles near the front doors at 12:30 and went over everything again.

  “Remember,” he cautioned, “don’t do or say anything until I give the word.”

  Rachel and I looked at Eric.

  “What!?” Eric whined. “I heard him.”

  We entered the hall and followed the reporter to the front. The place was busy with media people getting their equipment ready, but many of the seats were still empty because most people were still socializing outside with neighbours. We took four seats in the second row and waited.

  Mr. Miles winked at me and carefully passed me his canvas reporter bag. When he saw our anxious faces, he leaned over and said, “Don’t worry, you can’t get in more trouble for confessing to something you already tried to confess to.” He thought that was funny and laughed.

  I tried to smile, but my mouth refused to work.

  “I think I have to pee,” Eric said.

  Rachel ignored her brother and said, “Do you want me to do the talking?”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but I better do it. It’s only fair since it was my dumb idea.”

  “No, the idea was awesome,” she said. “And it still is. But now we have to admit that it was our awesome idea.”

  The hall filled to capacity again, and the press conference began on schedule. After welcoming everyone back, Professor Bell reintroduced the researchers sitting with him. When that was done, he pushed the microphone over to Dr. Peabody.

  “Thank you for your interest in this important find,” he began. “To maintain order today, we’ve set up an additional microphone.” He pointed at a mike on a stand beside the head table. “If anyone has any questions—at any time—please come up and use the microphone.”

  I imagined myself up there, confessing into the mike. I shuddered.

  “I’ll start with the carbon-14 results,” Dr. Peabody continued. “They are inconclusive.”

  “Why’s that?” someone yelled.

  He pinched his nose and pointed at the microphone. “If you have a question, please use that. Anyway, as I said on Monday, without some organic material in the tablet, carbon dating will not work. The clay that was used was pure—without any added straw or ash—so the artifact cannot be properly dated.”

  Mr. Miles slipped from his seat and stood behind the microphone. “So . . . ” he said, “does that mean the tablet is a fake—a hoax?”

  A few people murmured, obviously wanting to know the same thing.

  “Not at all,” said the Egyptologist. “I believe it’s authentic. I just can’t prove it at this time.”

  Now everyone was talking excitedly.

  Mr. Miles cleared his throat over the mike and everyone simmered down again. “But being a scientist,” he said, “you’re still keeping an open mind about the possibility this might be a hoax?”

  The room grew silent. Everyone sensed this reporter had something up his sleeve (actually, it was in his bag).

  “I . . . I believe I am,” Dr. Peabody said.

  “Then why didn’t you at least listen to those three kids when they tried to tell you they’re responsible for making the tablet?” Mr. Miles waved us up to the front to stand beside him.

  “This is absurd!” the Egyptologist cried. “Children could not create an ancient tablet, or inscribe these complex pictograms.”

  “Oh, but they did,” Mr. Miles said. “And they felt terrible for fooling everyone with it, and they wanted to confess (to you), but you rudely ignored them.”

  “Prove it!” someone yelled.

  Another voice, “Tell us how you made it!”

  Mr. Miles nodded and gently pushed me toward the mike.

  Here goes.

  “It’s all true,” I began, “and we’re really sorry for all the trouble. We made the tablet last week using a roofing shingle from New Orleans and pressing clay against it. The clay is pure clay—from the new dairy barn excavation outside of town—that’s why the carbon dating didn’t work.”

  “That explains nothing,” Dr. Peabody whined.

  I ignored him and went on. “We researched the proper pictograms on the internet, and Rachel Summers did the engraving. She’s a great artist, just like her mom.”

  I heard a few people agreeing with that last bit.

  “When Rachel finished the message, we baked it in the oven to dry it, and then we weathered it with a sandblaster. Dr. Murray found the tablet, because we placed it where we knew he’d find it. Anyway, I just want to say again that we’re awfully sorry for the whole mess.”

  “Hogwash!” cried the Egyptologist. He pointed a finger at Mr. Miles. “How could you, a reporter, be so gullible, so trusting?”

  I opened the canvas bag I was holding and slipped out a second fake tablet. I held it up so everyone could see it was like the first.

  “Ooh”s and “Ahh”s filled the room. And camera flashes threatened to blind me with their intensity.

  “We made this tablet for Dr. Peabody yesterday,” I said, “because we knew he wouldn’t believe us otherwise. Mr. Jelfs wasn’t home, so we couldn’t sandblast it, but otherwise we made it the same way.” I passed Dr. Peabody the tablet.

  The Egyptologist looked down at the plaque and studied the pictograms.

  “What’s it say?” a lady hollered.

  “Read it,” Mrs. Durupt ordered.

  Dr. Peabody laughed. “It says, ‘The three children who fooled you are very sorry.’ ”

  More flashes went off as he placed the new tablet next to the original.

  “Why’d you do it!” someone yelled. “Why’d you create the hoax?”

  “I . . . we . . . ” I started again. “I didn’t want my friends’mom, Mrs. Summers, to lose her job at the restaurant. If that happened, my friends would have to move away. So we thought we’d do something to get people to come to Sultana.”

  Eric grabbed the microphone and said, “Our mom is a great artist, by the way. Just like my sister. So . . . if anyone is looking for an artist . . . ”

  CHAPTER 18

  “YOU DID GREAT,” Rachel said to me when we got outside.

  “You rea
lly think so?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding?” Eric said. “That was awesome. Did you see the look on his face when you hauled out another tablet? Priceless!”

  We were in the parking lot again, waiting beside Mr. Miles’s car. He had said he wanted to speak with us alone, but he got cornered on the way out by other reporters, who all suddenly wanted to interview him.

  “Confessing to making the hoax was only half the problem,” I reminded my friends. “We still have no idea what our punishment will be.”

  I was watching the door of the community hall, hoping to see a cowboy hat, when Mr. Peabody emerged. He squinted around the parking lot, saw us, and headed over. I expected him to yell at us some more, but that never happened.

  “Seems I owe you three an apology,” he said. “You tried to save me from further embarrassment yesterday, but I was too stubborn to listen. And as a scientist, that is shameful behaviour.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Eric said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We are just kids.”

  He shook his head vigorously. “But that was no reason for me to dismiss you the way I did. I’m supposed to be open-minded, not a . . . not a dummy. Anyway, I’ve learned my lesson and I’m sorry.”

  “And we’re sorry for wasting your time,” Rachel said.

  “By the way,” he said, “can I keep the second tablet if I give you back the first one?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But why do you want it?”

  “It’s beautiful,” he said, “and it will serve to remind me to listen to people and not be a jerk. Plus, you made that tablet just for me.” He laughed and headed back into the community hall.

  “I thought he was going to freak out on us,” Eric said a minute later. “But I think we made his day.”

  “It would be nice,” Rachel said, “if we got some good news now.”

  Eric sat down on the gravel and rested his back against the front tire of the car. “You think mom will be mad?” Eric asked his sister.

  Rachel sat across from Eric. “Hard to say. She’ll be furious for us causing such a ruckus, but she might appreciate that we tried to help.”