The Genius Files #4

by Dan Gutman

  Oh, it made sense. It just didn’t make sense yet.

  Go to Google Maps (http://maps.google.com).

  Click Get Directions.

  In the A box, type Paris TX.

  In the B box, type Dallas TX.

  Click Get Directions.

  Chapter 15

  X MARKS THE SPOT

  If you recall from the first Genius Files book, Coke and Pep received a bunch of mysterious messages that appeared to have no common connection. But actually those messages led them to their climactic confrontation with Dr. Warsaw at The House on the Rock in Wisconsin.

  In the second book, it also seemed as though the ciphers had nothing in common, but in the end they all referred to items inside the National Museum of American History, where the twins encountered the deranged teenager Archie Clone.

  Once again, in the third book, the ciphers seemed to be completely incomprehensible, until the twins finally realized that they all had something to do with Graceland, Elvis Presley’s mansion in Memphis, Tennessee. That’s where Evil Elvis/Aunt Judy was waiting to ambush them.

  But what could these two new messages possibly mean? Pep turned to a blank page in her notepad and wrote them out in her neat handwriting:

  1. I WILL MEET YOU IN LLANO ESTACADO

  2. A PIECE OF THE BLARNEY STONE

  Dr. and Mrs. McDonald came back from the Lamar County Chamber of Commerce, where they had lodged a formal complaint about the dangerous conditions at the fake Eiffel Tower.

  “What did you say?” Pep asked.

  “I told them a dead cow fell out of the Eiffel Tower and almost landed on my son,” said Dr. McDonald.

  “And what did they say?” asked Pep.

  “They just laughed,” said Mrs. McDonald. “They thought it was funny.”

  It was, in an odd sort of way. After the family had gotten over the initial shock of what had happened, they were even able to joke about it.

  “Hey, what has four legs and goes ‘moo—thud’?” asked Pep.

  “What?”

  “A cow falling on Coke’s head.”

  Back in the car, the McDonalds were heading south and west. It would be almost two hours to Dallas, mainly along I-30. They stopped for lunch at a little diner in Greenville, but the parents spent most of the time arguing over what they were going to do for the rest of the day.

  “It says here that the first 7-Eleven opened in Dallas in 1927,” said Mrs. McDonald. “But the Slurpee wasn’t invented until fifty years later.”

  “Please don’t tell me they have a Slurpee museum in Dallas,” Dr. McDonald said, groaning. “I will have lost all faith in humanity.”

  “They don’t, but at the Baylor University Medical Center, they have bronze-coated replicas of the hands of famous people like Louis Armstrong, Winston Churchill, Joe DiMaggio, and Walt Disney,” Mrs. McDonald said. “That could be pretty interesting to see, don’t you think?”

  “Those could be anybody’s hands in bronze,” scoffed Dr. McDonald. “I don’t need to see that.”

  “Hey, the world’s largest patio chair is in Dallas!” Mrs. McDonald said more excitedly. “It’s in front of a furniture store.”

  “I’m not driving to Dallas to look at a chair,” Dr. McDonald said, “and that’s final.”

  Listening to the two of them go at it was like watching two great tennis players whack a ball back and forth.

  Coke and Pep’s parents hardly ever fought back home, but they seemed to bicker a lot in the car. Maybe it had something to do with being so close together in a confined space, and having to make important decisions quickly.

  In any case, Dr. and Mrs. McDonald finally hit on something they both wanted to see in Dallas—the Sixth Floor Museum.

  “What’s that?” asked Pep.

  “The Sixth Floor Museum chronicles the assassination and legacy of John F. Kennedy,” said her all-knowing brother.

  You’re probably aware that President Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas on November 22, 1963—a tragedy that shook the nation to its core. People who were alive that day remember exactly where they were when they heard the news that the president had been shot.

  When they reached Dallas, Dr. McDonald drove up Elm Street on the western edge of the historic district downtown and parked the car behind an early 20th-century warehouse that used to be known as the Texas School Book Depository. Shots rang out from the sixth floor of the building on that day in 1963. Today, the sixth and seventh floors are a museum jammed with exhibits about the assassination, and about Kennedy himself. Photography was not permitted in the museum, but Mrs. McDonald took notes for Amazing but True.

  What the twins found most interesting was the window where the sniper’s nest and rifle were found after the assassination. They could look out and see Dealey Plaza, where the president’s motorcade passed. As Coke and Pep peered out that window, a guard informed them that there’s an X painted on the street at the exact spot where the president was hit.

  “I can’t see the X,” Coke said.

  “That’s because that tree is in the way,” the guard told him.

  “Well, if the tree is in the way, how could Lee Harvey Oswald possibly have shot the president from this window?” asked Coke, quite proud of himself for personally debunking the notion that Oswald was the lone gunman.

  “The tree was a lot shorter in 1963,” the guard informed him.

  “Oh.”

  The museum was fascinating, but there was a lot to absorb, and to the twins 1963 might as well have been ancient history. After an hour or so, they were ready to leave.

  “I want to see everything,” Dr. McDonald said. “This was one of the most important events in American history.”

  “Can we go outside and look at the X on the street?” asked Coke.

  “Well, okay,” their mother agreed reluctantly. “Meet us back at the car in an hour.”

  Coke and Pep took the stairs down and walked around the front of the building to Dealey Plaza. They weren’t the only ones. A half-dozen tourists were milling around the area with cameras and guidebooks. Invariably, they would look up to the sixth floor of the book depository building, and then down to the street.

  “There it is,” Coke said, pointing to the white X painted in the center lane. “That’s the exact spot where Kennedy was hit.”

  The twins walked over to the curb. Cars zipped down the street, many of them driving right over the X mark.

  “Think about it,” Pep said quietly. “If those bullets had missed by an inch, history would have been different. Kennedy would probably have been reelected and been president through 1968. Maybe he would have ended the war in Vietnam. Watergate would have never happened. Maybe—”

  “You don’t know any of that,” Coke replied. “Nobody can know what would have happened if Kennedy had lived.”

  The traffic eased up. Coke looked up and down Elm Street. There were no cars.

  “I want to stand on it,” he said.

  “It’s just an X,” said Pep.

  “I know. I want to stand on the exact spot.”

  “It’s a busy street,” his sister warned. “You could get run over by a car.”

  “Who are you, Mom?” Coke asked. “Relax. Don’t worry about it.”

  Elm is a one-way street, but Coke looked both ways just to be sure. Satisfied that there were no cars coming, he dashed out into the middle of the road.

  “Be careful!” Pep yelled.

  “I’m always careful!” Coke yelled back. “Look, I’m standing on it! This is the exact spot where the president was hit.”

  “Okay, you saw it,” Pep yelled. “Come back now.”

  Coke glanced up and across the street for a moment to locate the window from which the shots had been fired. Then he looked down at the street.

  “Hey, there’s something written on the X,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  Just as Coke was bending down to read the tiny letters in the X, two motorcycles came roaring around the
bend on Elm Street.

  “Coke, get out of the way!” his sister shouted.

  He looked up. It was a three-lane road, but both of the motorcycles were in the center lane, and they were heading directly toward him at top speed. Their handlebars were nearly touching each other.

  “What the—”

  “The bowler dudes!” Pep screamed, pointing at the weird, bowler-shaped helmets the bikers were wearing.

  The bowler dudes didn’t look like they were going to veer around Coke. He couldn’t jump to his left. He couldn’t jump to his right. There was only one way to go.

  Up.

  Using the skills he had learned in his karate classes, Coke went from a deep crouch to pushing against the ground with all the energy he had to propel his body upward. He got pretty high—at least three feet in the air.

  The bowler dudes, taken by surprise, reached out to grab Coke’s legs as they passed, but missed him by inches. The rearview mirror of one of the bikes, however, caught on the bottom of Coke’s T-shirt as he leaped.

  As it passed by at close to fifty miles per hour, the mirror pulled at the shirt, flipping Coke around. His body did a 360 in the air and he landed roughly on his backside. The motorcycles kept right on going, roaring away down Elm Street.

  Coke, dazed, still had the sense to crawl to the curb just before several cars came speeding down the street. His shirt was ripped and he was gasping for breath, but he seemed to be all right. Pep dragged him out of harm’s way.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I think so,” Coke said, still gasping for breath. “How could they know we were here? How did they know to come down the road at that moment?”

  “They know things,” Pep said. “And now we know that they’re trying to kill us again. I knew we shouldn’t have trusted them.”

  If Coke had jumped a millisecond earlier, or a millisecond later, he would have been hit by the motorcycles and surely killed. If his body had spun around a few miles per hour faster or slower, he would have landed on his head and very possibly been killed. If it hadn’t been for these lucky breaks, it would have been the second assassination to take place at that exact same spot on Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.

  Chapter 16

  HUB CITY

  Did you ever have a really bad day when just about everything was going wrong? That was the kind of day Coke was having. So far, a cow had been dropped on him and he was almost run over by a couple of motorcycles. And it was still early afternoon.

  There’s a little hill on the north side of Elm Street in Dealey Plaza near some concrete steps. It’s referred to as “the grassy knoll.” Many Kennedy assassination experts believed at least one of the shots that hit the president came from this spot and not from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Coke and Pep went over and sat down on this grassy knoll to regain their composure. They had about ten minutes until it was time to meet their parents in the parking lot.

  “Are you going to be okay?” Pep asked.

  “Yeah. I’m indestructible. You know that.”

  “That was a really dumb thing you did,” Pep told her brother.

  “I know.”

  Coke lay back on the grass, looking up at the sky. His T-shirt was ripped and his knees were scraped from crawling across the street.

  “So . . . what did you see?” Pep asked him.

  “Huh?”

  “Just before those motorcycles came, you told me there was something written in the X,” Pep reminded him. “What did it say?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Coke said. The near miss with the motorcycle had almost made him forget that he had bent down to look at the words on the street. “You’re gonna laugh. It said BUY ITCH.”

  “BUY ITCH?”

  “It must be some kind of an ad,” Coke said. “I guess they’re selling an anti-itch cream. Can you believe that? Companies will advertise anywhere, even in a place like this.”

  “Not necessarily,” Pep replied. “Maybe BUY ITCH is an anagram that we’re supposed to figure out.”

  “Are you serious?” Coke said, sitting up. “You think somebody would send us a cipher by putting letters on an X in the middle of the street?”

  “Why not?” Pep said. “They put one at the bottom of a swimming pool, remember? They put one on the radio. When we were in Chicago, they put one on the scoreboard at Wrigley Field!”

  “But what could BUY ITCH mean?” Coke asked, as he juggled the letters around in his head.

  Pep took her notepad and pencil from her pocket and wrote BUY ITCH at the top of a page. Then she got to work, writing down every possible combination of those letters.

  “CUT BY HI,” she said softly as she wrote. “No, that can’t be it. I CUB THY . . . CHIT BUY . . .”

  It was just nonsense words. It didn’t seem like BUY ITCH could possibly mean anything besides BUY ITCH. Coke looked up at the passing cars, while his sister continued working on new letter combinations in her head.

  “Wait a minute!” she said suddenly. “I think I’ve got it!”

  She wrote this on her pad:

  HUB CITY

  “Hub City?”

  “‘Hub City’ is an anagram for BUY ITCH!” she told her brother. “We need to go to Hub City.”

  “Oh, great,” Coke said. “Now all we have to do is find out where Hub City is.”

  When the twins met their parents in the parking lot, Mrs. McDonald took one look at Coke and went into “Mom Mode.”

  “What happened to your shirt?” she asked.

  “It ripped.”

  “I can see that!” said Mrs. McDonald. “How did it rip? I left you on your own for less than an hour, and now you look like you got run over by a truck.”

  “Funny you should say that, Mom,” Coke told her. “You see, I was standing on the X in the street where President Kennedy was shot when these two motorcycles came out of nowhere and almost ran me over. So I jumped up in the air and flipped around, and—”

  “Ha-ha! That’s a good one, son,” said Dr. McDonald. “How do you come up with this stuff?”

  “I guess I just have a vivid imagination, Dad.”

  They got in the car and Dr. McDonald paid the parking attendant. But Mrs. McDonald wasn’t finished nagging Coke.

  “I wish you would take better care of your clothes,” she told him. “We just bought that shirt the other day, and now it’s ruined.”

  “I’ll try, Mom,” said Coke, who knew from experience that it was always better to agree with his mother than to argue with her.

  They got back on the road and after a few minutes everyone had calmed down a little.

  “Can we borrow your computer, Mom?” asked Pep. “We need to look something up.”

  “What for, sweetie?” Mrs. McDonald said from the front seat.

  “It’s an assignment for school,” said Coke, who was always the better liar of the two.

  “You’re working on schoolwork over summer vacation?” Dr. McDonald asked, turning around so he could see it with his own eyes. “Are you feeling okay?”

  Mrs. McDonald handed her laptop back, warning the kids to be careful with it because her entire website—her entire career—was stored in that little box. Then she turned the radio back on. “How Can I Miss You If You Won’t Go Away” was playing, and Dr. McDonald turned it up loud.

  Coke took the laptop and Googled “Hub City.” In 0.19 seconds, he had 125,000 results. He clicked the first one on the list.

  “It says Hub City is a manufacturer of worm gear,” he whispered to his sister.

  “What’s worm gear?” Pep asked. “Clothing for worms?”

  “It has something to do with motors,” Coke explained.

  Coke scrolled down to see some of the other results for “Hub City.” He hoped that the search would turn up the name of a city with that nickname. Unfortunately, the top search results included the name of a hockey club in Boston, a drag racing track in Mississippi, a bicycle store in Maryland, a Ford dealership in Louisiana
, and a brewery in Iowa.

  “There’s no way of knowing which Hub City is our Hub City,” Pep said. “It’s another dead end.”

  As frustrated as she was, Pep was a chronic list maker, and she dutifully added the new message to her list in the notepad. . . .

  1. I WILL MEET YOU IN LLANO ESTACADO

  2. A PIECE OF THE BLARNEY STONE

  3. HUB CITY

  There was still no obvious connection between the items, no clear thread that tied them all together. But after what had happened to her brother in Paris and Dallas, one thing was increasingly clear—someone was out to harm them . . . again.

  Go to Google Maps (http://maps.google.com).

  Click Get Directions.

  In the A box, type Dallas TX.

  In the B box, type Arlington TX.

  Click Get Directions.

  Chapter 17

  FRAMED

  Interstate 30, which starts in Little Rock, Arkansas, stretches west over 350 miles, across Texas. In the Dallas area it’s known as the Tom Landry Highway, in honor of the longtime coach of the Dallas Cowboys. The McDonalds were only on the road for fifteen minutes when they pulled off at the exit marked ARLINGTON.

  “Why are we stopping here?” Pep asked.

  “You’ll see,” said Mrs. McDonald. “It’s a surprise.”

  “I don’t like surprises,” Coke said, rubbing his bruised knee. He’d already had enough surprises for the day.

  “Oh, you’ll like this one,” his mother assured him.

  The twins looked around anxiously as Dr. McDonald pulled off the highway on the right and merged onto Six Flags Road.

  “We’re going to Six Flags!” Pep shouted excitedly. “We’re going to Six Flags!”

  Six Flags, as you probably know, is a popular amusement park chain. There are nineteen of them in North America. The twins had been to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom back home in California, and they could barely contain their enthusiasm.

  “I hate to break it to you,” Mrs. McDonald said, “but we’re not going to Six Flags.”

  “Why not?” asked Pep, deflated.