The Genius Files #4

by Dan Gutman

  Dr. McDonald took a minute, closing his eyes. Bridget McDonald was a wonderful woman. She was bright, funny, dedicated, and beautiful. But she wasn’t easy to be married to.

  “Okay, okay,” he finally grumbled.

  Instead of turning off at the exit, Dr. McDonald continued west on I-30. Shortly after passing a small airport, the road split and he got on Route 180, which goes directly to Mineral Wells. Route 180 is also called West Hubbard Street, which happens to be the street where the Laumdronat is located.

  Yes, that’s how it’s supposed to be spelled—Laumdronat.

  It was a plain white building. Dr. McDonald found a parking spot down the street and popped open the trunk. The rest of the family gathered up their dirty clothes.

  “I can’t believe we’re going to a washing machine museum,” Pep said as they opened the door.

  Laumdronat is essentially a regular laundromat that has a display of vintage washing machines. On a shelf above the modern machines are old-time tubs, washboards, and laundry accessories dating back to the days before most homes had electricity. Hanging from the ceiling are some ironing boards. There are also signs that say LAUNDRY, which are, for some reason, upside down.

  “It’s the history of laundry!” Mrs. McDonald enthused. “Isn’t this fascinating?”

  No, was the unanimous silent response from the rest of the family.

  “Believe it or not, there’s another washing machine museum, in Colorado,” she told them.

  “If we have to go there,” said Dr. McDonald, “I’ll shoot myself.”

  “Oh, you people are no fun at all,” Mrs. McDonald said as she began separating the darks from the lights.

  A few other people were doing their wash, but there were plenty of machines available. Once the clothes were inside and swishing around, Mrs. McDonald started taking pictures and jotting down notes for Amazing but True. There were a couple of ancient Pac-Man games in the corner, and Coke dug some quarters out of his pocket so he and Pep could play. Dr. McDonald pulled up a chair and read his newspaper to kill time. The dryers were huge, so when the clothes were done washing, Mrs. McDonald was able to fit all the darks and lights into one machine.

  When the dryer clicked off, everyone helped to fold and carry the clothes out to the car. They were about to drive away when—

  “Dad!” Coke yelled. “Stop!”

  “What now?”

  “I’m missing a pair of my underwear.”

  “Well, go get it,” his father said wearily.

  Coke hopped out of the car and ran back inside the Laumdronat. It was empty now. He went over to the dryer they had been using and looked through the round window. Spinning around in there were his missing Fruit of the Looms. He opened the door.

  As he leaned inside to grab the underwear, Coke was taken by surprise. The two bowler dudes came out of nowhere, shoved him from behind, and pushed him headfirst into the dryer.

  “What the—”

  See? I told you that Coke would be shoved into a spinning clothes dryer! You just had to be a little patient.

  The dryer door slammed behind him, and then the whole world began to spin.

  “Stop!” Coke yelled as his body spun around. “Ouch! Let me out!”

  The dryer was spinning fast, but not fast enough for the centrifugal force to hold Coke’s body against the inside of the drum. He tumbled around until he reached the top, and then he fell to the bottom with a thud.

  “Ooof!” he grunted. “Oww! Turn it off! Helllllp!”

  As he spun around, Coke caught a glimpse of the two bowler dudes, their smiling faces pressed against the round window. He could hear their cackling laughter as they held the dryer door closed.

  Within seconds, Coke started to feel dizzy from the spinning, and he realized he had to do something quickly or he would lose consciousness in there. If that happened and his head were to bang hard against the drum, it could be all over for him.

  As he spun around and around, he got himself into position, gathered up the strength he had left, and slammed his right foot against the door the same way he had been taught to kick in karate class. The door flew open and the machine slowed to a stop.

  Coke climbed out of the opening and fell on the floor. He tried to look around, but the world was still spinning. By the time he was able to see clearly, the bowler dudes were out the front door and running down the street.

  Coke struggled to his feet and walked unsteadily back to the car.

  “What took you?” asked Pep. “I was worried about you. How long does it take to get a pair of underwear out of a dryer, anyway?”

  “I went for a spin,” Coke replied.

  All in all, it had been one lousy day. In fact, it may have been one of the worst days the McDonald twins had ever experienced.

  Coke thought about everything that had happened to him since he woke up that morning. He had nearly been run over by two motorcycles. His shoes had been poisoned. He had been attacked by maniacs with bowling balls. And he had been pushed into a spinning clothes dryer. It was amazing that he was still alive.

  Oh, and a cow had nearly fallen on his head. He’d almost forgotten.

  Dr. McDonald drove east on Hubbard Street until he passed the Budget Host Mesa Motel near Lake Mineral Wells State Park. It was late, and the vacancy sign was blinking. He pulled in and got two rooms.

  Wearily, the twins brushed their teeth and laid out the clean clothes they would wear the next day. As Coke picked up the Fruit of the Looms he had retrieved from the back of the dryer, he noticed something unusual. There were some letters written inside the waistband—letters that had not been there before. . . .

  QBUXPOXKDBO

  “Oh no,” he said to his sister, “guess what?”

  “What?”

  “We got another one,” he told her.

  But both of the twins were too tired, too sore, and too frustrated to even think about solving the cipher. They crawled into their beds and went to sleep.

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

  Click Get Directions.

  In the A box, type Mineral Wells TX.

  In the B box, type Waco TX.

  Click Get Directions.

  Chapter 20

  A LOST WORLD

  When he woke up on the morning of July 16, Coke felt sore all over, but a little better in his head. There’s something about getting a good night’s sleep that helps to put yesterday behind you.

  The McDonald family got back on the road. Route 180 headed east and merged with I-20. From there, it was a straight shot south on I-35 all the way to Waco, Texas. It doesn’t sound like much, but it was a long drive, over two hours.

  Most drives in Texas are long drives. It takes about twelve hours to cross the state. That’s with no rest stops. About 740 miles. Do you know how long it takes to drive the highway across the middle of New Jersey? Forty-five minutes. About forty miles. Don’t believe me? Look it up.

  Of course, the speed limit in some parts of Texas is over eighty miles per hour. And forget about driving the speed limit. If you drive the speed limit in Texas, the other cars will be all over your back bumper like cheese on macaroni. Dr. McDonald liked driving fast, and now he had a car that liked it just as much as he did.

  Pep pulled out her notepad to work on the latest cipher. She felt a renewed urgency now. Somebody was out to get them. Her brother’s skills were effective, but they weren’t enough. She would have to use her wits to survive. Solving the cipher could be the key.

  While their parents were flipping around the radio stations in the front seat, Pep took the letters QBUXPOXKDBO and did just about everything she could do to crack the code. She looked at the letters backward. Upside-down. Sideways.

  QBUXPOXKDBO

  “Oh man!” Coke said as he looked over her shoulder. “That looks impossible.”

  “You’re intimidated by the Q and the Xs,” Pep told him. “It doesn’t matter what the letters are. They just represent other letters. Let�
�s break it down. Eleven letters. This is probably two words, maybe three.”

  “So?”

  “The only letters that appear twice are the two Xs and two Bs, see?” she continued. “So they very possibly represent E and A.”

  “Why do you say that?” Coke asked.

  “Because E and A are two of the most commonly used letters,” Pep replied.

  She studied the cipher for a long time, occasionally furrowing her brow or wrinkling up her nose as she worked on it silently.

  “I can almost see the wheels turning in your head,” Coke said as he watched her.

  Pep stopped for a moment.

  “That gives me an idea!” she said as she turned to a clean page in her notepad and drew a circle. “This could be a shift cipher.”

  “Shift cipher?” her brother asked. “What does that mean?”

  Pep didn’t bother answering. Instead, she wrote the letters of the alphabet around the circle, going clockwise.

  “You shift all the letters of the alphabet by a fixed amount,” Pep explained. “Back in Roman times, that’s what Julius Caesar did to keep his messages secret.”

  “How can you possibly know that?” Coke asked his sister.

  “I know some stuff, and you know some stuff,” Pep replied. “Look. Let’s say the two Bs are actually Es. That would mean that all the letters have been shifted counterclockwise by two. And if that’s true, the two Xs are As.”

  Pep wrote the cipher out again, with the new letters. . . .

  QEUAPOAKDEO

  “That doesn’t help much,” Coke remarked.

  “No,” Pep said, “but it might if we shift all the letters counterclockwise by two.”

  With that logic, the Q became a T, the U became an X, and the P became an S. Pep wrote them down.

  “Texas!” Coke said. “QBUXP is Texas!”

  “And OXKDBO is . . .,” Pep said as she tackled the rest of the letters one at a time, “R-A-N-G-E-R! Texas Ranger! That’s a baseball team, right?”

  “It’s also a law enforcement agency,” Coke told her. “They investigate crime and stuff. But what does that have to do with the other clues we got—the piece of the Blarney Stone, or Hub City, or anything?”

  “Beats me,” Pep admitted glumly. “Can’t help you there.”

  Dutifully, she wrote out the clues they had so far:

  1. I WILL MEET YOU IN LLANO ESTACADO

  2. A PIECE OF THE BLARNEY STONE

  3. HUB CITY

  4. TEXAS RANGER

  The Ferrari approached the outskirts of Waco. The city is on the Brazos River and was first settled by the Huaco Indians. You would not call it a small town. The population is over 124,000.

  “Did you know that Dr Pepper was invented in Waco in 1885?” Mrs. McDonald reported from the front seat.

  “Oh no,” Coke grumbled. “Please don’t tell me there’s a Dr Pepper Museum.”

  “There’s a Dr Pepper Museum,” his mother replied.

  “I told you not to tell me that.”

  “If we had a third child, we would have named her Pepper,” Dr. McDonald chimed in from the driver’s seat.

  “What if she was a boy?” Pep asked.

  “We would have named him Pepper,” Dr. McDonald replied. “Boys can be called Pepper. There used to be a baseball player on the St. Louis Cardinals named Pepper Martin.”

  Just northwest of the city, he pulled off the interstate and drove a few short miles until he reached a parking lot for something called the Waco Mammoth Site.

  “What is this?” Pep asked.

  “You’ll find out,” Mrs. McDonald said, knowing full well that if she told the twins what it was, they would come up with every possible reason not to get out of the car.

  The Waco Mammoth Site proved to be fascinating for everyone. In 1978, at this spot on the Bosque River, two men stumbled upon a large bone sticking out of a ravine. It turned out to be part of the skeleton of a 68,000-year-old mammoth. Not only that, but fifteen other mammoths were scattered under the earth at the same location.

  A lost world had been discovered. Soon, people started coming from all over to see the partly dug-up bones. The site was turned into a tourist attraction, complete with a scenic trail, a welcome center, and the inevitable gift shop.

  While their parents waited in line for the guided tour, Coke and Pep scampered ahead onto the suspended walkway over the mammoth bones.

  “Think of it,” Coke said as he leaned over the rail to peer at the tusks and bones below. “They all died right here, at the same time. They probably drowned in a flash flood or something.”

  “It’s kinda gross,” Pep said. “I mean, what if those bones were human bones?”

  “They weren’t humans,” her brother replied. “So it’s not gross.”

  Old people are forced to confront their mortality on a daily basis. Children, for the most part, don’t have to. Death is so far away. You have your whole lifetime ahead of you.

  For children like Coke and Pepsi McDonald, however, it was a different story. In the past few weeks, they had been tortured with extreme cold, heat, noise, electricity, and fire. They had jumped off a cliff. They had been attacked with everything from motorcycles to bowling balls. And yet they were still alive.

  “I wouldn’t want to die like those mammoths,” Pep said solemnly as she looked down at the large bones.

  At that moment, a trapdoor opened in the walkway and the twins tumbled into the darkness of the boneyard below.

  Chapter 21

  THANKS FOR NOTHING

  “How would you like to die?” asked a voice in the dark.

  Pep went to scream, but a hand came up to cover her mouth before she got a sound out.

  Coke struggled to his feet, only to be grabbed from behind by powerful arms.

  “Shhhhhhhh!” a voice said. “It’s us.”

  The twins turned around to see who had grabbed them.

  “Bones!”

  “Mya!”

  The pair were dressed in tan uniforms with name tags that said ARCHAEOLOGIST, WACO MAMMOTH SITE.

  “What are you doing here?” the twins asked simultaneously.

  “We needed to speak with you,” Mya told them.

  “We have reason to believe that your lives are in danger once again,” said Bones.

  “Gee, ya think?” Coke said sarcastically. “Yesterday somebody dropped a dead cow on my head. And then I was attacked with motorcycles and bowling balls.”

  “Who’s after us now?” Pep asked.

  “I’m sorry to say it’s Dr. Warsaw again,” Bones replied.

  “That’s impossible,” Coke said. “We saw him in Hot Springs. He was a wreck. He tried to kill us in the vapor cabinets, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He had some kind of a mental breakdown right in front of us.”

  “It’s not Dr. Warsaw himself that we’re worried about,” Mya said. “We think he may have created a clone.”

  “What?!?” Coke said. “How is that possible? I thought human cloning was years away.”

  “It was years away,” Bones told him. “But that was years ago when they said it was years away. Now those years have passed. It’s now. And it’s possible.”

  “You mean to say that now there are two Dr. Warsaws?” asked Pep.

  “We don’t have proof,” Mya said, “only our suspicions. We’ve heard rumors.”

  Coke kicked at the dirt, nearly breaking his foot on a mammoth tusk.

  “Well, this is just great,” he said disgustedly. “That doubles the chances that he’s going to get us.”

  Pep could see her brother’s emotions were getting the best of him. That wasn’t a good thing. He would be useless in an emergency if he couldn’t control himself.

  “We’ve been getting these secret messages,” Pep said, trying to change the subject. “Hub City . . . Texas Ranger . . . a piece of the Blarney Stone. Do you know who is sending them?”

  “No,” Mya said. “But I’ll look into it.”

 
“Are you two good for anything?” Coke spat. “All you ever do is sneak around with your funny disguises and pop up out of nowhere to scare the crap out of us. Then you bring us bad news. You never help us.”

  Bones took a step back. He wasn’t used to being talked to that way.

  “Coke, stop,” Pep said.

  “Need I remind you that we were the ones who saved your lives when you had to jump off the cliff in California?” Bones said calmly. “And we spent our annual budget to get you a Frisbee grenade, which you threw into a swimming pool.”

  “My sister used it to knock the gun out of Evil Elvis’s hand!” Coke said. “It ricocheted into the swimming pool!”

  Coke was furious. It looked as though he was going to throw a punch at Bones, but Mya stepped between them.

  “Let’s not argue, guys,” she said. “We’re sincerely trying to help you. Here, I brought you a little present.”

  She took something out of her pocket and handed it to Coke. It was a refrigerator magnet in the shape of Texas. He looked at it carefully.

  “Is it a camera?” he asked. “Where’s the lens?”

  “It’s not a camera,” Mya said. “You put it on your refrigerator.”

  “And it explodes?” Coke asked hopefully. “Why would I want to blow up a refrigerator?”

  “It doesn’t explode,” Mya told him.

  “Then how will it save my life?” Coke asked.

  “It won’t save your life,” Mya explained. “It will make your refrigerator look nice.”

  Coke shook his head and gave the magnet to Pep so she could add it to her collection.

  “Just leave us alone, okay?” he said to Mya and Bones. “We don’t need your help anymore.”

  Chapter 22

  BREAKING AND ENTERING

  “What’s eating you?” Dr. McDonald asked as Coke climbed into the car with a scowl on his face.

  “Nothin’.”

  “Didn’t you kids find those mammoths to be fascinating?” their mother asked. “I got a lot of material for Amazing but True.”

  Coke and Pep grunted. Their parents glanced at each other and rolled their eyes.