by Wendy Mass
He grinned and pointed up.
She craned her neck back to see past all the tall trees. “Are you trying to show me a constellation?” she asked. “I couldn’t tell you the difference between Orion’s Belt and Andromeda even if I wanted to.”
“Well, one of those is a galaxy,” he said, an edge of impatience in his voice. “And the other is a constellation not visible in this part of the world in the summer. Don’t you remember when we were kids and we went along on that mission with your parents to the Native American reservation?”
Daisy looked back at him, shaking her head.
“You’re sure? Remember the chief taught us how to find our location on the planet if we were ever lost?”
“Turn on the GPS?” she suggested.
He shook his head. “Find the North Star.”
Try as she might, no memory of stargazing with a Native American chief came back to her. “How old was I when this supposedly went down?”
He hesitated for a few seconds (a few seconds too long, which always made her suspicious). “You were only two or three. So of course you were too young to remember. Sorry.”
A little chill went through her, and she pulled her sweatshirt tighter around her. “Are we here to talk about the stars or to pick up a package?”
“Package,” he said firmly. “Which is what I was trying to show you.” He pointed again at the tree. This time she lowered her gaze from the stars to the treetop until she spotted it, sitting about forty feet above their heads.
“A birdhouse?” she asked, taking a step back to see better. It looked like a more professional version of the ones she’d had to make in arts and crafts.
“Watch out,” AJ called, grabbing her. “You almost stepped in that.”
Daisy looked down. A pile of bear poop lay inches away from her foot. “Yuck, thanks.”
“Yes, it’s a birdhouse,” AJ said. “But take my word for it—yesterday that branch was empty.”
“So you’re telling me the package we’ve been waiting two weeks for, the supersecret information that we’re getting paid big bucks to deliver to the next dead drop, is stuck up in what might be the tallest tree I’ve ever seen?”
He nodded. “Sure looks that way.”
“Fab.” Daisy tossed her backpack to AJ. “Hold this while I climb.” She kicked off her sneakers and approached the tree. The branches didn’t begin until at least twenty feet above the ground, so she’d have to shinny up to that point. Unfortunately, the trunk was so wide she’d never be able to wrap her legs around it. She ran her fingers over the bark, trying to decide if it was worth using up her spy wax to try to make rungs that she could climb like a ladder. Or maybe her laser could melt away chunks of the bark to create tiny finger- and toeholds. That would take hours, though, and it would be bright. She was about to ask AJ if he had anything in his sack that would help, when she encountered something smooth under her palm. She stepped back and peered at the area more closely. Something was wound around the tree! At first she felt a pang of fear—poison ivy winds around tree trunks! But that kind of poison ivy rope was fuzzy, and this was smooth. Well, if it was poison ivy, the damage was already done, so she gave a little tug. The tree-colored rope easily pulled away from the trunk.
“AJ! There’s a rope! I think it connects to the box like a pulley!” She looked over at AJ excitedly. He had his back to her, and his shoulders were heaving.
He was laughing!
She put her hands on her hips. “Let me guess, Aaron Jacob Whatever-Your-Real-Last-Name-Is, you knew there was a rope.”
AJ turned around, wiping a tear from his eye. “I just wanted to see how committed you are to your job. You were really going to climb this gigantic tree in the pitch-dark? Without a harness?”
Daisy puffed out her cheeks. “I was still working on a plan, if you must know. But c’mon, let’s get to it. I want to go home.”
AJ tipped his baseball cap at her. “My hat is off to your bravery, Oopsa Daisy Dinkleman.”
“Don’t call me Oopsa! Or Dinkleman.” But truth be told, she was starting not to mind his big-brother-like teasing as much as she used to.
They gently pulled on the rope until the birdhouse began to tip forward off the branch. Then they slid the rope through their hands. The birdhouse started to descend, bumping occasionally into the trunk, until it landed safely in AJ’s hands. He quickly untied it and set about inspecting it while Daisy pulled the empty rope the rest of the way down. She wound it up in a ball and stuffed it into her backpack.
“The spies who left this for us have a strange sense of humor,” he commented, turning it over and over in his hands. “There’s no way to open this thing.”
Daisy looked closely. Solid wood. No Popsicle sticks and glue here. No opening for a bird to sit in, either. She shook it gently, hearing a faint clink as something bounced off its walls. She knew they couldn’t force it open or slice it with their lasers. Not without risking damage to whatever had been placed inside. “They must have left us a clue.”
AJ turned the birdhouse upside down, but nothing was written on the bottom. When he flipped it back over, Daisy noticed that the chimney wobbled a bit. She reached one pinky inside and slid out a tightly rolled piece of paper covered in jumbled-up letters. She and AJ huddled on the ground and spread it out, careful to stay clear of the gift from the bear.
“A straw wrapper?” Daisy said, for surely that’s what lay before them. But from what Daisy could tell, none of the letters formed any recognizable words. No punctuation, either. “How is this supposed to help us?” she asked.
“It’s a scytale,” AJ replied.
“An Italy?”
“A scytale,” AJ repeated. “It might rhyme with Italy, but it was the Greeks who used scytales to pass secret information back and forth. It’s basically a note written in code. We need to find a stick exactly the right size. Then we roll the paper around the stick, and the letters will line up and form words.”
She rocked back on her heels. “Really? That’s a thing? How come I’ve never heard of it?”
He shrugged. “I do have a few more years of experience than you do, you know.”
“I don’t think they had straw wrappers back in ancient times,” Daisy pointed out.
“I guess our fellow spies didn’t have vellum or papyrus to write on. The point is, if you don’t have the right-size stick, you can’t read it.”
“Then how are we going to read it?”
AJ put his night-vision goggles back on. “We’re going to find the right-size stick.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Three quarters of an inch,” AJ declared, tossing the stick over his shoulder, where it lodged in a bush. “Too thick.”
“You don’t even want to test it? Let me put the paper around it, at least.”
“Be my guest,” AJ replied, reaching for the next stick they’d gathered from the woods. “But we need to beat the sunrise, or your camp is going to go on full alert when they find the lovely Ava Simon missing from her bed.”
“Fine, I trust you,” Daisy said. “Even though you never mentioned your ability to judge the circumference of a stick simply by rolling it through your fingers.”
AJ grinned and tossed the latest stick over his shoulder. “Never had much use for it till now.” He held out his hand, and she placed the next stick in it. “Actually, I have your father to thank for teaching me.”
“My father?” Daisy repeated. She knew that her parents and AJ had spent a lot of time together without her—some of it before she was even born—and she always enjoyed hearing him talk about it. It didn’t make her jealous. Well, maybe a tiny bit.
“Twelve millimeters,” AJ said, handing the stick back. “Too small. We need closer to fourteen millimeters.”
“I think you’re enjoying this a little too much,” Daisy accused, holding out the fourth stick, so thin it was more of a twig, really. It didn’t look any different from the last one. “So you were saying? About my dad?”
“Wait, you make up my names?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “Why, don’t you like them?”
“They’re fine,” she said. “It’s just that I wondered why Grammy let me keep Daisy as my first name on that gig. But that was your decision?”
He nodded, his fingers still judging the twig. “I thought you deserved it.”
She wasn’t sure what he meant by that. It almost sounded like he felt sorry for her, which would drive her crazy.
“Anyway,” he continued before she could dig deeper, “we had to pretend to be master craftsmen at making these dowels that would go up staircases in these fancy houses. So your dad thought it would be more convincing if we could show off this skill. It made us so popular that they practically handed us the documents we’d come for.” AJ held up the twig. “Fourteen millimeters exactly. Perfect.” He picked up the paper and wound it around the twig, careful to line up each edge without overlapping.
Daisy could see the words appear before her, just as he’d promised.
“Oh! I get it now! Whoever wrote this wound the paper around a stick this same size, then wrote the note straight across. Then when you unwind it, it’s impossible to read! I love it!”
“Yeah, it’s pretty cool,” AJ admitted. “Now let’s see what they went to all this trouble to tell us.” He turned his flashlight on at the lowest setting, and they hid the faint light with their bodies. He slowly rotated the stick until the only capital letter appeared in the first spot.
They both excelled at making and breaking codes and ciphers, so Daisy knew that, between the two of them, they would decipher this clue without too much trouble. When the kids in the mansion were growing up, Daisy’s grandmother encouraged them to communicate with each other in code. (Except for the twins, Clarissa and Marissa, who were excused from the exercise, since they already had their own system of communicating.)
The others got pretty creative, though. Courtney could write upside-down as quickly as she could write the normal way. Daisy enjoyed leaving clues where the true meaning could only be discovered by pulling out the third letter of every word and stringing them together to form new words. AJ used to make up his own languages, complete with rules of grammar and punctuation. Daisy had always found the hand-drawn symbols he used in the place of letters to be pretty cool, but she doubted she ever told him that, since until recently every single thing he did seemed intended to bug her.
They all stopped writing in code when they got older, saving it for the occasional job when the ability came in handy. Daisy hadn’t realized how much she missed it until she met Miles, who still spoke backward sometimes and made alphabets, too. Now, even though she and AJ were in a race against the sunrise, a part of her was excited to see how this one would challenge them.
She had expected a nearly unbreakable code, or a cipher so sneaky it would take them days to figure it out. Instead, they got a nursery rhyme!
Greetings to my fellow spies
it will come as no surprise
we hid the key to this fine house
in a space sized for a mouse
but no mouse made this brown house
if you don’t know what to do
our clue may be stuck to your shoe.
When they finished reading the rhyme, Daisy and AJ looked at each other with matching expressions of disbelief. The note left little doubt as to the hiding place of the key. “They wouldn’t,” Daisy whispered. She was definitely reevaluating her first opinion of their professionalism. “Would they?”
AJ grimaced. “I think they might.”
“Who are these people?” Daisy asked. “They really do have a very warped sense of humor.”
He shrugged. “Maybe they got bored during their own stakeout and wanted to mix things up a bit.”
She knew they were both stalling now, neither of them wanting to be the one to retrieve the key. “How many other spies do you think have passed along this same package?”
He shook his head. “No idea. We’ll know more when we get the key.”
“You mean when you get the key. Feels more like a man’s job, don’t you think?”
“Sure, the one time you act like you can’t do something as well as me,” AJ joked, but he grabbed one of the discarded sticks. He stood as far away from the pile of bear poop as possible and poked it with the stick. Daisy held her breath, assuming the stick would go right through. But to their surprise, the whole pile moved.
“It’s fake!” she shouted, reaching for it.
“Or maybe it’s just dried out and hardened,” AJ warned just as she grabbed for it.
Daisy heard his words a second too late. Her fingers had already closed around it. She immediately dropped it, stepping back so it didn’t land on her foot. It fell upside down, revealing a plastic bottom and the words Open Me.
“Phew!” Daisy decided then and there that she had to meet these spies. But right now she could see a glimmer of sunrise over the hilltops to the east. AJ would have to finish up here. “I’d better get to my bunk before anyone wakes up,” she told him, slipping on her backpack. “Don’t open the birdhouse without me.” She quickly kicked up some leaves to make sure the spot didn’t look disturbed. A good spy always cleaned up his or her tracks. “When everyone goes to breakfast, I’ll pack up my bag and meet you at the RV.” She flipped the setting on her vid com back to infrared and prepared to follow the heat dots back to the nature trail. She’d have to run from there to her bunk to make it on time.
“Nope,” AJ said, grabbing the bottom of her sweatshirt. “You can’t just ditch camp. They take the security of their campers very seriously. They’ll have every police official in the state out looking for you.”
“What do I do, then? No way you’re going to tell me I’m stuck here till the end of summer, right?”
“No, of course not. We just need to figure out a way to spring you that’s on the up and up.”
The story of AJ and her father was fresh in Daisy’s mind. It gave her an idea. “I can say I’m homesick. That I miss my dad and want to see him. If I cry, they have to send me home, right? It’s sleepaway camp, not jail.”
AJ stuffed the birdhouse and the fake poop into his sack and hoisted it over his shoulder. “Give it a try,” he said. “The camp has listed me as your legal guardian, so I’ll be there to pick you up.”
With that, he walked off into the sunrise. She turned in the opposite direction and ran all the way back to her bunk. She slid into bed exactly thirty-two seconds before the loudspeaker clicked on and the camp director (always sounding way too cheery for the early hour) shouted, “Rise and shine, everyone! It’s going to be a beautiful day!”
CHAPTER FIVE
Monday
Turns out they don’t send you home from camp for being homesick, even if you cry actual tears and move your shoulders up and down at the same time. What they do is send you to “Aunt” Jess, the warm and fuzzy camp director with the single braid down her back, who gives you a nice cup of lemonade and a long hug and tells you that keeping busy and not thinking about home is the best cure.
Daisy was not the least bit happy with this turn of events. She emptied her last sip of lemonade onto the grass outside the camp director’s cabin and stormed back to her own in a huff. How had that not worked? She wasn’t used to being brushed off and dismissed so quickly. Were her acting skills not good enough? Not possible. She’d once convinced a Boy Scout troop that she was an Eagle Scout named Bill so she could get access to a storeroom of stolen goods. If Aunt Jess wanted a challenge, a challenge she was going to get.
Twenty minutes later, while her bunkmates were busy painting banners for the upcoming Color War, Dais
y dipped a thin paintbrush into the red paint and dotted it on her arms and a little on her cheeks. She waved her arms and fanned her face until the spots of paint crusted a bit. Then she told her counselor she needed to go to the nurse.
As she passed the dining hall, she decided to make a quick detour for one more item. Three minutes later, she stood before Nurse Becky, a grandmotherly woman who was always chasing after the campers with bottles of sunscreen. If there was a weak link in Camp Tumbleweed’s defenses, it would be Becky.
“I have chicken pox,” Daisy announced as the screen door banged shut behind her. Nurse Becky looked up from restocking a bin of bandages. Daisy began to scratch at top speed. She figured if her arms moved fast enough, the nurse couldn’t get a good look at the dots of red paint. “I need to go home before I give it to everyone at camp.”
“Odd,” the nurse said. “I haven’t seen chicken pox in a number of years.” She squinted at Daisy’s cheeks without quite the level of concern Daisy had hoped for. Detecting a note of doubt in the woman’s voice, Daisy ramped up the scratching, careful to avoid scraping off the dried paint. “Well, I’d better let you get back to the nursing,” she said, waving her hand vaguely around the totally empty cabin as she scratched. “If you could let Aunt Jess know while I go pack my bags, that’d be great. Thanks.” She turned to go.
“One moment,” Nurse Becky said, blocking her way. She held up a white tube. “Let me put something on you to soothe the itch.”
“No, really, it’s okay,” Daisy said, but Becky reached out and squeezed a few drops onto her arm anyway. The situation went downhill from there as the paint smeared under the slippery lotion.
“Weird!” Daisy said, rubbing her hand over her arm. “Didn’t know that could happen. Guess it wasn’t chicken pox after all.”
“Guess not,” the nurse agreed.
Neither moved. Then Daisy began to scratch again, only this time it was her scalp. “I forgot to mention,” she said, pointing to her hair, “I also have lice. Better not get too close. People say they can’t jump, but I’m not so sure.”