The Candymakers and the Great Chocolate Chase

  AJ pulled off the road into a rest stop. “Anyone need to use the restroom?” he asked.

  “Isn’t the point of having an RV so that we don’t have to use public bathrooms?” Philip asked.

  “I was just kidding,” AJ said. “This is the dead-drop location.”

  “Really?” Miles said with interest. “Such a public place?”

  “Not here. We’re headed into the woods across the street. Now, here are the rules. Rule number one—you wait here. Actually, that’s the only rule.”

  Miles threw up his arms. “Seriously? You bring us this close to a real spy mission and we have to watch out a window?”

  AJ nodded. “Trust me, a dead drop is not very exciting. We leave the package, and tomorrow another spy comes to pick it up. That’s all there is to it. Normally I’d want to wait to verify the pickup, but because of someone’s need to be crowned the most talented kid in the nation, it works best to do it this way so we don’t need to backtrack.”

  Philip held up both hands. “Hey, it’s not my fault I’m crazy gifted.”

  Miles rolled his eyes. “You got part of that right.”

  Birdhouse under her arm, Daisy climbed out of the booth and over to the lab. AJ groaned. “We’re only going to be here for probably a half hour or so. Do you really need to start that up again?”

  “That’s enough time for one more pair,” she said, flipping the switch. “Why, you afraid that once we confirm the truth, you’ll have to start being nicer to me?”

  “I’m plenty nice to you,” AJ said, snatching the birdhouse. “Now let’s go before I pull your hair or hide your toothbrush.”

  “Is that what you think siblings do?” Philip asked. “As the only one here who actually has one, I can tell you Andrew has never pulled my hair.” He paused and added, “He did bite me once.”

  “Stay out of trouble,” AJ warned them as he left the RV with Daisy on his heels. She knew Miles and Logan were disappointed not to go, but AJ was right. Just bringing them along this far was already breaking ten different rules. She turned around once they got to the other side of the street and saw the boys watching from the window. She nearly lifted her hand to wave but stopped herself. Even though they were a day early for the drop, spies didn’t wave to their friends on a mission.

  AJ used his GPS to lead them into the thick trees and to the drop-off point. They passed a few other people on the trails, either hiking or jogging. Daisy had expected the coordinates to be deep in the woods, but AJ stopped after only a few minutes. He pointed to a tree with a lot of low branches, perfect for tucking the birdhouse in securely. He adjusted some leaves to cover as much of it as possible.

  “Well, that’s that, then,” he said.

  “Yup,” Daisy said. “May whatever’s in there finally reach its destination on the road of life.”

  “Very poetic of you,” AJ said. He stepped back to snap a picture of the birdhouse’s position in the tree, and a wider photo showing the whole tree. It was always wise to have proof of a drop. He counted out ten paces, then drew a red slash mark on the side of a birch tree.

  When they returned to the RV, they found the boys outside, sitting on top of a picnic table in front of the rest stop. “Aurora needed some fresh air,” Miles explained, pointing to the cat, currently brushing up against a nearby tree trunk.

  AJ raised his eyebrows. “Aurora did, or you did?”

  “Well, you have to admit, it’s not normal for growing boys to be cooped up inside so much,” Miles pointed out. “It’s summer, after all. Can we just get some fresh air for a little while?”

  Daisy checked her watch. “Or for the next six hours and nineteen minutes until the tests are done?”

  “I’m thinking more in the fifteen-minute range,” AJ said.

  “Plenty of time for snacks, then,” Logan said. He and Philip went to check out the vending machines along the outside wall of the rest area while Miles entertained Daisy and AJ by describing the people who passed by.

  He pointed at a man in a business suit who was getting out of his car. “That guy’s on his way to closing a big business deal. But he ate a bad burrito at a drive-through on his way to the meeting and doesn’t want to use the bathroom at the office.”

  “Fascinating!” Daisy said. “What about her?” She pointed at a middle-aged woman in a purple sweat suit walking a fluffy white dog.

  “She’s a professional dog walker,” Miles replied. “She secretly wants to keep this dog because she thinks if she dyes it purple, they will be matching.”

  “And them?” AJ asked, tilting his head toward two college-age boys emerging from the woods across the street. They wore hiking boots and backpacks and high-fived as they headed toward the parking area.

  “That’s easy,” Miles said. “They’re geocachers. Just found a really hard cache and are proud of themselves. Hey! Maybe there really are caches in there!” He scrambled to pull the vid com out of his backpack at his feet. He’d figured out from Arthur’s book how to search your nearby location for caches. In less than a minute he had a list of five, all within two miles! He switched over to the map view and pointed to two green flags that indicated locations in the woods across the street. “Please, please, please, can we try for these two?”

  “Why not,” AJ said. “I’m in a giving mood today.”

  “Yay!” Daisy said, jumping off the table. Miles knew she was more excited about having the extra time for her tests, but he didn’t care.

  “C’mon, guys!” he called out to Philip and Logan. “We’re going geocaching!” He dug around in his backpack some more and pulled out the small yellow plastic compass, a blue swirly marble, a plastic spider ring, and a pencil to sign the logbook. He shoved them all in his front pocket, leaving the candy coupons in the bag in case there wasn’t a candy store nearby. “Let’s go!”

  “You sure you’ve got everything now?” AJ asked, clearly amused. Miles gave a thumbs-up and waited impatiently until Logan and Philip joined them, their arms full of salty snacks, which they passed around.

  Chomping on chips, they headed into the woods. Philip kept swatting at invisible bugs. “How do we know there aren’t bears in here?”

  “We don’t,” Daisy said.

  “Well, that’s comforting,” Philip muttered.

  Logan started whistling. He loved being in the woods. Everything felt so alive, and it reminded him of the Tropical Room at home. Plus he’d never been on a treasure hunt before.

  Miles looked up from his vid com and turned west. “The first one is over this way. It’s supposed to be a small green box.”

  “It’s right there,” AJ said, pointing at the base of a tree.

  “What?” Miles said, twisting his head to see. “We haven’t even started looking!”

  AJ pointed at the ground. “Those two leaves are crushed, those three rocks are piled at an angle not likely to have happened naturally, and there’s a green M&M a foot away.”

  Miles exhaled loudly. “You are banned from geocaching.”

  “Wait till Mom and Dad hear about this,” Daisy said, shaking her head.

  AJ pinched Daisy on the arm. “We are not related! And it’s not my fault I got a perfect score in tracking class.”

  Miles grumbled but pulled out the container anyway. “I’m not claiming this find,” he said. He still hadn’t come up with a name for himself anyway. He snapped off the lid, and Daisy and Logan eagerly bent down to see what was inside. Philip was too busy scratching imaginary bites on his shin.

  “Hey, Philip,” Daisy said, reaching in. “This was meant for you.” She handed him an individually wrapped bug-repellent wipe. He ripped it open and rubbed it up and down his legs and arms.

  “And this is for you, Miles,” Logan said, digging under the logbook to pull out an eraser in the shape of a blue whale. “It’ll be like Whaley is with us after all.”

  Miles grinned. “This is what I love about caching. You hope that what you put in will be just what someone finding it will ne
ed.”

  “Not sure anyone needs a Whaley eraser,” Philip said.

  “You’re just jealous,” Miles joked, sticking Whaley in his pocket and pulling out the swag he’d loaded. He placed the compass and the ring in the box, sealed it back up, and hid it just like he’d found it. Or rather, like AJ had found it. Miles was still a little bitter about that.

  “On to the next!” he said, brushing off the leaves from his legs. “You can trail behind,” he told AJ. The compass built into the GPS said the next cache was only a tenth of a mile away, the minimum distance allowed between caches.

  “What are we looking for this time?” Logan asked.

  “The description says it’s a handmade container, so I guess it could be anything.” He scrolled down the recent logs, careful to watch where he was going. Arthur had drummed into his head the importance of not looking down at your device while walking. You could walk off a bridge that way. “Hmm, it doesn’t look like it’s been found in a while. It might not be here anymore.”

  Miles stopped a few minutes later. “Okay, it’s somewhere within a twenty-foot circle from here. The name of the cache is “Look Up,” so I’m guessing that means it’s hanging from a branch.”

  Daisy started to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Miles asked. “Has AJ found it already?”

  She shook her head. “You’re almost right on top of our drop!”

  Miles and Logan checked out a few of the closest trees, spotting the birdhouse easily. “You guys didn’t do such a great job hiding it,” Philip said.

  AJ stepped closer. “I thought it was covered better than that.” He pushed a few leaves away and lifted the birdhouse out of the nook made by the branches. “Whoa, look!” He showed it to Daisy, who gasped as she lifted off the chimney, which had been put back on upside down. She hadn’t even known it opened!

  She hurried over to check the signpost and then ran back. “If they came for it already, they didn’t make the X!”

  AJ pulled out his vid com and fired off a message. If the spies had picked it up early, they’d have sent word to headquarters. They also would have taken the container with them—or at least that’s the way it usually worked. You didn’t leave any evidence behind.

  Daisy shook the birdhouse, turning it over in her hands. She heard the same clink as the contents bounced against the sides, so that was a relief.

  AJ’s vid com beeped. He frowned as he read the message. “Nobody has been sent to the area yet.”

  “Maybe a really fat owl landed on it,” Miles suggested. “When the bird couldn’t get inside, it broke the chimney in frustration?”

  “Stranger things have happened,” Daisy said, trying to reach her fingers into the chimney hole. “I don’t think we need to worry, AJ. Whatever was in here is still here. Got it!” She pulled her hand out to reveal a tiny green turtle with a mask across its face. What looked like an engraved dog tag hung from a chain attached to its foot. “What the—?”

  “That’s a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle!” Miles exclaimed.

  Logan nodded and grinned. “It sure is!”

  “It’s a what?” Daisy asked.

  “Come on,” Philip said, “even I’ve heard of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and I don’t get out much. You never saw the cartoons? Movies? Action figures?”

  Daisy shook her head.

  “Turtles trained in the Japanese art of ninjutsu?” Miles added, crouching in what he hoped looked like an intimidating ninja-warrior pose.

  Daisy turned to AJ, dangling the object from her finger. “To think, this strange thing was in there the whole time.” She brought the dog tag closer to read it. All it had on it was a string of numbers.

  AJ shook his head, his tan skin going pale. “No, it wasn’t.”

  Daisy looked up from the tag. “What do you mean?”

  “The birdhouse had a microdot camera in it. It didn’t have a dog tag and a cartoon character in it.”

  “Why would you know what’s inside but Daisy doesn’t?” Philip asked. He didn’t say it in a mean way; he was truly curious.

  “If you must know, it’s safer if only one of us has that information. Spy protocol.”

  “So why is this toy in here now?” Daisy asked. Right as the words came out, she knew the answer. She wheeled around to face Miles. “Those guys really were geocachers, weren’t they? And they thought this was the cache! They took our camera and left this behind!”

  Miles nodded. “Either them or someone else.”

  “Time to use those famous tracking skills, right, AJ?” Philip asked.

  But AJ was already on their trail. Flattened grass, footprints in dirt, another M&M. Bent branches revealed their heights, but he’d already seen what they looked like, so he didn’t need those kinds of clues. It frustrated him to no end that he couldn’t use his sense of smell. They might have eaten something or been wearing some strong deodorant or cologne or bug spray that he could follow. He glanced at Daisy, who put her finger on her own nose and shook her head. Okay, he felt better that his sense of smell wouldn’t have helped there. The trail led them back to the paved path, where it went cold.

  AJ turned to Miles. “So tell me, how do we find who broke into our dead drop?”

  Miles froze for a minute. AJ had never asked him for advice. He wished he’d read more of Arthur’s book. He tried to think of the timeline of events. “Okay. We’ll go back to the first cache and check the logbook. Then we’ll know their caching identity. I think it’s safe to assume that if someone was caching in the woods, they would have gone for both caches listed there. Then what we can do is hide our own cache—we can use the fake poop as a container—get it on the official list and hope the same people come back to find it and leave the camera thingy. A lot of people can’t resist being the first to find a new cache. You usually get a really good prize in it. We can make sure to put something really great in there, so they’ll for sure have to leave something. Hopefully the camera.”

  “That sounds complicated,” AJ said. “Too many loose ends, like what if someone else finds the new cache first? Simplify.”

  Miles thought again. “We go back to the first cache, get their names from the logbook, contact them, and get the camera back by using your good looks, charm, and gentle persuasion?”

  AJ nodded. “Much better.”

  But when they pulled out the logbook, they saw that the last cachers had only written initials—BM & CB—and the date. “This isn’t going to help us much,” Miles warned. “Usually people write the nicknames they’re listed under in the geocaching registry.” He typed the initials into the search box of registered cachers. As he’d expected, nothing came up. “Our only other hope is that they went online to log their find,” he said, packing the box up and tossing the rocks back on top. He showed them his screen with the listing for the cache. “Once they claim the find, the log will appear here. It could show up any minute.”

  AJ wanted to be nearby on the off chance the cachers returned, so they headed back to the RV to plan their next step. Miles kept refreshing the page to see if a new listing popped up, but there was nothing yet.

  Daisy began to pace in the parking lot, nervously turning the plastic turtle over and over in her hands. Logan and Miles exchanged a worried look. They’d never seen her like this. She was usually the calm-under-pressure type. The fact that she hadn’t rushed inside to check her test results meant this was really serious. “Are you going to be okay?” Logan asked.

  “That camera could have really sensitive information on it,” Daisy said. “We could be in really big trouble.”

  “What is a microdot camera, anyway?” Philip asked.

  “That’s classified,” AJ said, out of habit.

  “If we’re a team here, we should know what we’re looking for,” Miles pointed out.

  “Oh, fine,” AJ said, barely able to believe it had come to this. He couldn’t stand the thought that his perfect track record of successful missions was going to be derailed
by some random guys trying to find trinkets hidden in the woods. “Spies use these special cameras to take a picture of a large amount of information,” he explained. “The image is then shrunk down to the size of a tiny dot, which would need to be put under a microscope to read. You could hide detailed instructions or secret maps in a period at the end of a sentence. No one would know a microdot was there unless they knew to look for it.”

  “But these guys aren’t going to know what they have,” Logan said. “They’ll probably just think it’s a toy.”

  “Maybe,” AJ said. “But we still need to get it back, since we don’t know what’s stored in that camera right now. And preferably before the real spies show up to collect it. So far all we know about the people who took it is their initials. It’s something, but not a lot to go on.”

  Daisy held up the turtle. “We know they like turtles.”

  “Or that they don’t like turtles,” Logan pointed out, “so when they found that one in another cache, they decided to pass it on the first chance they got.”

  “Wait a minute,” Miles said. “Let me see that.” He snatched the turtle from Daisy. “I think this is a travel bug! Arthur told me about these. Each tag has a number on it that you use to track the bug’s progress from cache to cache. Some of them wind up on the other side of the world!”

  AJ took it from him and held it up. “If we enter in this number, will it tell us who had it last?”

  “I think so!” Miles said. AJ read off the numbers while Miles typed them in. A few seconds later a page popped up:

  MUTANT NINJA TURTLE MADNESS!

  GET THIS BUG TO ANY TOWN WITH THE NAME TURTLE IN IT!

  What followed next was a map of where the travel bug started and a description of its mission. So far it had gone three hundred miles and been in sixteen different caches, none of them in a town called Turtle. Miles scrolled down with his finger until he found the most recent entry. The nickname of the last person to have found the travel bug was TwoDudesCaching, who reported taking it from a cache a week prior. He clicked on the name, and a profile popped up. Underneath a cartoon rendering of a twenty-something guy, it said, Brennan McCabe, geocaching for five years. Personal motto: Not all who wander are lost. Miles jabbed at the screen and handed it to AJ. “That’s our guy! I don’t know how you’ll find him, though. He could be anywhere by now.”