by Dan Gutman
“Wait a minute,” his sister said. “You mean to say you’re going to drop the contents of our toilet on Mrs. Higgins?”
Coke just grinned and nodded his head.
“That’s disgusting!” she said.
“I know!” he replied. “That’s why I’m doing it. She’s in for a big surprise.”
Coke gave the connector one last turn until the hose clicked into place. Then he took the other end of the hose and pulled it toward the guardrail. It reached just long enough to hang over the ledge and dangle above the convertible.
Down below, Mrs. Higgins took one last puff of her cigarette and flicked it away. Then she took some hand sanitizer out of the glove compartment and wiped off the steering wheel. Finally, she pulled the gloves back on.
“She’s getting ready to leave!” Pep said. “She’s putting her seat belt on!”
“Perfect!” Coke said. “That will make it harder for her to get out of the car. Quick! Go pull the lever next to the hose.”
At the same moment that Mrs. Higgins reached for her key to start her car, Pep pulled the lever next to the hose.
And that’s when five days’ worth of human waste slid down out of the holding tank, through the hose, and dropped into the driver’s seat of the red convertible parked directly below.
If you sat down and made a list of the most disgusting things that could possibly happen to a human being, having almost a week’s worth of human waste—both liquid and solid—fall on your head would probably be right up there at the top.
Mrs. Higgins let out a momentary shriek when the first few ounces hit her head but then wisely decided to close her mouth. She tried to unhook her seat belt, but by that time everything was wet and slippery.
The hose was thick, maybe five inches in diameter. It didn’t take long for the front seat of the convertible to be covered. Mrs. Higgins thrashed around helplessly, like a fish on the floor of a rowboat.
“Let’s blow this pop stand!” Coke said gleefully.
The twins scrambled to detach the hose from the connector and put it back in place. They took one last look over the railing to see Mrs. Higgins still sitting there, helpless and weeping, in a pool of human waste up to her neck. The twins jumped back into the RV. Coke started it, jammed it into reverse, and peeled out of there.
As they drove back into town, Coke and Pep were screaming and hooting and high-fiving each other as if they had just won the Super Bowl.
“It’ll take her a long time to clean that off!” Coke hollered.
“She won’t be driving that car into anything for a while,” Pep yelled.
“You know what they say,” Coke told his sister. “When all you’ve got are lemons, make lemonade.”
“And those weren’t lemons!” his sister shrieked.
They drove back to the center of Darwin, laughing all the way. Luckily, the parking space where the RV had been was still open. Not so luckily, there were two people standing in it.
Their parents.
“You two are so grounded!” Mrs. McDonald hollered.
Chapter 20
Grounded
The twins had done a lot of foolish things in their lives to make their parents angry. There was the time they jumped off a trampoline with umbrellas. The time they dialed 911 to see how long it would take for the cops to show up. The time they thought it would be fun to roll down the hill near the mall in shopping carts. Coke wound up in the emergency room after that one.
But they had never done anything as foolish, dangerous, and yes, let’s say it—stupid—as going on a joyride in a recreational vehicle.
“Are you kids out of your minds?” Mrs. McDonald shouted when Coke pulled the RV back into the parking spot. “Do you have one brain between the two of you? What were you thinking? We could all be in jail right now! You said you were going to look for souvenirs! Where were you? We thought the RV had been stolen!”
Veins were sticking out of Mrs. McDonald’s neck. People were starting to stare. It was causing a scene on the street.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Dr. McDonald assured the gathering crowd. “This isn’t child abuse, folks. My kids just went out for a little ride . . . in our rented RV! They turn thirteen years old the day after tomorrow. I guess they think they’re old enough to drive now.”
“Can’t blame you for screaming at ’em, pal,” a guy walking by said. “If they were my kids, I’d ship ’em off to military school.”
“We’re really sorry, Dad,” Pep said sincerely as she scampered into the backseat where she belonged. “We’ll never do it again.”
“Why did you do it this time?” asked her mother. “Do you have an explanation? I’d like to hear it.”
Pep looked at her brother, who was slinking out of the driver’s seat.
“Uh, we went to do a dump,” Coke said. It was the truth, technically.
“You went to do a dump!?” Dr. McDonald was incredulous.
“That was the job you gave me,” Coke reminded him. “The holding tank was really full, Dad. I promised I would do a dump today, and I felt bad that I forgot to do it yesterday. I always keep my promises, y’know.”
Dr. McDonald was too upset to speak. He slapped his forehead and walked around in a circle on the sidewalk trying to regain his composure.
“Who said you could drive?” asked Mrs. McDonald.
“You’re always telling us that we should take the initiative,” Coke said lamely.
“You’re minors!” Dr. McDonald said, exploding. “It’s against the law for you to drive a motor vehicle! You could have been arrested! Mom and I could have been arrested! The police would say we’re neglecting our kids! Did you ever think of that?”
“Calm down, Dad,” Coke said. “You’ll give yourself a coronary. Everything’s fine. We did the dump. The RV doesn’t have a scratch on it, and nobody got hurt. So what’s the big deal?”
Dr. McDonald climbed into the driver’s seat mumbling “It’s a rental!” and how this sort of thing never happened when he was a kid. He drove out of Darwin aggressively, stomping on the gas pedal at every green light and stomping on the brake when the lights turned red. It was the only way he could express his anger.
They drove in silence for several miles until Coke worked up the courage to speak.
“May I ask one question, Dad?”
“What is it?” Dr. McDonald said sharply.
“When we’re at home and you ground us, we have to stay in the house. I understand that. But how do you ground us when we’re in an RV?”
Pep rolled her eyes. Sometimes, she wished, her brother should just keep his mouth shut.
“I’ll tell you how,” Dr. McDonald replied. “Your mother and I are going out to a nice dinner and a movie tonight . . . alone. You two are going to stay at the campground and think about what you did.”
“Fair enough,” Coke said sheepishly.
I don’t know if you’ve ever stayed at an RV campground. Some of them are fully equipped with game rooms, stores, Ping-Pong tables, swimming pools, basketball courts, WiFi, and videos. Others just have an electrical hookup for your RV, a septic tank (so you can do a dump), and pretty much nothing else.
Mrs. McDonald purposely found a campground for the night that had no amenities. The place was basically a big parking lot with an office. After he checked in, Dr. McDonald told the twins to get out of the RV.
“We’ll be at the movies,” he said. “See if you can make it through the next few hours without getting into trouble.”
With that, Dr. and Mrs. McDonald drove away.
“What do you wanna do?” Pep asked.
“I don’t know. What do you wanna do?” her brother replied.
“I asked you first.”
There wasn’t a whole lot to do. The twins put their backpacks on the nearest picnic table. Coke took out the Frisbee and flipped it casually to his sister. Then he ran about ten yards out into the parking lot.
“Do you think what we did was wrong?” Pep asked as s
he flipped the Frisbee back to him.
“Mrs. Higgins tried to kill us!” Coke said. “All we did was do a dump on her head.”
“No,” Pep said, catching his return throw. “I mean, was it wrong to drive the RV?”
“Oh,” Coke replied. “Well, yeah, that was wrong. But it was right to do the dump on Mrs. Higgins’s head, because it prevented her from blowing up the ball of twine. And how could we do the dump on her head and prevent her from blowing up the ball of twine if we didn’t drive the RV? The right we did compensated for the wrong we did. So, all in all, I say we did the right thing.”
Pep couldn’t argue with his logic.
“It was fun, wasn’t it?” Coke asked. “Doing the dump, I mean.”
“Yeah.” She giggled.
They threw the Frisbee back and forth a number of times, and Coke had to admit that his sister was getting better. She had learned to hold the Frisbee level as she released it. She didn’t throw it very hard, but she was throwing it accurately. He hardly ever had to go chase it down.
When they got tired of playing Frisbee, they opened their backpacks looking for something else to do. Pez dispensers, yo-yos, balls of twine, and the deck of cards were scattered across the picnic table. Pep pulled out her pad and suddenly remembered the most recent cipher they had received. In all the excitement, she had completely forgotten about it.
Together they sat down at the picnic table and examined the cipher closely.
“The numbers in the first row are all higher than the numbers in the second row,” Coke said.
“Brilliant, Einstein,” his sister replied. “Did you notice that the numbers in the bottom row are all 1, 2, or 3, except for a single 4?”
“The numbers must correspond to letters in some way,” Coke said. “It can’t be as simple as 1 means A, 2 means B, and so on, because the bottom row would be almost all the same three letters.”
“I can see some patterns,” Pep pointed out. “In the top row, 8 4 3 is repeated three times. And in the bottom row, 1 2 2 is repeated three times. And look, the repeating digits are in the same place—on top of each other. That’s got to mean something.”
“The top and bottom rows are related to each other in some way,” Coke guessed. “Maybe the code is 6 3, 6 2, 3 2, and so on.”
At that point, Coke’s cell phone beeped. A text had come in from his father.
U KIDS OK? WERE SORRY WE GOT SO MAD
Coke texted back
no prob.
“Hey!” Pep said suddenly. “Let me see your phone for a sec.”
“Why?”
“Just let me see it.”
He handed his sister the cell, and she peered at the keypad. Slowly, her eyes widened and a smile spread across her face.
“Look!” she said excitedly. “There are no 1s on the top line of the cipher!”
“So?”
“Just like the number 1 on the telephone keypad has no letters that go with it!”
“I don’t read you,” Coke said, confused.
“Don’t you see?” Pep said. “Number 2 on the telephone keypad represents the letters A, B, and C. Number 3 represents D, E, and F. Number 4 represents G, H, and I. And so on. Each number on the keypad stands for three letters.”
“But that doesn’t help us,” Coke said, “because every number in the cipher can be any of three different letters.”
“That’s right. It’s the bottom row that tells us which letter it is!” Pep said excitedly. “See? The first column of numbers is 6 and 3. The 6 on the keypad represents the letters M, N, and O. And the 3 tells us it’s the third letter. So the message begins with the letter O!”
“Well, if 6 and 3 equals the letter O,” Coke said, “then the next letter in the message is represented by 6 and 2. And that would be . . .”
They looked at the keypad and said it together: “N.”
The next number was a 3, with a 2 underneath it. They looked at the keypad and saw that the 3 could be D, E, or F; and the 2 meant it was the second of those, the letter E.
“O-N-E,” Pep said as she wrote it down on her pad. “That’s probably the first word of the message!”
The twins quickly figured out that every time there was a 6 on the top row and a 3 beneath it, that represented the letter O. And every time there was a 4 on the top row and a 3 beneath it, that represented the letter I. Every time there was an 8 on the top row and a 1 beneath it, that represented the letter T. They rushed to fill in the rest of the letters.
625625 meant oclock.
5863 meant June.
893689 meant twenty.
34384 meant fifth.
“The infinity room!” Coke said excitedly. “8 4 3 4 6 3 4 6 4 8 9 7 6 6 6 means the infinity room.”
“And 8 4 3 4 6 8 7 3 6 6 8 4 3 7 6 2 5 means . . .” Pep said as she worked it out, “the house on the rock!”
They repeated the message out loud together.
“ONE OCLOCK JUNE TWENTY FIFTH THE INFINITY ROOM THE HOUSE ON THE ROCK.”
Chapter 21
A Wrong Turn
Now the twins were furious. The house on the rock! Coke ripped the sheet of paper out of the pad, crumpled it up into a ball, and tossed it in the trash can next to the picnic table.
“What is this with a house on a rock?” he sputtered. “If they want us to go to this stupid house so badly, why don’t they tell us where it is? Oh no, that would make too much sense!”
“And today is June twenty-third,” Pep said, checking the date on the cell phone. “We only have two days to get there.”
The sound of wheels on gravel made the twins look up and see the family’s RV pulling into the parking lot. It was hard to believe three hours had gone by. Pep slipped her pad back into her backpack so her parents wouldn’t see it.
“What have you kids been doing?” Dr. McDonald said cheerfully as he hopped out of the driver’s seat. The movie must have been a comedy, the twins figured. Any anger their parents felt before they left was gone.
“Nothing exciting,” Coke replied. “Played Frisbee mostly.”
Their parents sat down at the picnic table with leftovers they had brought back from dinner, and gave the food to the kids. They said they had done some thinking about the rest of the trip. Aunt Judy’s wedding would be in Washington on July Fourth, so they had eleven days to drive 1,167 miles. Mrs. McDonald felt there was plenty of time to stop off at interesting spots along the way and gather information for Amazing but True. She pulled a Minnesota guidebook out of her purse.
They were an hour and a half from Minneapolis, she told them. With that as a starting point, they could check out the Mall of America. It was one of the biggest malls in the world, and it was right nearby. In Belle Plaine, there was a two-story outhouse that attracts a lot of tourists. But that would be an hour out of the way, a long way to go to see a toilet.
In Rothsay, Minnesota, there was a nine-thousand-pound statue of a chicken. And in Frazee, there was the world’s largest turkey.
In a town called Virginia, they had a giant floating statue of the Minnesota state bird: the loon. But it was more than three hours north. And the Sandpaper Museum, in Two Harbors, Minnesota, was almost as far. Even Mrs. McDonald had second thoughts about driving three hours to look at sandpaper. If they were going to go that far north, they might as well drive a little farther to Hibbing, which was the home of the world’s largest open pit iron ore mine and also the boyhood home of Bob Dylan.
“I could spend a month just in Minnesota,” Mrs. McDonald said wistfully.
“No wonder the state bird is a loon,” Coke remarked.
Go to Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/).
Click Get Directions.
In the A box, type Darwin MN.
In the B box, type Minneapolis MN.
Click Get Directions.
“Anything in your guidebook about houses on rocks?” Coke asked.
“No,” his mother replied. “Why?”
“Just wondering.”
; There was no way for the twins to find where the mysterious house on the rock was located. They would just have to wait and hope they received another cipher. In the end, Mrs. McDonald decided to visit just one location in Minneapolis: the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices.
Mrs. McDonald read out loud from her guidebook and described this amazing museum that collected two hundred fifty weird contraptions that supposedly used electricity, radio waves, magnets, or vibrations to cure everything from arthritis to acne. A century ago, apparently, bogus scientists spent a lot of time dreaming up fraudulent devices such as the Bio-Electric Shield, the Dynameter, and Boyd’s Battery, which hung around the neck to ward off the earth’s magnetic rays. The Rejuvenator reversed the aging process. The Spectro-Chrome used six colored lights to cure six different diseases if you sat in front of it with no clothes on. The Psychograph was a bowl-shaped sensor that you put on your head to measure the bumps to determine your personality traits.
“Anybody who used one of those things should have his head examined,” Coke remarked.
The next morning, June twenty-fourth, the McDonalds headed for St. Paul. The address for The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices, interestingly, turned out to be the same as for the Science Museum of Minnesota.
“Excuse me,” Mrs. McDonald asked a lady at the information desk, “where is The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices?”
“I’m very sorry,” the lady replied, “but that museum is closed.”
“Well, when does it open?”
“Uh, never,” the lady said. “It closed a few years ago.”
“What do you mean it’s closed?” Mrs. McDonald put her hands on her hips, and her voice rose.
“Calm down, Bridge,” Dr. McDonald said.
“I’m very sorry,” the lady behind the desk said. “But that museum no longer exists.”
“Do you know who I am?” Mrs. McDonald shouted. “I run a very popular website called Amazing but True. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”
“Mom,” Pep said.
