“The newspapers say he was a Nazi,” I said.
“He wore a Nazi uniform,” Hernando said. “As long as he could. A spy against Hitler, the most dangerous job in the world. When they stole the paintings, the gold, the jewels, Otto smuggled as much as he could, through the Resistance. Until someone ratted him out. On the morning the Nazis came for him, he escaped.”
“To Argentina,” I said. “Where he became the Canary.”
I sat back. It was all becoming clear. The Fabergé egg had been smuggled away by Geheimnis. Who now wanted to make sure it was returned to . . .
I nearly leaped off the bench. “Norman!”
Hernando and Lizzie both gave me a look. “He’s here?” Lizzie said.
“No,” I said, as the pieces fell into place. “Otto wants to return the diamond to Norman, because he’s a Kaufmann. The Fabergé egg—and the Arkady Diamond—belonged to his family!”
Hernando’s watery eyes snapped toward me. “What did you say?”
“Wait . . . your father is Norman?” Lizzie blurted out. “Oh, is that depressing.”
I began pacing. “If Norman is my dad, why didn’t he tell me? He met Harriet on the day she adopted me. So he just decided he’d give me up, then hang out with my mom and make bad jokes while she raised me?”
“And why would Otto want to contact you,” Lizzie said, “when he could contact Norman directly?”
“No . . . no . . .” Hernando was sputtering, trying to get a word in edgewise. “Grobheit . . . you do not know about Putzi Grobheit?”
We both stared at him blankly. “I’ll spell it,” he said. “You look it up.”
I did, and the first hit was a news report headlined “Nazi War Criminal Dies Before Sentencing.”
MIAMI (AP)—A trial for convicted Nazi war criminal Karl-Heinz “Putzi” Grobheit ended yesterday, when the 91-year-old suffered a fatal heart attack in court. He had been convicted of stealing $117 million in artwork, gold, and jewelry from Jewish families during World War II, after which he moved to Miami under an assumed name. In a plea for leniency, Grobheit gave an address of a warehouse in Buenos Aires, where he claimed to have stored his plunder. It was found to be empty. Grobheit had suffered congestive heart failure for many years, according to his sister, Clara Kaufmann of New York City.
The last sentence made me catch my breath. “Kaufmann . . .”
“As in Norman Kaufmann?” Lizzie said. “Clara was Norman’s mom?”
Hernando nodded.
It was all clear now. Norman was lying about his family. They never owned the egg. They were the thieves. “But . . . how . . . ?” I sputtered.
“Argentina was full of Nazis,” Hernando said. “Real ones, like Grobheit, who wanted me to give him the location of the egg. The diamond. But I could not tell him anything. Otto did not give me the location—he thought he was protecting me.”
I began pacing. “We have a problem . . . Norman read Otto’s secret invisible-ink note!”
“That sucks,” Lizzie said. “He’s going after the diamond.”
“Through the lawyer, Caswell Connor,” I said. “Norman promised to track down all his family.”
“Oh Dios mío . . .” Hernando muttered.
I pulled out my phone and called Harriet, trying not to sound frantic. “Hi! Have you heard from Norman?”
“You bet I did,” she replied. “We’re going to have a big celebration when he returns. I made you pancakes, Jakey!”
“Celebration?” I said.
“Down in the Village he found the granddaughter of that man . . . Connor. Can you believe, she inherited that entire brownstone! You know what that’s worth?”
“What happened?” I said.
She let out a laugh. “You’re breaking my eardrum, hon. He found the . . . the thing. The egg.”
“The Fabergé egg with the Arkady Diamond?” I blurted.
“You have such a good memory,” Harriet said. “Always have.”
Sometimes when I’m upset, I walk until I’m tired.
That didn’t happen until Lizzie and I reached the duck pond at the bottom of the park. There I plopped down on a granite outcropping and broke down in tears. “He played me . . .”
“Maybe Norman will marry Harriet,” Lizzie said, pacing in front of me, “and you’ll be rich.”
“That’s not the point . . .” I was still clutching the book, and I threw it toward the pond, but it didn’t quite make the water. “Look. I can’t even do that right.”
Lizzie scrambled after the book and brought it back, holding it gingerly between thumb and forefinger. “Ew, duck poop.”
She put it down on the rock. It had fallen open to the page with the writing on it.
Something about that alphabet drew my eye. I stared at it for a minute and began leafing back through the book, starting with the last page.
Otto’s final sentence was in a huge font:
Remember, every message contains a message, and it’s up to YOU to unlock it!
And then I glanced at the alphabet again. “Lizzie?” I said. “What if we missed the message?”
“We didn’t,” Lizzie replied. “Remember the iron? The milk?”
I nodded. “But everything this guy writes means something. That’s his philosophy. You look for messages within messages. I mean, he wrote ‘Warm milk 2C’ and we thought it meant nothing. But we were wrong, right? So why did he write down a Greek alphabet?”
On a nearby park bench, a white-haired saxophone player was setting up. His case was decorated with a light-blue-and-white-striped flag. He waved to us. Behind him, Hernando was approaching, pushing his blue box. “You two are fast,” he said.
“Hernando,” I said, “do you think Otto was trying to tell us something?”
Lizzie groaned. “Jake, what’s the difference? Norman has the loot already. It’s a done deal.”
As we all sat on the bench, my phone buzzed. It was a text from Harriet:
Jakey, where r u? The pancakes are getting cold.
Is Norman with u? he is not answering my texts!!!
“I’m not so sure . . .” I said under my breath. “We may never see Norman again.”
The sax player was looking at the book over my shoulder now. “Is Greek alphavito!” he shouted. “Many Greeks in New York. Good handwriting!”
“You’re Greek?” I asked.
The guy nodded proudly. “English alphabet comes from Greek—only Greek has twenty-four letters, English twenty-six. You see—Greek is easier!”
With a big laugh, he stood and started playing.
Twenty-four letters . . .
Carefully I counted out the letters Otto had written down. “There are twenty-three letters here.”
“So?” Lizzie said.
“What is missing?” Hernando asked.
I got out my phone again and searched for the Greek alphabet. When I got it, I held up the screen for all to see:
The font was a little different, but when I compared letter for letter, it was easy to see what was missing.
“Pi,” I said. “Otto’s alphabet is missing the letter pi.”
“Pi, as in three point one four one five nine?” Lizzie said. “Et cetera?”
The et cetera might be important. I searched for that too:
3.14159265358979323846264338327
“I’m not following,” Lizzie said.
Now my eyes were moving from the digits of pi to the message in invisible ink.
Caswell Connor, residing on Tenth Street,
boldly handles my current placements,
assuring the arrival of my most important of hidden, snared eggs.
I rest now.
You act.
Know I am smiling.
“Every message contains a message . . .” I murmured. “What if this—all this stuff about Caswell Connor—isn’t the real message? What if it’s a decoy?”
“But Harriet said Norman already got the egg . . .” Lizzie’s voice trailed off.
“Unless,” Hernando said softly, “he did not.”
“Norman hasn’t come home, so Harriet didn’t actually see the egg!” I said. “What if Caswell was a spy, too? What if he and Otto had a plan . . . together?”
“Like a prank!” Hernando was clapping his hands.
Thinking the applause was for him, the Greek sax player took a bow.
“OK . . .” Lizzie stared at my phone. Her lips were blue from the cold. “So what if the three in pi means the third letter, and then the one means the first letter, and so on?”
Carefully, I matched each pi digit to the corresponding letter—3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5.
After writing S-C-W-C-E-O-A-L-E, I stopped. “Or maybe not.”
“Maybe those letters are anagram,” Hernando said. “Mixed up.”
“But pi goes on forever,” I said. “How would you know when to stop?”
“I’m freezing,” Lizzie said. She was jumping up and down, hugging herself. “Can we go to the food court and continue this over hot chocolate?”
That sounded like a good idea to me. As I stood Hernando was giving her a puzzled look. “Food court?”
“At the Plaza,” Lizzie explained. “Right there. Fifty-ninth and Fifth.”
I stopped halfway to a standing position.
Fifty-ninth . . .
Fifth . . .
At that moment I was no longer feeling cold.
There were number numbers, like one, two, three, four. But there were also counting numbers like first, second, third, fourth . . .
I flopped back down on the bench. “I have an idea.”
Minutes later we were racing around the Delacorte Theater, which was shuttered and quiet. On the other side, behind the park benches, the ground sloped up to a gentle ridge. I knew what it was (because Harriet and I have been on every historical tour of the park)—the buried remains of a stone wall that once contained NYC’s drinking-water reservoir. Years ago it was filled in and became baseball diamonds and picnic sites.
At the top of the little slope, a sign pointed out two or three unremarkable stones sticking up out of the ground. They were the only remaining visible signs of the reservoir.
I looked up the pathway. “I just texted Harriet. She should be here soon.”
“OK then, let’s do this!” Lizzie was shaking again, but not from the cold.
From excitement.
I held up the note, where we had carefully mapped out the code.
3.14159 . . .
Third letter. First letter after that. Fourth letter after that. First letter after that . . .
SW CORNER OLD RESERVOIR FIND GROCKS
“What is a grock?” Hernando asked.
I shrugged. Together we crouched by the exposed stones. What were we even looking for? Were we supposed to dig them up? Dig around them? Stare dumbly until a Fabergé egg materialized?
After a while, a little girl skipped up toward us and crouched next to Lizzie. “What are you looking for?”
“Grocks,” Lizzie said.
The girl nodded as if that made perfect sense. “That’s like rocks, only with a G,” she said. “My name is Gelizabeth! Elizabeth with a G!”
“Glizzie,” Lizzie said.
I smiled. Grock without the g was rock. Maybe we just needed to think of that. I began digging around the old stones with my hands. Hernando was lumbering over, with a trowel from his box. Together we dug, working our way north, uncovering stone after stone.
A parks department vehicle puttered by. Lizzie was nervous. “This is a historical site,” she reminded us in a whisper.
We froze, but the worker didn’t seem to notice. We got back to work but all the stones looked the same—jagged and broken, like the teeth of an old, petrified giant.
Until I got to the fifth rock north of the sign.
I dusted it off as best I could. Hernando magically produced a whisk broom and I brushed until the rock was completely visible.
Lizzie’s eyes were wide. “Of course . . .”
I nodded. “It’s kind of obvious, when it’s staring you in the face.”
For the solution to this story, please turn here.
Gridlock Jones Cracks the Case
by Bruce Hale
You wouldn’t expect to find the sharpest mind at Vista Grande Elementary in the front office. (No offense to our staff.) But that’s where Gabriel “Gridlock” Jones (who’s in my grade) volunteered every day—not because he was a kiss-up, but because information is power, and the main office is where it flows strongest.
At least that’s what he says.
When I dropped by that Monday before school, Gabe sat in his wheelchair at a worktable festooned with papers, his neck craned forward so all that showed was the black bird’s nest of his hair. It looked like he was redesigning the school’s filing system (or something equally exciting).
“Hello, Maya.” He gave me a quick up-and-down scan. “Fell asleep studying again last night, eh?”
My hands flew to my hair. Was it still flattened on one side? No, I’d showered that morning. “How did you—?” Even after knowing Gabe for three years, I was still startled by his powers of deduction.
A corner of his wide mouth tugged upward. “Easy. Your socks are mismatched, meaning you dressed in a hurry. Your eyes are puffy. And even though you washed your face, you didn’t totally remove that ink stain in the corner of your mouth.”
I tugged my jeans legs down over my socks and rubbed at my lip. A girl likes to be noticed, but maybe not that closely.
“You chew on your pen when you study,” said Gabe. “Nervous habit.”
The outside door opened, admitting a mom, three students, and a gust of chilly November wind. While the kids shuffled up to the secretary, the grim-faced mom cut behind the counter, beelining it for the principal’s office.
Glancing up from his papers, Gabe registered everything. “Trouble with the PTA,” he said, dividing his mess into four neat stacks.
“Oh, really? How do you know she’s not visiting on personal mom business?” I asked, unable to resist taking the bait.
His smirk widened. “Regular parents check with the secretary first, so that makes her either PTA or someone with an appointment. And between that expression on her face and how tightly she’s clutching her purse, I suspect bad financial news.”
“Wow.”
“Plus, I happen to know Mrs. Dunbarton is PTA treasurer.”
I whacked his shoulder. “You might have led with that.”
“And ruin my fun?” asked Gabe, brown eyes dancing.
Yes, it can be a pain sometimes, having a brilliant friend.
Shortly after Mrs. Dunbarton entered the principal’s office, voices rose. Even with all the usual hubbub—kids coming and going, phones ringing—you could almost make out what they were saying behind the closed door.
“Cover for me,” said Gabe. With five powerful strokes, he wheeled himself back by the principal’s door. Gabe pretended to read the bulletin board on the wall beside it, but I knew eavesdropping when I saw it.
Glancing around, I wondered what cover for me meant. Nobody was paying us the slightest bit of attention.
The argument grew louder. I heard our principal, Ms. Braxton, say, “But you don’t know for sure. It could’ve gone missing earlier.”
Suddenly the door blew open, and everyone in the office heard Mrs. Dunbarton say, “Well, the PTA holds you responsible!”
The treasurer stormed from the office, past Gabe, past the secretaries, and out the door. Behind him, Ms. Braxton appeared in her doorway, jaw clenched and face flushed.
“Problems, Ms. Braxton?” said Gabe innocently.
The principal blew out a breath and sent him a sour smile. “Like you don’t already know.”
Gabe lifted a shoulder. “Maybe I could help?”
After her sharp brown gaze scanned the office (sending secretaries back to work), Ms. Braxton regarded my friend. Another sigh. “Come in.”
Raising an eyeb
row at me, Gabe followed her back into her office. I joined them, closing the door behind me.
“It’s about Casino Night,” our principal said. “Have a seat.” She winced when she remembered that Gabe already had a permanent seat.
His face stayed blank. He’d dealt with insensitivity before. So many times.
“It was a profitable fund-raiser?” he said.
“Almost six thousand dollars,” said Ms. Braxton, “and now it’s gone.”
Gabe leaned forward. “Fascinating.”
The principal glowered. “It’s not ‘fascinating,’ it’s dreadful. The money was stolen from my desk over the weekend.”
“Locked office?”
“Of course,” said Ms. Braxton. “The desk, too.”
Curiosity prodded me. “Who has keys?” I asked.
“Only the janitor, my secretary, and me,” said the principal. “And mine never leave my possession.”
Leaning back in his wheelchair, Gabe tented his fingers. “Who knew the money was there?”
The principal puffed out her cheeks, considering. “Well . . . the custodians, the PTA president and treasurer . . . and probably Mr. Langley.”
“Mr. Langley?” I asked.
Gabe glanced over at me. “Teacher representative on the Casino Night committee.”
I shook my head wonderingly. Gabe was right; you could learn a lot by working in the office.
“Any signs of a break-in?” he asked.
Ms. Braxton shrugged. “The door was locked when I arrived today.”
Pivoting his chair around, Gabe wheeled over to the door and examined the lock. I peeked over his shoulder.
“No scratches,” he muttered, running a hand along the doorjamb. “No signs of crowbar use.”
“So they had a key,” I said.
“Maybe.” He looked to Ms. Braxton. “And the window?”
“Painted shut.” The principal clasped her hands. “Look, Grid—uh, Gabriel, I’ve given you some leeway because you’ve been . . . helpful in the past.”
“‘Helpful?’” I bristled. “He’s solved three major mysteries here.”
She dipped her head in acknowledgment. “But now I’m going to call in the police.”
“Wait,” said Gabe. “Give me until after school.”
Super Puzzletastic Mysteries Page 22
