They were leaving! Homer ran to the screen. “Wait!” he cried. “That’s my map!”
Torch stopped laughing. “Well, well,” she said with a snort. “Look who’s gone to the dark side. And to think His Lordship had so much confidence in you. When the membership finds out you’re helping FOUND, you’ll be cast out.”
Gertrude grabbed the book from Torch and waved it at the camera. “This is my revenge, little girl. You stole all those harmonic crystals from me. Did you think I’d forgive you?”
“Give our regards to the losers at L.O.S.T.,” Torch said. Then the screen went black.
Lorelei sat back in her throne and folded her arms behind her head. She was oddly quiet for someone who’d just been double-crossed. Homer, on the other hand, wanted to shake her for making such a huge mistake.
“Why aren’t you freaking out?” he cried.
Lorelei sighed. “Homer, calm down.”
But how could he calm down? His dream was sailing away. His promise to his uncle would never be fulfilled. “We’ve got to stop them.” He grabbed Dog’s leash and headed toward the stairs.
“But, Homer—”
“This is all your fault, Lorelei. That map was safe under my bed, and now Gertrude and Torch have it.” With a grunt, he pushed Dog’s rump up the first two steps. Hercules grabbed his first-aid kit and started toward the stairs.
“They don’t have it,” Lorelei called.
Dog grunted. “What do you mean, they don’t have it? I saw it. They…” Homer stopped pushing and paused for a minute. Lorelei was many things, but she wasn’t stupid. She’d proven her ability to outsmart people time and time again. He whipped around. “You gave them a fake book.”
She nodded.
“Oh, it’s a ruse,” Hercules said. “That’s quite brilliant.”
“I can’t believe you thought I’d hand over the map,” Lorelei said. “How could you think I’d do something like that? It was so easy to fool them. I figured they’ve never read a copy of Rare Reptiles I Caught and Stuffed. I mean, who has? It’s such a totally boring book. So I got a dusty copy from the library, and I took a map, cut it into bits, and pasted it inside.”
“What map?” Homer asked.
“Something I found in Madame’s things. A map to some place called the Lost Temple of the Reptile King.”
“That’s in the middle of the jungle,” Homer said.
“Uh-huh. That should keep them busy for a while.” She frowned. “I do hate ruining library books, though. I’ll be sure to replace it with a nice new book.”
Homer was so relieved he wanted to hug Lorelei, but of course he didn’t, because ex-friends don’t get hugs.
Lorelei opened the seat to her throne and took out a metal box. The box was sealed in airtight plastic. As soon as she ripped off the plastic and opened the lid, Dog went nuts. He ran in a circle, sniffing the air as if a rabbit had appeared on the scene. He pressed his nose into the box, sniffed some more, his tail wagging. Lorelei set the box on the lair’s floor. Dog flipped onto his back and rolled against the box, spreading its luscious scent all over himself. Thanks to Dog, Homer knew without a doubt that what Lorelei held was real.
“So, shall we put the map together and get started on our quest?”
“Yes!” Hercules and Homer said.
Some people are good at jigsaw puzzles. They buy those fat boxes, the ones with more than twenty thousand pieces. Days drift by, maybe weeks, as the puzzle takes shape. When it’s done, they frame the puzzle and put it on the wall so whenever a guest comes over, they can say, “Look at that puzzle. It took two whole years. Aren’t you impressed?”
Other people, however, prefer puzzles with, say, ten or twenty pieces at most, because after a few minutes of puzzling, boredom sets in and the swimming pool calls, or that shady spot beneath the willow tree, or the movie theater. Lorelei was that kind of person.
“Why is this taking so long?” she complained for the hundredth time. “This is soooo boring.”
Homer, Hercules, and Lorelei lay on their stomachs on a pink carpet. They had cut out all the map pieces from the reptile book and had spread them out.
“Boring?” Homer held one of the squares. Like most of the other pieces, it was plain white with little black dots sprinkled in no apparent order. A bunch of pieces had words on them. Hercules was working on those. “This is Rumpold Smeller’s map, the most important map in pirating history, and you say it’s boring?”
“The map isn’t boring. But putting it together is. Can’t you go faster?”
“It’s not that easy,” Homer grumbled.
A spray of water hit Homer. Speckles the whale shark swam along the edge of the pool. Luckily the water hadn’t hit the map pieces—though the map had already been inside the belly of a mutant tortoise, so a little water probably wouldn’t hurt it.
“Hey!” Homer cried again as another spray of water hit his face. The whale shark’s eye peeked over the pool’s edge. “I think he’s doing that on purpose.”
“He wants to play,” Lorelei explained. She stomped over to a toy chest and grabbed a red beach ball. “Fetch,” she called as she tossed the ball into the pool. Speckles swam after it and caught it in his enormous mouth. Then he swam back to the side of the pool and spat out the ball at Lorelei. Dog, who’d kept a cautious distance between himself and the lair’s pool, took a few wary steps forward. “Fetch,” Lorelei called again as she threw the ball. As the shark went after it, Dog wagged his tail.
While it was odd, indeed, that a whale shark wanted to play fetch, Homer had only one thing on his mind. “Lorelei, will you please stop making so much noise? We’re trying to concentrate.”
In truth, Lorelei wasn’t the source of Homer’s frustration. The map was proving to be very confusing. There were no lines indicating mountains or rivers or roads. But there was a date in the bottom corner and a little directional key in the upper corner. Other than the words, everything else was just black dots.
Hercules sat up. “I’ve pieced the words together.”
“What does it say?” Lorelei asked as she ran over.
Hercules read:
Flammae geminate supra et infra
Speculum infinitum inter eas
In oculis caelestibus stellae lucent
Post salivam quod quaeritis latet
“Huh?” Lorelei and Homer said.
“It’s Latin.”
“Can you translate?” Homer asked.
“Sure. I’m the spelling bee champion of the world. But it might take a while.” He began to scribble in a spiral notebook.
Lorelei sighed and stomped back to the side of the pool, where she grabbed the red ball and returned to her game of whale shark fetch. Homer furrowed his brow and glared at her. “We’ve got serious business over here, Lorelei. We could use your help figuring this out.”
“You’re the map reader,” she said. A spray of water hit Homer’s sleeve as Speckles spat out the ball.
I’m the map reader, Homer thought. And so he was. That’s why it would be very difficult for him to admit that this map didn’t make sense.
Hercules stared at the Latin words, deep in thought, mumbling to himself. Homer, on the other hand, was a bit worried about how close Dog was standing to the edge of the pool. “That shark’s got a really big mouth,” he said to Lorelei. “Aren’t you afraid he might eat you?”
“Speckles would never eat me,” Lorelei said. “He doesn’t eat mammals. Fetch!”
As she threw the ball into the pool, Dog jumped in after it. He paddled up to the ball and sank his teeth into the red plastic. That’s when Speckles opened his enormous mouth. Dog didn’t stand a chance. Even if Dog had been an athletic sort of creature, even if he’d had flippers and a mermaid tail, he would not have been able to escape the suction of that mouth. In an instant, Dog and the red ball disappeared into the black hole. The whale shark’s mouth snapped close.
“Bad Speckles!” Lorelei cried.
Homer’s heart got confused for a momen
t and tripled its beat. No words came. Pure agony shot through his body like a bolt of lightning. What had just happened? Had his beloved dog been eaten by a shark? No survival training could have prepared Homer for this. The only word he managed to utter was “Dog?”
Lorelei, however, was quick to react. She leaped onto the whale shark’s back. “Open up!” she ordered, kneeling on the creature. “Come on, open up!” She rapped her knuckles on his head.
Angry tears filled Homer’s eyes. “He ate Dog!”
“He didn’t eat him,” Lorelei said. “He’s playing hide-and-seek.”
Homer ran to the side of the pool as Lorelei and the shark took a lap. “He ate Dog. I saw him eat Dog!”
“Homer, don’t worry. I have an idea.” Lorelei pointed to the vending machine. “Get a bag of brine shrimp. He can’t resist.”
Homer ran to the machine, got a bag, and ripped it open. Then he knelt at the pool’s edge and held out the bag with a trembling hand. The whale shark swam up and opened his mouth. A spray of spit coated Homer’s face as Dog was ejected. Dog flew through the air, the red ball still in his mouth, and landed right next to Hercules. Hercules looked up from his word puzzle and said, “Oh, hi, Dog.”
Homer tossed the bag of shrimp into the shark’s mouth. Just before the shark submerged with his treat, Lorelei jumped back onto land. Homer threw his arms around Dog. “Are you okay?” “Urrrr.” Dog shook shark spit from his ears. Homer didn’t know whether he should yell at Lorelei or thank her. But that was nothing new.
“Hey, you guys, I’ve got it. Do you want to hear the translation?” Hercules asked. And this is what he read:
Twins of flame above and below
An endless mirror between
In heavenly eyes the stars do shine
Behind saliva hides what you seek
“Saliva?” Lorelei said. “The treasure’s hidden behind saliva? That’s disgusting.” She sat between Homer and Hercules. “So? What does it mean? Where are we going?”
“I’m not sure,” Homer said, his heart settling back to its normal rhythm.
“What do you mean, you’re not sure?” She folded her arms. “You’re supposed to be a map expert.”
“The only thing I can figure out is that it’s a celestial map. That makes sense, since Rumpold spent so much time at sea and he’d navigate using the stars.”
“Can you read a celestial map?” Hercules asked.
This was no time to be embarrassed. He had to admit the truth. “No. I can’t read it. We’re going to need help. But I know just the place to go.”
It was called Soupwater Prison for good reason. From a distance, the swamp that surrounded the concrete fortress looked like pea soup. Up close, the water had a thick, goopy consistency with mysterious lumps floating at the surface. Every so often, one of the lumps moved on its own accord.
“Disgusting,” Madame la Directeur hissed between clenched teeth. Waist-deep in the swamp, she grabbed an overhanging tree branch for balance. A water snake slithered past, leaving a fleeting pattern in the muck. Madame took a deep breath and pushed forward.
That morning, while she was sitting in the prison cafeteria, there’d been a press conference on the prison television. A pink-haired girl had told the world that she possessed an important treasure map. And the girl had said, “If you want your map, Homer, you know where to find me.” A malevolent laugh had risen in Madame’s throat. The Pudding kid wouldn’t be able to ignore the invitation. Revenge was close at hand.
The escape had been so easy. Whoever had designed the prison’s security system had ignored an obvious fact—that the best way to hide is to simply blend in.
Rumpold Smeller the Pirate often used this technique, which is known as camouflage. While searching foreign ports for treasure, he would leave his pirate clothing on his ship and wear whatever the locals wore, even if that meant donning a grass skirt and coconut-husk shirt. When traversing a forest, he’d stick branches into his hat. And while his competitors preferred to sail their pirate ships right up to their victims’ ships and jump on board, Rumpold covered himself in seaweed and swam to his target. This cunning ploy was always successful, for no captain ever pointed to the water and hollered, “All men to battle stations! A pile of seaweed is coming our way!”
While working in the prison kitchen, Madame noticed that the biscuit-mix bags were blue and white, just like the prison pajamas. Biscuits were a staple of the Soupwater diet. The tasteless lumps of cooked dough were fed to inmates at every meal. Breakfast biscuits were drizzled with cold gravy. Lunch biscuits had a slab of ham shoved into the middle. Dinner biscuits came with an extra dollop of cold gravy. The prison warden knew that if people suddenly stopped committing crimes and Soupwater Prison was no longer necessary, he could easily turn it into a biscuit factory.
Hundreds of biscuit-mix bags were emptied each week and tossed into the garbage bin. The garbage truck collected the bin at precisely 3:00 p.m., when the security gates opened. So Madame la Directeur, wearing her blue-and-white prison pajamas, decided to simply blend in.
Once the garbage truck had left the prison yard and was headed over a bridge, Madame jumped. The truck’s engine masked the sound of her splash as she landed in goopy swamp water. She spat out a pollywog and wiped a few more from her face. “Ewww,” she said with a shudder. The prison alarm hadn’t yet sounded, but she knew she had no time to waste. She needed to move away from the road as quickly as possible.
Because her wristwatch had been confiscated by the prison warden, Madame had no way to tell how much time had passed before she reached the first signs of human life—a little shack and outhouse. She stepped out of the swamp and sat on a log. After rolling up her soggy pajama bottoms, she gasped. In the old days, when she’d been a member of L.O.S.T., she’d owned a pair of leech-proof socks. They would have come in handy, seeing as her calves were now covered with leeches. Flicking the fat, blood-filled pests onto the ground, she mumbled to herself, “I will never forget this. I’ll show him. He’ll wish he’d never been born.”
A bucket of paint and a paintbrush sat on the shack’s half-painted porch. Whoever had been painting it was probably taking a break. Trying to muster some dignity, Madame tiptoed past the shack and stopped at a clothesline. Stealing was no problem for her. It was a skill she’d honed over the years, and she’d been good at it—until that rotten Homer Pudding kid got in the way. She snatched a pair of jeans and a cotton T-shirt. Then she changed behind a tree. She’d never worn such garish clothing. She missed her pearls, tailored suits, and designer heels. She picked moss from her hair. How long had it been since she’d had her hair washed, trimmed, and styled at the posh Parlor de Beauty? She stared in horror at her ragged fingernails. How long had it been since she’d had them filed and shellacked at the Fingernail Emporium?
A baseball cap lay on the shack’s front stoop. She grabbed it and pulled it over her wet hair.
She knew she might not make it. When the police learned of her escape, she’d be hunted like a fox. Breaking out of prison was a crime that would add years to her sentence. But she had to try. She craved revenge as a leech craves blood.
Dressed as a “normal” person, she walked down a narrow driveway until she came to a dirt road. She glanced down the road, then up the road, wondering which way to go. An engine hummed in the distance. Then a motorcycle appeared on the horizon, churning up a cloud of dirt in its wake. “Well, this is fortunate,” Madame said to herself. She held out her thumb as the cycle approached.
“You want a ride?” the driver asked.
“Yes.”
“Where to?”
Madame la Directeur slid onto the seat behind the driver and wrapped her arms around his waist. “Take me to The City.”
PART FOUR
MAP OF THE
MONTH CLUB
The afternoon was nearly over by the time the L.O.S.T. and FOUND team sped through the lair’s channel in Lorelei’s red speedboat. A push of the remote control opened the
gate, and the boat roared out onto City Lake. Dog sat at the helm, his ears billowing in the wind, as Lorelei thrust the boat into its highest gear. The wake tore across the lake, upsetting a canoe, a paddleboat, and a flock of geese.
They moored the boat at a public dock, then headed for their destination. Dog pranced down the sidewalk, his loose skin undulating with each step. Surely no one could have guessed that he’d recently been swallowed by a whale shark. There was a happy rhythm to his stride. Maybe he was relieved to be out of the lair. Maybe he was simply looking forward to all the fire hydrants. Maybe he was happy because, after rolling all over Rumpold’s map, he’d covered himself with the scent of treasure.
The only member of the team not in attendance was Daisy, who’d stayed back at the lair to work on a nest. “It’s best that way,” Lorelei said. “Rats aren’t very popular around here. City people leave out traps and try to kill them.” Homer didn’t tell her that country people did the same thing.
They turned onto the Boulevard of Destinations. “There it is,” Hercules said as he tucked the spiral notebook under his arm. It would be difficult to miss the Map of the Month Club, for it had a singular unique feature. A giant world globe perched on the roof, providing a vibrant splash of color amid the other, drab buildings.
Fortunately, the map club had no revolving door, just a regular door with a regular knob that opened into a regular sort of lobby—except that entire continents were painted on the floor and a giant compass stood on a pedestal in the center of the room. A lady with cat-eye glasses sat behind an information desk.
“May I help you?” she asked as she chewed the end of a pen.
“Go on,” Lorelei whispered, shoving Homer toward the desk.
Homer stuck his hands in his pockets because he thought that would hide his nervousness, even though jitters ran up and down his legs. Because he didn’t want the true identity of the map to be revealed, this was going to be tricky. “Uh, hello. I have a map, and I was wondering if I could get some help reading it. It’s for a… a… a school paper.”