The Friendship Riddle

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  Coco shrugged, but it was more like his head sinking down into his chest than his shoulders coming up to reach his ears. “It was stupid.”

  “It wasn’t so stupid,” I told him. “Sometimes you can want and want something so much from a person, and you just can’t get them to do it.”

  He lifted his brown eyes. “Like what?”

  I could have told him about Mum, how she was never home. Or about how Mom always talked big but never followed through—or worse, would decide to do something and make a big mess for me, so now I was stuck changing in the supply closet. Instead, I reached into my bag and pulled out two origami-paper envelopes.

  “To the buses!” Coco cried when we met after school. He’d managed to rally everyone, and get calls made home so we could all take the bus to the library. Even Dev, whose mother never liked to let him do anything without properly evaluating the situation first. Coco had actually gotten on the phone with her and charmed her into letting Dev go by promising to keep an eye on Dev at all times. He also had to promise that Dev would wear his boots, hat, and gloves, and that he wouldn’t eat any food unless it came from Coco or Adam.

  We took up four seats on the school bus. Me with Lena, Coco with Dev, and then Adam and Lucas sat separately. But we all leaned over into the aisle. “So we’re just going to walk from the library to the cemetery?” Dev asked. “That doesn’t sound like much of a plan.” He tugged his hat down so it nearly touched his gold-flecked eyes. In Taryn Greenbottom’s world, people with gold-flecked eyes were always exceptionally trustworthy.

  Adam had told us that the clue referred to Magic—not like magic tricks, but the game: Magic: The Gathering. He said the players were called Planeswalkers, and that you took cards from the library and put them in the graveyard. So we decided we’d walk from the library to the graveyard in the hopes that something would come of it.

  “It will come to us,” Lena assured him. “That’s how Ruthy and I found the British phone booth. Did you know there was one of those on Sea Street? Bright red British phone booth?”

  “Next to Pledge Allegiance Comics,” Adam said.

  I was beginning to think we should have brought Adam along earlier.

  Dev glanced over at me and Coco. We were sort of sitting next to each other, me and Coco, with just the seat back between us. “So you two have been studying a lot, huh?” he asked.

  “A bit,” I said, while Coco said, “Yeah.”

  “I think I’m ready,” Dev said.

  “You’re ready,” Adam replied, sounding a little exasperated.

  “I’m totally ready,” Lucas said.

  “We know,” Lena said. “Born ready, right?”

  Dev scratched at some paint on the fake leather of his seat. “Do you sometimes worry that you’ll know a word and then just muff it?”

  “No,” Lucas answered.

  “Modesty. Respect. Humility,” Lena told him.

  “Humility,” Lucas said. “The state of being humble. Humble, Middle English, derived from Latin, ‘humilis,’ low, and ‘humus,’ the earth. Low on the earth.”

  “Like a bug,” I said.

  “An insect,” he corrected.

  “It’s not like I think my mind will go blank, but that I’ll confuse myself,” Dev said. “Like it’ll be ‘sultan,’ and I’ll think, oh, that’s easy. S-U-L-T-A-N. But then I have this second track of my brain, like left speaker–right speaker, and the second track is saying, ‘Wait, no, that’s too easy. It must be E-N, or maybe even I-N.’ And I talk myself out of the right answer.”

  I wish I could tell him that I felt the same way, but this had never happened to me.

  “Squash it,” Adam told him.

  “I can’t,” Dev said. “It’s loud.”

  “It’s like in tennis. You have all this time when the ball is coming to you. So it’s like, ‘Okay. Here comes the ball. It is going to land to the left of the center court line. But wait. Maybe there is spin on it. Or maybe it will have a funny bounce.’ And you can’t let those thoughts get in. You just have to squash them. That’s what they mean when they say ‘Keep your eye on the ball.’ It means don’t think, just hit.”

  “You don’t hit a spelling word,” Dev said.

  But maybe you sort of did. Maybe when you’re at the top of the game, and your mind is dialed in, the words are just there. I wondered if that’s how it was for Lucas.

  “We’ll work on it,” Adam promised. “Maybe at our next practice I can throw tennis balls at you while you spell.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Dev asked.

  “Yes,” Adam said. “Yes, I would.”

  The bus rolled to a stop in front of the library. It was still all collapsed. The salvageable books had been moved into storage units while the town tried to figure out what they were going to do next. I had heard Mom talking on the phone with Mum. The insurance company didn’t want to pay until they did a full evaluation of the design and reconstruction history. “Alan’s afraid they’ll want to pin it on him,” she’d said.

  We all just stood there in front of the wreckage. The building was folded in upon itself, like a speller at the national bee who misses an easy word.

  I wished I could close my eyes as we walked by.

  “That’s just so crazy, isn’t it?” Lena asked.

  “It’s not crazy. It’s not insane or cool. It’s awful.”

  “Hey, I didn’t say it was cool,” Lena replied. “I meant awful. I meant it was there one day, and now the whole thing is gone.”

  “It’s Charlotte’s house, too.”

  “I know,” Lena said.

  Coco was a few steps ahead of us. Glancing over his shoulder, he asked, “Forty-two, right? The answer to the math problem on the last clue?”

  “Forty-two,” I said back. “That’s what Lucas got.”

  Coco nodded and smiled and nodded again. Then he nearly tripped over a pile of snow. He stumbled into Adam, who made an “oof” sort of noise. Red crept over Coco’s face, and he stared straight ahead as we rounded the corner and kept going up the hill toward the cemetery. Lena grabbed my arm and made a kissy face. I think it was a kissy face. I threw snow in it.

  We walked past the historical society, which was housed in an old lighthouse that had been decommissioned. “If I was going to hide a clue, I’d hide it in there,” Adam said. “It’s the coolest building with this awesome spiral staircase, and they built bookshelves that go all around the walls in a big circle.”

  Like the Seattle Public Library, I thought, thinking of what my mum had told me.

  “You just hang out at the historical society?” Lena asked.

  Adam shrugged. “My mom said that we used to own waterfront property up here, like, generations ago, but somehow it was swindled out of my great-great-great-grandfather’s hands. When I figure out where the land is, and who took it, we’re gonna take it back, and I’ll be rich and happy.”

  “Quite the plan,” Lena replied.

  “Hey!” Lucas said. He was stopped in front of a plaque next to a statue of the fisherman’s wife. It wasn’t any specific fisherman’s wife, just one in general, staring out toward the ocean, holding a basket of apples while her skirt twisted around her legs. “Did you know that there is a fish hidden in the skirts somewhere? I bet I can find it first.”

  I came up beside him and looked at the plaque. It was part of the town’s History Path. There were locations throughout the town with historical significance, and you could walk from one to the other and learn all about them. In the summer you’d see tourists doing it, though mostly the older ones. We’d walked part of it in third grade, but all I remembered was that Charlotte had stumbled and scraped her knee and spent the whole rest of the trip limping along beside me.

  I read the plaque by the statue:

  Museum on the Street

  The Fisherman’s Wife

  39

  This sculpture was created by Arnold Aaron Lophanger. The model was his niece, Lucinda Lophanger, who
was a fisherwoman herself and died a widow. Mr. Lophanger felt that she had a naturally sad and pensive face, hence his choice of her as a model.

  The sculpture was first placed closer to the town square in 1897. In the 1920s, suffragettes took umbrage at the implication that women simply stayed home, watching and waiting for their men. They hung placards on the statue saying “Votes for Women.” In the 1960s, the statue was once again the target of women’s rights activists, who decorated it with their undergarments and placed real fish in the basket, implying that women, too, could fish, much like Ms. Lucy Lophanger herself.

  In 1972, the sculpture was moved to make room for the new town hall. Here she has enjoyed quieter days. Perhaps as a nod to her profession, Lophanger hid a fish inside the folds of the woman’s skirt. Can you find it?

  “I’ve got it!” I exclaimed.

  “What? No way! Where?” Lucas replied.

  “Not the fish,” I said. “The clue!”

  Everyone turned to look at me. I put my finger on the number 39 on the plaque. “ ‘On the path, you face history. Walk the path, do the math.’ It’s the History Path! We need to find number forty-two!”

  “Let’s go!” Coco said.

  “I haven’t found the fish yet,” Lucas said.

  “Come on,” Dev cajoled.

  “Not yet.”

  “We can leave you here,” Adam told him.

  “No, we can’t,” I said. “We go together. We can look for the fish on the way back.”

  “The fish?” Lena asked. “It’s right there.”

  She pointed and it was like the fish appeared right on Lucy Lophanger’s hip.

  “How’d you know?” Lucas demanded.

  “Where would you put a fish?” she replied. “So come on, let’s go.”

  We all started walking, faster now.

  “Tell the truth,” Lucas said to Lena. “You knew beforehand.”

  “I didn’t,” she replied, but she was smiling like a cat who had caught that very same fish, so maybe she wasn’t quite telling the truth.

  Outside of the cemetery was another plaque. “Forty!” we cried out.

  Inside the gate, paths went off in three directions. “Which one?” Dev asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Counterclockwise,” Lucas said. “These sorts of things always go counterclockwise.”

  I didn’t know if that was true or not, but it seemed reasonable. We set off on the right-most path.

  “I’ve been thinking about the clues,” Lena said.

  “What about them?”

  “Well, who put them here, for starters?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “And why?” Adam asked. “Seems like an awful lot of work.”

  “And are they leading someplace?” Lena asked.

  What do you even expect to find? That was what Charlotte had asked me. There’s no pot of gold or prince at the end. This isn’t a fairy-tale quest.

  It felt like a quest, though, all of us together, this motley crew. That’s what Harriet Wexler always called it when Taryn got together with a band of friends and foes on a quest. She usually did wind up with a group around her—other squires, magicians, sometimes even thieves. Everyone always had a special role, and the quest couldn’t be completed without each one of them. The Riddled Cottage was different. She was all alone. Well, all alone until that stupid Lord Charlesmoore kissed her. Maybe I did like it better when she was with the others, after all; there was more laughter and excitement, even if they did sometimes slow you down.

  “The purpose of any quest is glory,” Lucas said.

  Adam shook his head. “The purpose of any good quest is treasure, preferably gold.”

  “That could be,” Lena said. “It doesn’t really matter so much what it is, as where it leads. One quest leads to the next, doesn’t it, Ruthy?”

  “For Taryn Greenbottom it always does,” I agreed.

  “And one of those quests will lead me right out of this town.”

  “You want to leave Promise?” Coco asked with some surprise.

  Lena shook her head. “The two of you are supposed to be smart.”

  “But don’t you want to leave?” I asked Coco. “I mean, if you’re going to be a forensic anthropologist, you can’t just wait for more old graveyards to be discovered around here.”

  “Well, sure, I’ll probably travel all over the place, but I guess I always figured I’d come back here.”

  “Not me,” Dev said. “I’m with Lena.”

  “Really?” Lena and I said simultaneously

  “Why is that such a surprise?”

  “You seem like a stay-putter to me,” Lena said in a way that managed to not sound mean.

  Dev pulled his hat off and tucked it into his pocket. “I have a twenty-year plan. Finish Frontenac Consolidated Middle School and then attend the Maine School of Science and Mathematics.”

  “Your parents will never let you go there,” Adam said.

  The Maine School of Science and Mathematics was a public boarding school for exceptional math and science students. It was also so far north, it was practically in Canada.

  “And then I will attend an Ivy League university, or MIT or Stanford. And then I will get a Rhodes Scholarship and go to Oxford. I will eventually get my doctorate and secure a position at either Cambridge or Oxford, or possibly the Sorbonne. That’s in France. What matters is that it’s a city with a lot of smart people.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s long-range.”

  “There!” Coco called out. We all followed as he ran to the next plaque. Number forty-one. It was all about the trees in the cemetery. One of them had been planted by Frontenac himself.

  “Boring,” Lucas said.

  “Keep going,” Coco said. “At least we know we’re going in the right direction.”

  So we walked on. Adam started whistling a camp marching song, and Dev joined in. Soon we were all whistling and marching.

  “It feels like we stepped into a different time,” Lucas said.

  “Time travel is impossible,” Dev told him.

  “It’s theoretically possible,” Adam countered. “Just not physically possible yet.”

  “But if it were ever going to be possible, then someone would have come back and—” Dev began.

  “That’s not what he means,” Coco interrupted. “He means it feels like a real, old-fashioned adventure.”

  “A quest,” I said.

  “A quest,” Lucas repeated. “Exactly. And you know how quests end? Victory!”

  “There it is!” Lena said.

  We ran up the slippery path. Lena stumbled and grabbed my arm, so we practically fell on top of the plaque.

  Museum on the Street

  Lord Whitcomb Vertrand

  42

  In front of you is the grave of Lord Whitcomb Vertrand, a wealthy gentleman who came to Promise in his later years. He built a grand mansion overlooking the bay, where he entertained guests from all over the world. He claimed he made his fortune in importing and exporting from his native England, where he alleged aristocratic status. It wasn’t long after his arrival, though, that another story of his past began to emerge. Lord Whitcomb Vertrand, it was rumored, was actually the dreaded pirate Greenbottom. Greenbottom had stalked the seas between Canada and North Carolina. He earned his name for the vivid green satin breeches that he wore. Legend holds that he buried gold on the coast of the peninsula, but that claim has never been substantiated.

  “Huh,” I said.

  “What?” Coco asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, shaking my head. “Just in the Harriet Wexler books, the character’s last name is Greenbottom, too.”

  “It’s a good name,” Coco said.

  “But where’s the clue?” Lucas asked.

  “It’s got to be hidden on the plaque or stand somewhere.”

  Lucas crouched down behind the stand, while Lena ran her hand around the edge, trying to find an opening. The base was iron, wh
ile the top was a single, solid piece of wood.

  “Maybe the clue is in the words?” Adam said. “Like the gold! The buried gold!”

  “I don’t think so,” Coco said.

  “There was gold in another clue, wasn’t there?” Adam pressed. “We are on a treasure hunt!”

  “No,” I said. “They’ve all been written down.” We were right. We’d solved the riddle and we were in the right place, I knew it. So where was that sixth clue?

  “Look at this,” Coco said. “It says that this was placed here in 2013.” He read, “ ‘Generous funds from the Promise Historical Society and a grant from the Maine Humanities Council allowed us to replace aging markers on the History Path.’ ”

  “Oh, no,” I moaned. “It’s gone.”

  “A total dead end,” Lucas said.

  “So no gold, and my shoes are going to have salt stains?” Adam asked.

  “That’s why you should wear boots, nimrod,” Dev said as he pulled his hat back onto his head.

  “A nimrod, traditionally, is a skilled hunter,” Lucas told him.

  “Ha!” Adam said. “I am Adam the Nimrod, great and skillful hunter.”

  “I’m sorry,” Coco said to me. “It’s not over yet. We could keep going, follow the later clues you found.”

  “If only we had that key,” Lena said.

  “What key?” Adam asked.

  “The one it talks about in the clue with the maiden on it. The Snow White one. ‘Now you might ask, this little key . . .’ Ruthy and I found the post office box, thanks to Adam. And if we had that key, we could get in, and then this day wouldn’t be a total bust.”

  I felt myself growing hot. How had I not put that together? “Actually,” I said in a soft voice. “Actually, we do have the key.”

  We raced back down the hill toward town, slipping and sliding on the icy paths. When we made it to Main Street, we slowed to a walk, but only because we were getting some dirty looks.

  The clock tower bells started chiming. One, two, three, four. “Come on!” Lena cried. “Before they close!”

  “What time do they close?” Coco asked.

  “I don’t know. Post offices keep the wackiest hours. Let’s go.” She grabbed my arm and tugged.