The Eagle's Quill

by Sarah L. Thomson

  “But, Theo, man—”

  “No, Sam.” Marty leaned forward into the light, her face somber. “He’s right.”

  “Marty, you too? You’re kidding me!”

  “Sam, this is bigger than any one person. I’m sorry, Abby. Truly I am.” Marty reached out a hand to Abby, who shrank back, her face taut with misery. “We can’t let a man like Gideon Arnold anywhere near Benjamin Franklin’s secret weapon. No matter who gets hurt.”

  Sam could hardly believe his ears. He’d kind of expected this out of Theo’s mouth—but Marty?

  Two days ago, one of Gideon Arnold’s thugs had been about to strangle Marty, and Sam had given Arnold the information he’d asked for to save her life. It hadn’t even occurred to him to do anything else. If he’d been the one choking for air and Marty had the information in her hand, would she have done the same for him?

  What if it were Sam, rather than Evangeline and the Hodges, in Gideon Arnold’s clutches right now?

  “I can’t believe you, Marty.” Sam looked at Abby’s stricken face and felt anger, sharp and hot, flare up inside his chest. “You sound just like a Founder. Anything’s okay as long as it protects the secret, huh?” He turned to Theo and shook his head. “It’s okay to lie, to risk people’s lives, to abandon our friends?”

  Theo stood up suddenly and shook off his hood. He glared down at Sam, and spat a single word at him.

  “Yes.”

  Theo lifted up his foot in its heavy hiking boot and put it down squarely on Gideon Arnold’s phone, crushing it and grinding the black splinters into the wooden floor.

  CHAPTER NINE

  On the whole, it was one of the worst nights of Sam’s life.

  Outside, thunder pounded the sky and rain hammered at the boards of the old church. Inside, the storm had been just as bad. Abby screamed at Theo, Marty tried to calm her down, Theo sat in a corner and refused to talk to anyone, and Sam didn’t know what to say or even how to feel.

  At last Abby, furious and tearful, picked up a rain poncho and her jacket and went over to lie down in a corner as far away from all of them as she could get. After a while, Sam had gone to sit next to her, leaving Theo and Marty on their own.

  Sam sat there wrapped in his fleece jacket, his cold hands in his pockets, and shivered while ideas chased themselves through his mind, each more miserable than the last.

  Sam understood Theo and Marty—he did. Sam had promised to help safeguard Benjamin Franklin’s weapon, and he knew firsthand how scary Gideon Arnold truly was. But he understood Abby too. It was her parents they were talking about. If it had been Sam’s mother and father in Gideon Arnold’s clutches . . . Sam knew he’d have given over the Quill in two seconds to keep them safe. Maybe it wouldn’t have been the smartest thing to do, but he’d do it, and without a second thought.

  So who was right—Theo or Abby? Both. Neither. Sam had no idea. He was cold and tired, and it seemed completely impossible to fall asleep, but eventually he must have done so, because suddenly he found himself waking up, blinking in a weird, lifeless gray light. The storm had blown itself out. Even though the air was still damp and chilly, everything was quiet—no whisper of wind, no rattling of rain, no crack of thunder.

  Abby was asleep next to him, the blotches of tears still on her cheeks. Sam didn’t want to wake her up. There was nothing he could say that would make her feel better, and plenty of ways to make her feel worse. Theo and Marty were asleep on the other side of the church. He didn’t much feel like talking to them either.

  Sam got up, grabbed his hiking boots from where he’d left them the night before, and slipped out of the church. The ghost town looked, well, ghostly, in the grayish light that comes before the sun slides up over the horizon. Restlessly, Sam headed down the two stone steps and into the street, walking past tumbledown cabins with empty doorways and blank spaces where windows had once been. As soon as he got to the end of the town, he turned and came back.

  What were they supposed to do now that Theo had smashed the phone? They had no way of contacting Gideon Arnold, and no way of handing Jefferson’s Quill over to him. To Theo, of course, that was a good thing. Theodore Washington wasn’t going to play Gideon Arnold’s game—and he wasn’t about to let the rest of them play either.

  Sam sighed and rubbed his hands over his face, trying to grind the sleep out of his eyes and the stiffness out of his brain. They still had to find the Quill, didn’t they? What other choice did they have? It wasn’t like Sam could just hike out of here and catch a plane home. Not knowing what he knew about Gideon Arnold and the damage the man could do—to Evangeline, to Abby’s parents, to the country, to the world.

  It looked like there was only one thing to do—find the Quill and keep it safe. Just like Theo had wanted all along. The big guy had wiped all the other moves off the board.

  But it didn’t mean Sam had to like it. And he didn’t blame Abby for not liking it either.

  He was back at the church steps now, but he didn’t feel like going in. Sam wandered around the building, kicking his way through wet, knee-high grass, and stubbed his toe so hard on a rock he nearly yelped with pain. Hopping away, he tripped over another rock and fell.

  Then he realized that what he had fallen over wasn’t a rock—it was a tombstone.

  Great. He was in the church’s graveyard. If that wasn’t the perfect setting for his mood this morning . . .

  Sam got up and walked among the tombs, brushing aside clinging grass to read old names and dates. One of the tombstones seemed larger than the rest, with a lot of writing on it. Sam made his way over to that one and crouched down to read what it said.

  It was odd. He wiped dew away from the stone and then rubbed harder, cleaning off moss and lichen. Some of the letters were missing, and it didn’t look as if they’d worn away naturally with time either. It looked like they’d never been carved.

  FRE_MAN JOSS_OFT

  BELO_ED SON, H_SBAND, F_IEND

  AN A_ERIC_N PATRI_T

  BO_N 1743 D_ED 1826

  RE_EM_ER ME AS YOU _ASS BY,

  AS Y_U ARE _OW, SO ON_E WAS I,

  _S I AM N_W, _O YOU M_ST BE,

  _REPARE FO_ _EATH AND _OL_OW M_.

  Who would carve a tombstone and leave out half the letters?

  Maybe someone with a message to send.

  Sam’s heart speeded up, and he felt a familiar excitement fizzing along his nerves. It didn’t exactly burn away the resentment he felt toward Theo, who’d taken it upon himself to decide what their next move should be, or Marty, who’d sided with Theo—but it did shove those dark feelings into the back of Sam’s mind for the moment. Because this was it! He’d found it! Their next clue!

  In ten minutes he had everybody awake and outside to check it out. Neither Theo nor Abby was saying much, and in fact, nobody seemed happy with anybody else. But they were all willing to follow Sam outside, focus on the tombstone, and leave last night’s bitter argument alone—for now.

  “Right.” Marty, in particular, seemed extremely relieved to have a puzzle to think about. “The first thing is the missing letters—obviously.” She dug into her pack and pulled out a notebook and a pen.

  “Obviously,” Sam agreed. Abby moved to Sam’s side, farther away from Theo, and studied the tombstone too. “But that first line—I don’t get what’s missing there.”

  “It’s a name,” Marty said, sucking on her pen.

  “No kidding. But we don’t know what name. It’s not like it’s a simple one.”

  “Like Sam,” Marty agreed. She quickly copied down the epitaph in her notebook. “Skip that for now. What about the rest of the lines?”

  That was easier. It didn’t take long before they had the message mostly deciphered.

  FRE_MAN JOSS_OFT

  BELOVED SON, HUSBAND, FRIEND

  AN AMERICAN PATRIOT

  BORN 1743 DIED 1826

  REMEMBER ME AS YOU PASS BY,

  AS YOU ARE NOW, SO ONCE WAS I,

  AS I AM NOW, SO Y
OU MUST BE,

  PREPARE FOR DEATH AND FOLLOW ME.

  “Whoa,” Sam muttered. “Morbid much?”

  “Okay,” Marty muttered, scribbling fast. “So if we pull out all the letters we just filled in, minus those first two we don’t know yet, we get . . . this.”

  __ __ V U R M A O R I M B P O N C A O S U P R D F L E

  “A code,” Sam said.

  “A code,” Marty agreed.

  Theo spoke up. “Can you break it?”

  Sam snorted. “With one hand tied behind my back. With one eye shut. With—”

  Marty shoved the notebook at him. “With a little less showing off?”

  Sam felt the tight clench inside his stomach relaxing. They had a puzzle to solve, and he and Marty were working on it together. Things weren’t quite right among the four of them, but at least they could still do this.

  “Maybe you just have to rearrange the letters,” Sam muttered to himself, scribbling possibilities. “There’s PRE, that’s a common prefix . . . or ED, could be an ending. There’s AIM, that’s a word!”

  “But there are hardly any Es,” Marty said, looking at what Sam was doing. “And E is the most common letter in English.”

  “I know that, Marty. Who doesn’t know that?”

  “And a lot of Us. I always hate getting a U in Scrabble; it’s really hard to work with. Sam, I don’t think this is right way to go.”

  “Maybe not.” Sam’s letter combinations weren’t getting him much of anywhere, he had to admit. “It’s not a simple offset code either. You know, using B for A and C for B, and so on.”

  “I got that already,” Marty told him a little smugly.

  “It would help if the letters were broken up into words.”

  “But they’re not. What’s the most common letter in the message?”

  “Uh . . . R. Three Rs.”

  “So maybe R is E?”

  Sam scribbled Es over the Rs in the message but shook his head. “It doesn’t help us much.”

  “We’ve just got to keep trying.” Marty took the pen and notebook back. “T is the next most common letter in English, after E. What’s the second most frequent letter in the code?”

  Sam stared at the message, counting. “It’s no good. Two As, two Ms, three Os, two Us. Any of those letters could be T. This isn’t working. We can’t just try letters randomly.”

  “So you’re giving up?”

  “Let me think.” Sam’s fingers tapped impatiently on a tombstone. “It’s a code. A secret message. It isn’t any good sending somebody a secret message unless they have the key to breaking it. So either the key is something easy to figure out—in which case why aren’t we figuring it out? Or it’s something . . .”

  A wide grin spread across Marty’s face. “Or it’s something we already have.”

  Sam’s grin was just as wide. “You do have it, right?”

  Abby spoke up for the first time. “Have what?”

  “Have what Thomas Jefferson meant us to have.” Marty turned to her pack, beside her on the grass. “Here!” She pulled out the wheel cipher that they had found hidden in the wall of Caractacus Ranch.

  “Try it,” Sam said eagerly.

  “We still don’t know the first two letters. I’ll start with the third wheel in.” Marty deftly spun the small wooden wheels on their long spoke, making a row of letters that matched what she’d written in her notebook. “Now, if this works—”

  “It’ll work,” Sam said. His fingers were tingling; he felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle.

  “Overconfidence is a killer,” Marty told him, but he could tell from her voice that her heart wasn’t in the scolding. “If this works, one of the rows of letters on the cipher should hold a message we can read.” She rotated the cipher wheel slowly. Sam ached to snatch it from her, but if he did that he’d just jostle the letters and they’d have to start all over. Meaningless rows of letters passed before his eyes:

  “That’s it!” he yelled. Abby jumped.

  Theo frowned. “Keep your voice down, Sam.”

  “Why, because the bears are going to hear us? That’s it, there!” He pointed. “See, Marty? Can you tell what the first two letters should be?”

  “Of course I can!” Marty spun the first two wheels and turned up the letters U and N.

  “United we stand, divided we fall,” Sam read out loud.

  “And that means that the missing letters in the name on the tombstone are . . .” Marty turned the wheel back to check their original line of coded text. “R and I.”

  “Does that really matter?” Sam asked.

  Marty ignored him. “So the name on the tombstone is Freeman Josshoft. That’s an odd name. Maybe it’s Dutch . . .”

  Sam laughed. “Dutch! Marty, you’re better than that.” Staring at all those little letters on the cipher wheel must have made letters dance inside his brain, because it was easy to see now why the name on the tombstone was so odd. “It’s an anagram. Mix up the letters.”

  “Thomas Jefferson!” Marty gasped. “Rearrange the letters in ‘Freeman Josshoft’ and you get ‘Thomas Jefferson’!”

  “Just a little extra clue so we know we’re on the right track,” Sam told her happily. It felt right, solving a puzzle with Marty. She seemed to feel the same way.

  Then Abby spoke up, and her cool voice cast a shadow over the triumph. “So we’ve got the clue. But what are we supposed to do with it? It’s not exactly a direction.”

  “It’s never that simple.” Sam looked up from the tombstone and rubbed his eyes. “But it’ll be somewhere around here. We know we’re where old TJ—”

  “Really, Sam, I don’t think you should call him that.”

  Sam ignored Marty. “—wanted us to be. So something near here will . . . um . . . unite. I guess.”

  Marty had her map out and was spreading it out on the wet grass. “Unite. Unite,” she said, chewing on a strand of her black hair. “Two things coming together . . .”

  Sam turned in a slow circle. Marty had the right idea. Two things coming together . . .

  “There!” they both said at the same moment.

  Sam looked down at Marty, and she looked up at him.

  “What’s there?” she asked.

  “What did you find?” he asked.

  She pointed to her map. “Look here, at all those streams. Down at the end of the valley, they all run into this river. Uniting, right? Many becoming one? Just like all the colonies had to unite together to win the Revolution?”

  “Or over there,” Sam said. “Look down the street, to the end of the valley.” The just-risen sun illuminated two cliffs that rose up above the tree line, meeting at a sharp angle that looked very much like a pyramid to Sam. “Two cliffs uniting into one. And doesn’t that look kind of Founderish to you? They did love their pyramids.”

  “There can’t be two right answers,” Abby said, still sounding a little cold.

  “I vote for the river,” Sam said. “Lots of streams, all coming together—that’s a better fit than two cliffs. It took a lot of colonies coming together to win the Revolution.”

  “No, the cliffs,” Marty said just as quickly. “The Founders would have seen that pyramid and used it, for sure.”

  “Marty, come on. It’s got to be the river.”

  “Sam, that river might have changed course twenty times since the Civil War. But those cliffs have probably been like that since the Cretaceous!”

  “Arguing isn’t going to solve this one,” Theo said, not sounding much more cheerful than Abby. “Two possibilities. We’d better check them both out.”

  “I’ll go with Sam,” Abby said quickly. “To the river.”

  Marty stood, folding up her map. “Then Theo and I can head over to those cliffs, I guess. Meet back here in three hours?”

  She looked over at Sam, and he thought he saw something anxious in her eyes. Splitting up? It did make good sense . . . but Sam had a moment of hesitation.

  He’d only met Theo and M
arty a few days ago. But it had been an intense few days. And everything the three of them had done, they’d done together.

  But they did need to investigate both the river and the cliffs. So he grinned reassuringly at Marty and saluted.

  “Three hours, Captain! Should we synchronize our watches?”

  Marty rolled her eyes. “Just don’t fall in the river and drown, Sam.”

  Sam and Abby left Theo waiting while Marty repacked and organized her backpack. Following Marty’s map, they located one of the streams and set out to follow it to the larger river.

  “Listen, Abby,” Sam said, after they had hiked in silence for a while. “I want you to know—I’m not giving up on your parents. No matter what Theo says.”

  “Thanks, Sam.” Abby sniffed hard. She was in front of Sam; he couldn’t see her face. But he could hear the gratitude in her voice. A few minutes later she asked, “How long have you known them? Marty and Theo?”

  “Actually, just a few days. Remember, I told you how we met on the way to Death Valley?”

  Abby nodded. There was a pause, during which the loudest sound was the crunch of their boots over dead leaves. Then Abby said, “Sam . . . I think you should be careful.”

  “Me? Why?” Of course they should all be careful; they had Gideon Arnold on their tail and killer puzzles from the Founders of the country to solve. But why should Sam be more careful than anyone else?

  “You’re not like them,” Abby told him.

  “Huh?”

  “Would you have smashed that phone last night?”

  “Well . . . no.” Sam had to admit it. Maybe he wouldn’t cheerfully hand Thomas Jefferson’s Quill over to the bad guys, but Sam wouldn’t have smashed the phone, not unless he had no other choice. If you wanted to win a game, there was no point in cutting off options until you had to. It was better to keep as many moves as possible in play.

  “That Theo . . . he’s kind of brainwashed Marty, hasn’t he?” Abby kept walking, moving in and out of shadow as she walked beneath trees and back out into the sunlight. Sam couldn’t see her face, but he could hear her clearly as her voice drifted back to him.