“Sixteen horseshoes,” said Samantha, nodding confidently.
She led Nipper to the edge of the fountain. Stone walls three feet high formed an octagon. At the corners were bronze statues of men, women, fish, and what she guessed were Roman gods. The statue in the center was enormous, even taller than Michelangelo’s David. Neptune stood on a pedestal with circles on two sides, so it looked as if the horses were pulling him along in an underwater chariot.
Samantha took a closer look at the horses. From the edge of the pool, they seemed to be splashing and straining as they hauled Neptune through the water. Their mouths were open, as if gasping for air. Each horse pointed its face in a different direction.
She looked even closer, and noticed something odd. As she leaned forward over the fountain wall and stared at the bright marble faces, she saw a blue dot in one horse’s nostril.
“There’s something up with that horse,” she told her brother, pointing. “Follow me into the fountain.”
“I’m in,” he said, and climbed up onto the wall ahead of her. Then he hopped into the water and waited.
Samantha wasn’t as eager to go into the pool. She pulled herself up onto the stone wall and stopped to look back. She had been in this amazing historic city for less than an hour and had spent the entire time looking for a way to leave. Now the umbrella had led her to a mysterious dot in the middle of a horse’s nose in the middle of a fountain.
In the many times she had thought about visiting the beautiful city of Florence, this was not what she’d had in mind. There were museums and cathedrals and historic palaces…and she was jumping into a fountain to find the quickest way home.
It wasn’t fair.
She clutched the umbrella tightly as she hopped into the water and waded past Nipper toward the statues.
Water bubbled gently around them.
“Hey,” said Nipper, gazing down at the floor of the pool. “There’s money everywhere.”
He knelt down and began to scoop up a handful of shiny coins. Samantha turned back and grabbed his arm.
“It’s not yours,” she said. “Those coins get collected for charity. And we’re in the fountain to get out of here, remember?”
Nipper frowned for a minute. Then he nodded and stood back up, leaving the money where it was.
They splashed through the waist-deep water toward the center of the pool.
Samantha looked around. No one in the plaza had noticed them yet. She wasn’t sure how long it would take before somebody did.
“Do you think this is where Uncle Paul’s money came from?” Nipper asked, splashing behind her. “His letter mentioned underwater treasure. There are a lot of fountains around the world.”
“I don’t think so,” said Samantha. “Didn’t he say something about gold bars? Who throws gold bars into a fountain?”
Samantha abruptly stopped walking and Nipper ran into her. They’d come face to face with the four bright white marble stallions. She looked back at Nipper as she pointed to the face of the horse second from the right.
Nipper squinted at the horse for a moment. Then he stood up straight.
“Step aside,” Nipper said loudly, pushing his sister out of the way. He raised a hand high in the air and wiggled his index finger.
“This is a nose-worthy situation,” he declared, as if addressing an audience. “And I have been called upon to use my special talent!”
Samantha groaned. “Even in Florence, Italy, you are exceptionally gross.”
Nipper plunged his finger deep inside the horse’s dark nostril and pressed. Something gave, a little, and there was a click followed by four loud, low creaking noises. Somewhere deep below the street, it sounded like four giant toilets were flushing. Samantha and Nipper both looked down. The water directly beneath the horses’ feet began to froth.
Nipper took one big step backward to where Samantha stood.
“My work here is done,” he announced proudly, and folded his arms.
The water around the horses began to churn. It looked as if the marble herd was stampeding.
Samantha and Nipper inched back a bit more as the water started whipping more strongly and began to lap against the walls of the fountain.
“Ouch!” said Nipper as a wave tossed one of the coins from the bottom of the fountain and smacked him hard on the cheek with it.
Both kids took another step back.
“Maybe we should get out of the pool for a minute,” Nipper said nervously, rubbing his face where the coin had hit him.
But Samantha was staring at the horses’ feet. A dark shape had appeared in the swirling water in front of them.
Nipper reached for his sister’s hand, but she had already taken another big step back. Samantha turned and looked out from where they stood in the fountain. Several visitors around the plaza had begun to notice the watery spectacle.
“Mommy, it’s a water show!” a boy wearing a New York Yankees T-shirt shouted, pointing at them.
“Prego, non più pagliacci!” wailed a woman standing next to him.
Samantha started to lose her footing. The fountain had become an angry squall.
“Wait!” she shouted to Nipper above the chaos. “I just remembered something Uncle Paul told us about David. That one’s a copy. The real one is in the muse—”
The current yanked Samantha under the surface, ending her sentence in a gurgling “Eeeee!” She was being sucked toward the dark shape in front of the horses. She flailed her arms, slapping at the water helplessly, and slid into darkness.
The magtrain ride to Paris had been smooth sailing. The pneumatic tube to Italy had been a bumpy tumble. Now, unexpectedly, Samantha faced a bruising, class 4 white-water challenge.
She dropped through the hole in the Fountain of Neptune, fell for about five feet, and landed with a splat on a narrow half-pipe track. Fountain water and coins rained down on her. A shallow but powerful current swept her forward.
Seconds later, she heard a splash and a thump as Nipper plopped down behind her. The current grew stronger and the rushing water propelled them along. The track became steeper and they rocketed down the slide.
They banked left and right, spiraling downward and bouncing off the walls of the U-shaped track.
Samantha clutched her umbrella close to her body and shut her eyes.
For a while she coasted along on her back. Then the current tossed and flipped her, and she was sliding headfirst. Water seemed to blast at her from all directions.
“Holy cow-a-bunga!” her brother shouted.
She opened her eyes just in time to see that the slide curved upward and ended with a ramp, spraying its contents into a giant funnel.
“Yow!” she shouted as she careened up and out of the half-pipe track and sailed through the air.
Samantha plunged into the funnel. Seconds later, she heard Nipper splash down behind her. She caught a glimpse of him every few seconds as they both swirled around and around in a vortex of water and foam. It dragged her to the center of the funnel. Then there was an incredibly loud pop! She shot through a tube at the bottom—and everything went white.
Samantha couldn’t see anything but bubbles. She focused on her breathing as she rocketed along inside a bullet of foam. Slowly, the bubbles began to clear. She was back on a water slide. She coasted along again for what must have been minutes but seemed like hours. Then the track made an extra-sharp turn and flung her out of the water. She bumped into a wall and tumbled down another dark slide.
Thump!
Samantha fell out onto a damp stone floor.
Thump!
Nipper spilled onto the floor beside her.
They both lay there quietly for a while, stunned, soggy, and sore.
Nipper sat up first. He shook his head from side to side. Then he did it five more times. It remi
nded Samantha of Dennis.
“That is the last time we go white-water rafting without a raft,” she said.
She looked down and saw her fist clenched around the red umbrella. She’d been gripping it tightly the whole time. She eased up but didn’t let go.
She rose to her feet carefully, using the umbrella to prop herself up.
The floor beneath them was a pattern of large tiles. Samantha recognized it immediately.
“France?” Nipper asked.
Samantha nodded. The water slide had dumped her and Nipper back into the room under the Louvre. A few yards away, they could see a blinking red dot.
“Magtrain. Home,” she said.
They walked carefully toward the faint light, their shoes squishing on the floor with every step. The glowing dot was the oval button near the center seat of the magtrain car.
They climbed aboard the familiar car and took their places. Samantha tapped the button and the tiny hairs on her arms stood up. The rails began to glow, and she and Nipper sped away through the tunnel.
Samantha pushed some soggy hair away from her face and leaned back in the seat. Her neck and her arms were sore from the water ride. If giant pneumatic tubes weren’t a smart way to travel, then international waterslides were completely stupid.
Then she looked over at the umbrella resting against the rail. It was full of secrets…and danger…and pointless pain and aggravation.
Did Uncle Paul really think he was giving her a present? So far, it had gotten her bounced around, soaked, bruised, and almost sliced by ninjas. Maybe the smelly ninjas were planning to kill whoever had the umbrella, and that’s why he’d passed it to her and run away.
“Thanks a lot, Pajama Paul,” she said softly.
Samantha figured they had about twenty minutes before they would be back in Seattle. She took out her notebook and inspected it. It was damp on the outside, but the pages inside were still dry. She began to write:
If someone puts you in grave danger and then you have to leave the beautiful city of Florence in a hurry, look for Neptune’s Fountain.
Wade into the water, up to the statue with four horses. Face the second horse from the right and stick your finger in his nose….
Section 06, Detail IRANSABOCL
RMS Titanic
The RMS Titanic was a British passenger ship that sank in the North Atlantic Ocean during its maiden voyage.
It was the largest and most luxurious vessel of its day, and its passengers included some of the richest people in the history of the world.
It had a state-of-the-art design with a series of innovative watertight compartments that were supposed to make the ship “unsinkable.”
Tragically, the Titanic collided with an iceberg in the early morning of April 15, 1912. It filled with water, snapped in two, and sank.
There were not enough lifeboats aboard to carry the passengers, and more than fifteen hundred people were lost at sea.
Some people question why the Titanic sank so quickly.
* * *
• • •
If you have scuba equipment, you can reach the back half of the Titanic from a tunnel that runs below the North Atlantic Ocean. This section of the sunken vessel includes the engine room, coal storage, and several of the ship’s secret treasure vaults.
Most of the gold bars and other valuable items that these secret vaults held have been removed from the wreck. An estimated $2,400,000,000 has vanished from the ship—an amount of precious metal that would have far exceeded the ship’s weight capacity.
If you take a closer look at things, however, it is still possible to come across treasure when you explore the ruins along the cold, dark ocean floor.
As soon as Samantha and Nipper made it home, they changed into clean, dry clothes and went to the kitchen. Neither of them had eaten anything all day, other than when Nipper munched on a few bread cubes.
They made themselves sandwiches and were just cleaning up when their parents came in through the side door.
“Sorry we’re so late, kids,” said Mrs. Spinner. “I hope you weren’t worried about us.”
Mr. Spinner leaned his umbrella against the wall and started to hang up his coat but stopped. He studied his children for a moment. It was the right number of kids, but they were wearing different clothes than they’d been wearing that morning. Samantha’s hair was a mess, and she looked like she’d been blasted in the face by a garden hose. Nipper had a bruise about the size of a quarter on his cheek.
“You’re looking a little rough around the edges, you two,” observed their father. “Did something happen while we were gone?”
Samantha and her brother glanced at each other.
“How was the Pet Expo?” Samantha asked, changing the subject.
“Ahh…what a fine show,” Mr. Spinner declared, not even noticing that she hadn’t answered his question. He turned and finished hanging up his coat.
Then he bent down and grabbed their pug with both hands.
“Look what we got,” he said, holding Dennis up in front of them.
“We already had that dog,” said Nipper.
“Very funny,” their dad said, twisting the pug around to show off a new pet accessory. A wide plastic ring curved around Dennis’s neck just above his sparkling collar with the giant blue gem.
A very faint buzzing sound came from the dog.
“It’s a Blinky Barker light,” their dad said, dropping Dennis back onto the floor. “Show ’em what you can do, old pal.”
“Wruf!” the little dog yapped, and a lightbulb turned on inside the new collar. It reflected off the jewels on his gold collar and the facets of the big walnut-sized diamond, lighting up the room in a dazzling display of light.
Mr. Spinner smiled. “What a splendid use of science,” he said, watching Dennis trot off to the living room.
Mrs. Spinner walked over and joined the conversation. “It was a strange day at the expo,” she said.
“Oh, yes,” their father chimed in. “We had an encounter with a strange group of people, all dressed in black.”
Samantha and Nipper glanced at each other again.
“We saw them following Dennis around the convention hall,” said Mrs. Spinner. “Then they started following your father and me.”
“They seemed to think they were being sneaky,” Mr. Spinner added. “But we noticed right away because they smelled terrible. Like smoldering lamp cords, or sulfurous filament epoxy.”
“Here’s the strange part,” their mother continued. “While one of them tried to get my attention, the other one grabbed our umbrella. He opened it up in the middle of the convention hall. He got really angry and threw it on the floor.”
“They walked away without saying anything,” said their father.
Mrs. Spinner went to the kitchen counter and began sorting through the day’s mail.
“What is it with everyone and their umbrellas?” she wondered as she opened an envelope.
“Well, dear, this is Seattle,” Mr. Spinner reminded her.
Samantha decided not to say anything about smelly ninjas or umbrella snatchers just then. She shot her brother a quick look to keep him quiet.
Mrs. Spinner unfolded five pages of blue paper. It was a new Unexplained Vanishing Person Form.
“Didn’t we already fill out three of those?” asked Mr. Spinner.
A week after Uncle Paul went missing, two notices arrived. One was a death certificate for “Flipflop P. Wafflemaker.” Another was an official warning to be on the lookout for an eight-year-old girl in a yellow polka-dot blouse who had gone missing in 1973.
Many more incorrect forms and crazy, mixed-up files had come since then.
This one requested additional information for “Pablo Rotación.”
“I think th
e police officers who came to our house were clowns,” Mrs. Spinner sighed.
While their parents worked together at the table filling out the new form, Samantha and Nipper left the house through the kitchen door.
“Flipflop P. Wafflemaker.” Nipper chuckled as they headed across the driveway.
“Pablo Rotación.” Samantha giggled, then stopped when she realized what she’d said. “Wait. I think that’s Spanish for Paul Spinner.”
“I don’t think anyone’s ever going to get Uncle Paul’s name right,” said Nipper.
Samantha became more serious. “And I don’t think Uncle Paul is dead, either,” she said.
They stopped at the foot of the stairs to Uncle Paul’s apartment over the garage.
“You keep saying that,” Nipper told her. “But we’ve been halfway around the world and haven’t seen or heard anything about Uncle Paul at all.”
He looked up at the stairs.
“And now we’re right back where we started.”
Samantha pulled the throwing star from her pocket and waved it at Nipper.
“No,” she said. “Ninjas are hunting for umbrellas on two continents. And this is a clue.”
Samantha and Nipper climbed the stairs next to the garage, entered their uncle’s one-room apartment, and began to investigate everything from scratch. They studied all the walls and windowsills. They crawled along the floor and searched under the sofa. They were both sure that, somewhere, there was a clue about ninjas who smell or uncles who just go missing.
“What exactly are we looking for?” Nipper asked.
“I have no idea,” said Samantha. “Another throwing star…or a note that says ‘I’m sorry you won’t get to spend any time in Florence.’ Maybe there’s a book about umbrellas.”
They stood back up and began to explore the bookshelves. Samantha started with the books on the top shelf and Nipper started from the bottom. There were too many to read. Systematically, they inspected the spine of each book. Some had titles printed in English. Others had words in completely unidentifiable languages, if they were words at all. Other books just had symbols on them.
Samantha Spinner and the Super-Secret Plans Page 7