Tooth and Nail: A Novel Approach to the SAT (A Harvest Test Preparation Book)

by Charles Harrington Elster

  “Don’t worry about it.” Leo stood up. “Caitlin, you won’t take it as an insult if Phil and I offer to walk you back to LaSalle, will you?”

  “Of course not,” Caitlin said, getting up. “As my dad always says, ‘The better part of valor is discretion.’ I’m independent but not foolhardy.”

  Phil stretched out into the space Caitlin had vacated on the couch. “What do you mean, ‘Phil and I’? I’m happy right here.”

  “You’re going to have to get up eventually,” Caitlin said. “Besides, after what happened tonight there’s no way I’m going to walk across campus at this hour without Mr. Phil Kwon Do.”

  Phil laughed. “All right, I’m coming,” he said, dragging himself to his feet.

  Chapter 23

  Ay, Here’s the Rub

  Wednesday

  Torres took off her thin-rimmed glasses and leaned back in her chair. “This really is most extraordinary!”

  “Then you’ll help us?” Leo asked.

  The professor stood and walked over to the window. The warm midafternoon sun fell across her contemplative face. “He could have been a prince during the Italian Renaissance,” she mused, momentarily oblivious to Leo’s question.

  “Who could have?” Caitlin asked.

  “Prospero. Edward Anthony Prospero.” Torres turned from the window. “Leo, do you recall that painting of Cosimo de’ Medici by Giuseppe Abbruzzese?”

  “The one in which he’s portrayed with his arm resting on the picture frame, only the frame isn’t really a frame but an illusion painted on the canvas?”

  “Yes. It was a common technique meant to convey the presence of a person’s influence even in his or her absence.”

  “I don’t get the connection,” Phil said.

  “In sending Leo on this quest,” Carmen explained, “it’s as if Prospero wanted to exert control and guide Leo’s destiny, even from the grave. His will was powerful indeed.”

  She returned to her desk and sat down. “In answer to your question, Leo, yes, I will keep these documents in my safe at home and assist you in any way I can. As your professor and friend, that’s the least I can do. Besides,” she said with a conspiratorial grin, “how could I resist the chance to help solve such an engrossing mystery?”

  “Thanks, Carmen,” Leo said. “I knew we could count on you.”

  “Don’t mention it.” Torres put on her glasses and picked up Prospero’s letter-map. “Tell me, does anyone beyond this room know about this?”

  “Just Bill Berkowitz,” Caitlin said.

  “But someone else definitely knows we have it,” Phil added.

  Torres frowned. “Who?”

  “We’re not sure,” Leo said, “but whoever it is wants it in a serious way.” He described the encounter with the knife-wielding thug in the costume room.

  “Generally speaking, people don’t resort to force based on speculation,” Torres said. “It would seem that this person must know something we don’t about the nature and value of this treasure. But there’s one thing I don’t understand.”

  “What’s that?” Leo asked.

  “You received Prospero’s letter at last Sunday’s meeting. Since then you’ve divulged its contents to only four people: Bill, Caitlin, Phil, and me. How could anyone else have found out enough about it to harass Hargrave and the three of you?”

  “Carmen, that’s not the letter I got at the executors’ meeting. Something—intuition, I guess—told me the one I got there was apocryphal. Certain things about it didn’t look right. We found the real letter by pure coincidence. It was inside a Shakespeare primer that Phil took out of the library Monday morning.”

  Torres took off her glasses and leaned across her desk. “Are you implying someone made a switch before the meeting?”

  “Yes. I think someone saw Prospero’s letter, made a forgery to give to me, then hid the original in that Shakespeare book temporarily, intending to retrieve it later. By sheer luck it got back into the appropriate hands.”

  “Did you share that suspicion with anyone?”

  “I went to Professor Hargrave’s office that afternoon to tell him I thought the letter was spurious. Reggie was there too. He said he was certain Prospero didn’t write it.”

  “That’s interesting. And Hargrave was attacked that night, wasn’t he?”

  Leo nodded. “The question is, by whom?”

  “I’ll bet it was Teddy,” Phil said. “Bill said Prospero left him nothing in his will. Maybe Teddy saw Prospero’s letter to Leo and thinks this treasure is his rightful inheritance.”

  “So it could be the vindictive grandson,” Torres said, “or it could very well be Prospero’s trusted valet.”

  Caitlin giggled. “You mean the butler did it? That’s so hackneyed.”

  “The notion may seem trite,” Torres said, “but consider the facts. Reggie probably knew Prospero better than anyone. Moreover, he was the one who handed out the gifts at the executors’ meeting last Sunday, so he had access to the original letter and could have made a switch. Also, he appears to have been the last person with Hargrave before he was attacked. Reggie’s a big, imposing man. He could have gone after Hargrave and Leo, figuring one of them was lying and had the real letter. Physically, he also fits the description of the man in the Harlequin mask who attacked you in the theater.”

  Leo sighed. “If it were Teddy, it wouldn’t surprise me. I know he and Tooth and Nail are in financial trouble. Plus he hates my guts. But Reggie? I just can’t believe he’s culpable. He’s got money—Prospero left him a small fortune in his will. He’d never betray the old man like that. Or attack me. Reggie is the epitome of rectitude and loyalty. I consider him a friend.”

  “Money tests friendship,” Torres said, “and it’s not unusual for people who have plenty of it to want even more.”

  “Maybe it was someone else close to Prospero, someone who got wind of this treasure and knew of his plan,” Caitlin said. She looked at Leo. “You worked with Prospero. Any ideas?”

  “The most logical suspects would be the executors—excluding ourselves, of course,” Leo added, smiling at Torres.

  “And Hargrave too,” Caitlin said.

  “Why him?” asked Phil.

  “He can’t be a criminal and a victim simultaneously.”

  “Maybe he staged the assault and knocked himself out to throw the authorities off the scent.”

  Caitlin laughed. “Phil, you’ve been reading too many detective novels.”

  “So that leaves Bibb and Martext,” Torres said, “who revered Prospero but also had considerable reverence for his prosperity—enough, perhaps, to become envious and covetous of it.” She leaned back in her chair and put her hands behind her head. “Which means we now have four plausible suspects. It could be the depraved grandson, the renegade valet, the avaricious theater director, or the acquisitive Renaissance Studies professor. I suppose it could even be some combination of the above—or even all of the above.”

  “Geez, it sounds like that board game Clue,” Phil said.

  Everyone laughed.

  “Well, if we can’t deduce who the culprit is, perhaps we can dupe him into revealing himself,” Phil suggested.

  “What do you mean?” asked Caitlin.

  “Set a trap and draw him out. We could pretend to find the treasure. Then maybe he’d show up.”

  “Yeah,” Caitlin said, growing excited. “Maybe we could ask Bill to run a bogus article in the Herald—”

  “That just happens to mention where the treasure’s being kept,” Phil said, galvanized by Caitlin’s enthusiasm.

  “He’d be drawn to it like a bee to honey,” Caitlin said.

  “Then whammo!” Phil jumped up and mimed the act of taking a photograph. “We catch him red-handed.”

  “Wait a minute. Time out,” Torres said, waving her arms like a referee. “Who do you think you are, the Mod Squad?”

  Caitlin and Phil exchanged a baffled look.

  “Mod squad? What’s a mo
d squad?” Leo asked.

  Torres chuckled. “‘The Mod Squad’ was a TV show years ago about a trio of young investigators like you guys—only they were undercover cops and you’re not. Look. Your mission is not to apprehend and incarcerate criminals. It’s to solve Prospero’s clues and find the treasure, taking as few risks as possible.” The professor slipped on her glasses and carefully picked up the piece of parchment on her desk. “Let’s take a look at matters closer at hand, shall we?”

  While Caitlin and Phil joined Torres in examining the fragment, Leo explained how they’d transcribed it. When he had finished, Torres said, “If this document is genuine, the date would coincide nicely with the two quotations from As You Like It that led you to the costume room.”

  “How’s that?” Phil asked.

  “The play was entered in the old English copyright records in August 1600. This fragment is dated late in 1599. Perhaps this is no fortuitous correspondence.”

  Caitlin looked at the torn scrap of parchment in the professor’s hand. “Are you implying Shakespeare wrote that?”

  Torres gave her a solemn nod. “There’s not much to go on at this point, but I must confess, when I saw what Prospero wrote in his letter to Leo—that the treasure would ‘astound not only you but also the world’—I immediately assumed it had something to do with Shakespeare, either some new biographical material or perhaps an actual manuscript. After all, Prospero was a prominent Shakespearean scholar.”

  “The coincidence of the clues and the date may simply be attributable to the old man’s mania for quoting Shakespeare,” Leo said. “It would have been normal for him to quote Shakespeare regardless of the nature of the prize. He practically thought in Shakespeare.”

  “True,” Torres conceded. “Either way, I suppose, this fragment is quite a find.” She removed a magnifying glass from her desk drawer and compared the writing on the fragile document with Leo’s transcription. After a minute she said, “Leo, everything looks great, except for one minuscule discrepancy. The u in ‘custard’ looks more like an o to me.”

  “I wasn’t sure about that,” Leo replied. “But ‘clownish costard’ didn’t make any sense to me.”

  “Is ‘clownish custard’ any less cryptic?”

  “Not really, but at least ‘custard’ is a real word.”

  “So is ‘costard,’ if you change the c to upper case. ‘Costard’ is the name of a clown in Love’s Labour’s Lost.”

  “Isn’t that one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays?” Caitlin asked.

  “Yes, it was probably completed about 1593. Shakespeare apparently revised it after that, for when it was first printed in 1598 the phrase ‘newly corrected and augmented’ appeared on the title page.”

  “But isn’t that still too early for the date on this fragment?” Leo asked.

  “Not if Shakespeare was working on a sequel. There is credible evidence showing that there was also a later play called Love’s Labour’s Won. In 1598 the English critic Francis Meres, in his Palladis Tamia, listed both Love’s Labour’s Lost and Love’s Labour’s Won as written by Shakespeare. So did a bookseller’s catalogue from 1603 that was discovered in the 1950s. Until that catalogue turned up, most scholars thought Love’s Labour’s Won was simply another title for the play we know as The Taming of the Shrew, but now many believe it was a separate play that was mysteriously lost. Of course no copy has ever been found, so we know practically nothing else about it.”

  “That’s fascinating,” Caitlin said. “If in fact there was a sequel, maybe the same characters were carried over into it, and perhaps the writing on this piece of parchment is part of a letter that refers to this missing play.”

  “And if that’s the case,” Phil said, taking the hypothesis to its logical conclusion, “then maybe the treasure Prospero’s letter refers to is that play itself.”

  A moment of silence fell over the room. Torres stood up and went to the window. “If Phil’s right,” she said finally, “then there’s no telling how much money it would be worth.”

  “Or what someone would be willing to do to get it,” Leo added.

  Chapter 24

  Use Your Dictionary

  It was a little after midnight when Caitlin and Phil climbed the stairs to the fifth floor of Ericson Hall.

  “You think Leo’s still awake?” Caitlin asked as they reached the landing.

  “Look,” Phil reasoned, holding a piece of paper up as evidence. “His note specifically says, ‘Come by my room after you’re done with whatever you’re doing tonight.’ We went to the library. After that we saw Fellini’s La Strada, which was excellent. And after that we went to Salerno’s—”

  “Which was also excellent.”

  “Now we’re here,” he continued. “If he’s asleep, which I doubt, and we wake him up, we can say we were simply doing what he asked us to do.”

  They knocked on 5-A and Leo opened the door with alacrity, as if he had been standing there waiting for them to arrive.

  “Well, hello!” he said, smiling broadly. “Come on in.”

  They stepped inside and Leo quickly closed the door. “You guys have good timing. Come over here and help me out.”

  He strode to the couch, where what appeared to be an old unabridged dictionary lay spread out on the cushions. The two freshmen followed and stood by his side.

  “What can we do for you, chief?” asked Phil.

  “Read me the numbers from the second clue.” Leo pointed to the armchair. “They’re over there, on my legal pad.”

  Phil headed toward the armchair, and Leo looked at Caitlin. “When I locate each word in this dictionary, write it down for me, okay?”

  Caitlin nodded. She dug pen and paper out of her purse and sat down on the couch.

  “Okay, Phil. Let’s go,” Leo said, bending over the old dictionary. “Read me the first set—slowly, okay?”

  “Right, chief.” Phil looked down at Leo’s notepad, cleared his throat, and carefully articulated each number in the first set: “0-0-0-1-1-0-4.”

  “0-0-0-1-1-0-4,” Leo repeated as he began thumbing through the front part of the big book. After a moment he stood up straight. “A,” he announced.

  Caitlin looked back, puzzled. “‘A’?”

  “Yes, the letter A—it’s the first word in the clue.”

  “Okay, whatever you say,” Caitlin said, writing it down.

  Leo signaled Phil for the next set of numbers.

  “2-9-2-5-2-0-7.”

  Leo flipped to the back pages of the dictionary. “Wild, Caitlin,” he said after a moment.

  “Yes,” she agreed, “this is pretty wild.”

  “No, I meant wild is the second word.”

  “Oh, sorry,” Caitlin said and wrote it down.

  Phil read the next group: “1-2-7-0-2-2-6.”

  Leo flipped to the middle of the dictionary and slowly ran his finger down a page, stopping near the bottom. “Indulgent!” he cried. “Now we’re getting someplace. You got that, Caitlin? Indulgent?”

  “Yeah.” She wrote it down, then looked up at Leo. “I hate to say it, but I’m confused. What exactly are we doing here?”

  “You’re facilitating the process, Caitlin. Just hang on and I’ll explain in a second. Phil, give me the next set.”

  A few minutes later Caitlin jotted down the final word of the decoded message. She looked at what she had written and shook her head. “This is weird. Leo, are you sure it’s right?”

  “Of course. It’s a dictionary code. The numbers refer to specific words in this dictionary.”

  Caitlin rolled her eyes. “I think we gathered that much.”

  “All right, let me explain,” Leo said, holding up his hands. “When I saw some examples of dictionary codes in one of the cryptography books, I noticed they looked similar to Professor Prospero’s second clue. The thing about dictionary codes, though, is that both the code-writer and the code-reader have to know which dictionary the code refers to. In this case, Prospero knew and I didn’
t, so right away we had a major problem.”

  Phil laughed. “No kidding. There must be hundreds of dictionaries out there.”

  “That’s right,” Leo said, pointing an index finger at him, “but only one of them is the 1934 Webster’s New International, Second Edition—the dictionary Prospero gave me last April on my twentieth birthday.” He laughed and sat down on the couch. “I can’t believe I was so obtuse and wasted all that time looking through the OED. In retrospect, it seems so obvious that he would use the dictionary he gave me as the code-breaker.”

  Caitlin patted Leo’s shoulder. “Even an indefatigable mind like yours has to take a break once in a while.”

  “Anyway,” Leo went on, “once you know which dictionary you’re working with, cracking the code is simple. This baby here,” he said, patting the dictionary beside him, “has more than three thousand pages, and each page has three columns. Now, you probably noticed that each group of numbers in the clue has seven digits. I figured the first four digits would indicate the page number; the fifth would indicate the column—left, middle, or right; and the sixth and seventh would indicate the headword, or boldfaced entry, counted down from the top of the column.”

  “That’s pretty ingenious,” Phil said.

  “I’m not sure I followed all of that,” Caitlin said. “Can you give me an example?”

  “Be glad to.” Leo set the big dictionary on his lap. “Pick a word, any word,” he told Caitlin. She pointed to a headword at random.

  “Okay,” Leo said, “you chose instinct. It’s on page 1287. It’s in the right-hand column—the third column. And,” he paused and counted down the column, “it’s the twenty-third word from the top. So, if you put all those numbers together, the seven-digit code for the word instinct would be 1287323: page 1287, column three, twenty-third word down. Does that help clarify it for you?”

  Caitlin nodded. “Phil,” she said, getting up from the couch, “may I see the whole clue again?”

  “Sure.”

  Phil handed her the notepad and Caitlin looked at the numbers.