The Case That Time Forgot

by Tracy Barrett

  Xena nodded. “And we’re making some progress.”

  Xander handed him the note with the drawing of the scorpion on it. Karim read it and looked up. “I don’t get it. How is this progress?”

  “It proves,” Xena said, “that whoever took the casebook is the same person who left the scorpion. It also proves that they know about the amulet. We already figured that, but it’s good to have solid evidence. So now we know that anything we learn about either case will help us with the other one. Did you ever mention the amulet to anyone except us?”

  “Never.” Karim sounded definite.

  “Not even a hint?” Xander asked.

  “I promised my granddad that I wouldn’t say anything to anyone except you, and I wouldn’t even do that until I figured out that you really were good detectives and hadn’t just found that painting by accident.”

  “Okay, then.” Xena settled back in her seat. “So once we find the person who was spying on you two in the locker room—”

  “And who keeps following us around and made that phone call and left the scorpion and the note in my backpack—” Xander added.

  “We’ll have the thief and the casebook.”

  “It must be a student,” Xander said. “Probably a boy. The person Xena saw was dressed like someone our age and was too short to be an adult. And more boys than girls wear Atalantas.”

  “Now we have to find Mrs. Collins,” Karim said.

  “Let’s play the Game!” Xena said.

  “What game?” Karim looked mystified.

  Xander explained that their father had taught them to play a game that had been passed down from Sherlock Holmes, where they had to guess something about a person just by looking at him. “Like you can tell someone’s a teacher if he’s carrying schoolbooks,” he said. “Maybe we can figure out who Mrs. Collins is.”

  There were a lot of women in the pub, some old, some young, some with friends, a few with one other person, and two sitting alone. Both Xena and Xander thought hard; each wanted to be the first to find her.

  The waiter said her husband died years ago, Xander remembered. She must be old. Or at least not young.

  She owns the pub, Xena thought. She would know all the regulars.

  A cheer came up from the people playing darts as a short woman threw her arms in the air in triumph. A bright-eyed elderly woman sitting at a table near them was laughing as she congratulated the short woman on her darts victory. “I always told you you’d win someday, Selma!” she said, and the short woman bent over to give her a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek. As she did so, a small face poked up from the elderly lady’s lap. A cat—like Bastet!

  “Mrs. Collins!” Xena and Xander said at once. The lady looked around at them and smiled.

  “Who talks to her?” Xander asked in a low voice.

  “You, of course.” Xena was confident in her brother’s ability to charm anyone, particularly an old lady who seemed as nice as this one.

  They all got up and went to her table. The woman looked up at them and smiled as she stroked the sleek black cat sitting on her lap.

  “Are you Mrs. Collins?” Xander asked.

  “That’s right, dear. Rosie Collins, proprietor. And who might you be?”

  “I’m Xander Holmes. This is my sister, Xena, and our friend Karim Farag.” Xander took a deep breath. It all sounded so crazy, but he did his best. “We’re searching for something, and we think we’re supposed to find it here.”

  “What kind of something, dear?”

  “That’s the problem,” Xena said. “We’re not sure.” She stroked the cat, which arched its back under her hand and purred more loudly. Xander sneezed and backed up a step, rubbing his nose.

  “Well, then, I can’t really help you, dear.”

  They racked their brains trying to think. How much could they tell Mrs. Collins without giving away the whole story of the amulet?

  “Your cat is beautiful,” Xena said.

  “Thank you, dear. The women in my family have always kept cats, because of the name of our pub.”

  Xander nudged Karim, who looked bewildered. “‘Who Bastet rules, she Bastet rules’—it means ‘The person who runs The Cat and Crown rules Bastet’!” he whispered.

  “As much as anyone can rule a cat!” Karim whispered back.

  “The name of our pub and the Egyptian connection, of course,” Mrs. Collins went on, “what with my name and all.”

  Her name? Rosie Collins? That didn’t sound Egyptian! “I don’t understand about your name, Mrs. Collins,” Xena said.

  “Rosetta Stone Collins,” the old lady answered proudly. “My family has always had an interest in everything Egyptian, you see. It started with my great-grandparents, who had a friend from Egypt.”

  “Rosetta Stone—like that famous stone in the British Museum?” Xena asked. “The one that helped people figure out how to read hieroglyphs?”

  She chuckled. “Yes, just like that. My great-grandmother thought Rosetta was a pretty name and it went well with our last name, so she asked my mother to name me Rosetta Stone in remembrance of her dear friend. Then I married Mr. Collins and became plain Rosie Collins!”

  “What’s the Rosetta Stone?” Xander asked.

  “I saw it at the British Museum,” Xena said. “Remember, Xander? Mom made us go to all those museums before we started school.”

  Xander shook his head. “You must have gone to see it when I was looking at the mummies.”

  Karim said, “It’s this big stone that has writing on it in Egyptian hieroglyphs and some other languages. . . .” He hesitated and looked at Mrs. Collins.

  “Greek and demotic.” Mrs. Collins took up the explanation. “A great French scholar named Champollion could read Greek, and he used it to decipher the Egyptian.”

  “Wow!” Xander said. “Another clue!”

  “A clue to what, dear?”

  Xena and Xander looked at Karim. “I guess it’s all right,” he said. “Go ahead and tell her.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “But not about the magic.”

  They explained that they were descendants of Sherlock Holmes working on a case. When Xena said the name “Amin,” Mrs. Collins sat up straight. The cat jumped off her lap and stalked away, looking offended.

  “Amin Farag—that’s the friend of my great-grandparents!” She turned to Karim with a look of astonishment. “Did your friend say your name is Farag?” Karim nodded. “Are you related to Mr. Amin Farag? Did you come to find the paper he left?”

  More paper. I hope this one actually leads us somewhere, Xena thought, and she said, “Yes, ma’am. Do you have it?”

  “Isn’t that strange! All these years and nobody shows any interest in it, and then yesterday a boy came here and was interested in it, and now you! How odd that the three of you would turn up right after him.”

  “What boy?” Xena asked.

  “Just a boy. About your age, I’d say. Brown hair. I didn’t get a good look—it was dark yesterday, you know, and the lights in here are dim.” Brown hair—that could be a lot of people.

  “What did he want?” Karim asked.

  “He said that his father collected Egyptian artifacts and had heard a rumor that I had something Egyptian. I told him no, nothing like that, unless he meant the paper Mr. Farag gave my ancestors for safekeeping until he or his son could come back for it.”

  “Oh, no!” Xander exclaimed. “You didn’t give it to him, did you?”

  “Of course not!” All three of them felt huge relief, only to be followed by worry when she added, “I did show it to him, though. He seemed most interested in it, examining it under the lamp over there. He wanted to take it outside, but something about him didn’t seem trustworthy, so I told him he couldn’t and asked Harold over there”—she nodded at the waiter, who was bringing them the tea and lemonade they had ordered—“to keep an eye on him.”

  “Mrs. Collins,” Karim said. “Amin Farag was my great-great-great-granduncle. I don’t think he had any child
ren. I’m the closest thing to a direct descendant there is.” He pulled his school ID out of his pocket and showed it to her.

  Mrs. Collins glanced at it with her bright eyes, and then seemed to make up her mind. “You three wait here,” she instructed. She disappeared into a back room while they burned with excitement.

  Mrs. Collins returned with an envelope. On it was written in spidery, old-fashioned handwriting, For Mr. Amin Farag or his son. To be called for.

  “It was among my great-grandmother’s possessions at her death. My grandfather didn’t know what to do with it. It has remained in the family for all those years.”

  She passed it ceremoniously to Karim, who made a little bow as he took it from her hand. After a deep breath, he opened it. Xena and Xander stared eagerly at him, but the disappointment Karim felt showed in his eyes as he passed it to them.

  Nothing but a series of meaningless doodles on both sides.

  “What does it mean?” Xena asked.

  “Sorry, love, I’ve no idea. All I know is that it was to be kept for Mr. Farag, and now I’ve done my duty, even if a century late.” Mrs. Collins nodded at Karim, who managed a weak smile. “And now I’ve got to get back to running the pub. Your snacks are on the house!”

  They thanked her and went out into the darkening afternoon. “I wonder why you have to hold it to the sun,” Xander said.

  Xena shrugged. It didn’t matter; the sun was barely showing.

  “That must be why that other boy held it to the light in the pub,” Karim said.

  “Good thing the lights aren’t too bright in there!” Xena said.

  “How do you know they weren’t bright enough to see whatever it was he was supposed to see?”

  “Because,” Xena explained, “if he’d gotten what he needed, he wouldn’t have tried to take it away!”

  “Maybe there’s a watermark,” Xander guessed. “You know, when paper looks like there’s nothing on it but there are some marks that show in the light. Like on English money.”

  “American money too, sometimes,” Xena said. “Let’s go someplace brighter.”

  Karim glanced at his watch. “I have to go home,” he said. “Walk me to the Tube? My mum said I could ride alone just this once.”

  They went down the stairs with Karim. “It’s pretty bright down here,” Xander said, and Karim held the paper up to the light.

  “Nothing.” He passed it to them and they checked it out. He was right.

  “Can I borrow it?” Xena asked. “We’ll take it by the SPFD and see if someone there can find something. Whatever it was must have faded.”

  Karim handed her the envelope just as his train came in. Xena and Xander waved good-bye and were turning to go when Xena, who was looking at the map, said, “Look, Xander—we’re not far from the British Museum. Let’s go look at that stone on our way. Maybe there’s something like these marks on it!”

  “But I want to figure out who that other person was—the one who got to the pub ahead of us!” Xander protested.

  “We can’t split up. You can’t take the Tube alone, and I think it’s more important to figure out the clue. We don’t have anything to go on with that other person—just that it’s a boy with brown hair. That could be lots of people!”

  They cut through the park in Russell Square, dodging pigeons as they went, and entered the British Museum. The Rosetta Stone stood in its case right near the entrance. It was a large, dark gray slab covered with tiny writing in three different languages. Not one of them looked anything like the marks on their paper.

  Once again they had to step aside when a tour group came by. The guide told the tourists about the stone and how it had been used to decipher hieroglyphs. “The first complete English translation of the Egyptian portion of the text was made in 1858, but today most people prefer the later work of Fotheringale and Smythe, two young scholars at Oxford, whose translation is considered more poetic, even though it departs somewhat from the original. . . .”

  Xander yawned but then he caught sight of Xena, who had a broad grin on her face.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I know what the hieroglyphs from the casebook mean!”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  You know what the hieroglyphs mean?” Xander couldn’t help sounding doubtful.

  “Yes!”

  “Tell me about it on the way to the SPFD. It’s getting late!”

  They hurried out of the museum and ran down the steps. “It’ll be quicker on foot,” Xander said, so they trotted down the sidewalk, dodging pedestrians.

  “Okay, so it turns out that hieroglyphs don’t use many vowels, not the same way that our alphabet does,” Xena began.

  “How do you know?”

  “Read it. What were those letters that Dr. Bowen said the hieroglyphs stood for?”

  “F-t-h-r-n-g-l, then a space, then s-m-y-t-h.”

  Xena nodded. “That’s what I thought. Didn’t you hear what the guide said?”

  Xander stopped dead in his tracks. “Fotheringale and Smythe—the people who translated the Rosetta Stone. That’s what the hieroglyphs spell!”

  “So put it all together. Amin wanted someone—his son or his grandson—to read the Rosetta Stone. Of course they wouldn’t know how to read hieroglyphs, so he had to send them to a translation—the Fotheringale and Smythe version!”

  They soon found themselves in the neighborhood they had lived in when they’d first arrived in London. They hurried to the headquarters of the SPFD in a secret room at the back of the Dancing Men pub. They had discovered the door to the headquarters as part of a test that the SPFD had given them to see if they had inherited Sherlock Holmes’s powers of deduction. First they had to go through the main room of the pub and down a long corridor to a storage room. Inside the storeroom a large box, which looked as if it were made of cardboard, was pushed against a wall. The box was really made of concrete—and it concealed the small door. Xander crawled inside the box and set the dials on the actual door to the combination he had figured out: 221B, Sherlock Holmes’s street address on Baker Street.

  Xander pushed the door open and crawled through. As his feet disappeared, Xena took a deep breath and followed him. She always hated this part. She didn’t like small, enclosed spaces, and even the breakthrough about the Rosetta Stone didn’t distract her enough to make her comfortable.

  Andrew met them as they emerged into the club’s sitting room. “So what’s the excitement?” he asked as he helped them to their feet.

  Xander gave him a quick rundown of the case, leaving out the part about the amulet’s supposed power to make time stand still.

  “Interesting!” Andrew raised one eyebrow. “Let’s have a look at Sherlock’s notes.” An uncomfortable silence filled the small room. “What, don’t have the casebook on you? Bring it by school tomorrow, then.”

  Xena looked at Xander, who looked down at his shoes. “I can’t,” he finally said. “It’s disappeared.”

  If Andrew had yelled at them, it would have been better than the stony silence followed by his bitter exclamation, “I knew it! I told Aunt Mary you weren’t to be trusted.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. You’re too young to be given such a treasure. You don’t even care about it or about Sherlock Holmes! Just wait till the others hear about this.” Andrew stomped off and slammed the door behind him.

  “Do you think he’ll tell everyone?” Xander asked.

  “Probably.” Xena couldn’t bear the thought. “Let’s leave the paper from Mrs. Collins with a note asking someone to send it to that Egyptologist.”

  “If we leave the real thing, it might get lost like the casebook,” Xander objected, “and then Andrew will get us kicked out of the Society.”

  “He won’t. We’ll find it first. Besides, the others wouldn’t let him do that to the descendants of Sherlock Holmes.” Xena wasn’t as sure as she sounded. “Give it to me and I’ll make a copy.”

  She headed into the office, wher
e Mr. Brown, the Society’s secretary, was clicking on his keyboard. He looked up and smiled at them. “Xena! Xander, my boy! How are you two?”

  “Fine,” Xena mumbled, hoping he wouldn’t mention the casebook. “Can I make a copy?”

  Mr. Brown waved his hand at the photocopy machine. “Be my guest!”

  She placed the paper facedown on the glass. She’d have to make a copy of each side, but the marks were faint and didn’t show up well on the first try. She pressed a few buttons and tried again. Better, but still not great. She increased the contrast to the maximum. This time it came out so grainy that it was almost worse. She was about to drop that attempt into the recycling bin when Xander grabbed her wrist.

  “What?” she asked, twisting free.

  “Look!” He pointed at the paper.

  “I don’t see what—Oh!”

  The light from the copy machine had been so bright, and the contrast had been increased so much, that the marks from the front were overlaid on the marks from the back.

  “They’re numbers!” Xander said. “Two, eighteen, thirty-five, ninety-one, forty-four.”

  Their eyes met. “The Rosetta Stone!” Xander breathed. “It’s got to have something to do with the translation!”

  Mr. Brown cheerily interrupted his work to give them directions to the nearest public library. “Thanks!” they called out as they dashed away, and for once Xena didn’t notice how closed in she felt crawling out through the box in the pub’s storeroom.

  In the library Xander went in search of the book—the Fotheringale and Smythe translation of the Rosetta Stone—while Xena called their mother to tell her they were close to home and would be there soon. “Yes, Mom, we’re all caught up on homework,” she was saying when Xander reappeared waving a piece of paper with a call number on it. She gestured at him to go find the book while she finished talking to their mother.

  “Phew!” Xena settled next to Xander, who was turning the pages of a large book in a dark gray binding. “Mom wants us home soon. Maybe we should check the book out.”

  “Can’t.” Xander shook his head. “Reference only. See?”