The Multiplying Mysteries of Mount Ten

by Krista Van Dolzer

  For Isaac, Madeleine, and William, my little number crunchers

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER 1

  I was lots of things, but outdoorsy wasn’t one of them. I could mix paints with my eyes closed and lunge and parry with the best, but when it came to the outdoors, I was as clueless as a brick. Throw in an unexpected downpour and the situation went from bad to deadly.

  Unfortunately, Toby was as clueless as I was. He might have looked like a mountain man, with his rosy cheeks and bushy beard, but my stepdad was a city slicker with a taste for alternative rock. I couldn’t decide which looked more out of place: his scared, wide-open eyes or his Imagine Dragons shirt.

  I squinted through the windshield. The sky was a charcoal-gray canvas slashed through with gnarled black branches and the occasional lightning bolt. “How long is it supposed to rain?”

  “All day?” Toby replied, tightening his grip on the steering wheel. It was windy, too. He motioned toward his phone, which he’d stuck in the cup holder. “What does that thing say?”

  Eagerly, I scooped up his phone. Mom had finally made him get a real one after he’d dropped his beloved Nokia into a vat of turpentine, but Toby didn’t appreciate it like I did. I’d had him convinced that we needed to trade—my phone was so ancient it still had a slide-out keyboard—but Mom had vetoed that idea. She didn’t think I needed a new phone until the old one self-destructed.

  As luck would have it, Toby’s phone looked like it might be on the verge. I could get it to wake up, but even though it was brand-new, none of the apps worked, and the screen kept wigging out.

  “It’s not saying anything,” I said as I returned it to the cup holder.

  “Figures,” Toby grumbled.

  He preferred to communicate with art rather than with deceitful things like words (which could be warped and used against him), so I knew this really meant You can only trust technology as far as you can throw it. I’d never had a problem with “newfangled mumbo jumbo,” as Toby liked to call it, but he was thirty-five (at least). That was halfway to seventy, and that was nearly in the ground.

  I fiddled with the radio, but the only station I could get was the one with that gravelly voiced guy who liked to hear himself make words. “In weather news, torrential rains drench the Wasatch Front,” he said before the static cut him off. It was probably just as well. Anyone with two eyes and a window—or even one eye and a window—could tell that it was raining. But before I could turn it off, he added, “And it looks like the Fenimore Forger is back in action.”

  Toby sat up straighter. “Turn it up.”

  Eagerly, I turned it up, but the station had conked out again. The static was so loud I could hear it over the rain.

  Toby slumped back in his seat. “I just wish they’d catch the guy.”

  Toby and I had been paying close attention to the Fenimore Forger. The story had hit the news when the Fenimore Art Museum announced that one of their recent acquisitions, a lesser-known Thomas Cole, had turned out to be a fake. The museum had traced the painting’s roots, but they’d turned out to be as tangled as my hair in a windstorm. Apparently, the Fenimore Forger never stayed in one place long enough for the authorities to track him down. He came, he painted, and he left.

  “I hope they catch him, too. Or her. It could be a girl, you know. Artists come in all shapes and sizes.”

  Toby rumpled my hair. “Yes, they do.”

  Pride glowed in my chest, a ray of warmth on this gray day, but instead of letting it distract me, I set my sights on the clouds. “I hope the rain doesn’t interfere with the Jackson Pollock workshop.”

  Camp Vermeer, which billed itself as “the only weeklong camp your artist will ever need,” required applicants to submit detailed portfolios, so I’d tried not to get my hopes up. Mr. Nelson, my art teacher, had helped me take pictures of the pieces I’d been working on in class, but the pièce de résistance—that was French for the best part—was the collection of campaign materials I’d produced for my friend David, our new seventh-grade class president. He’d won the election thanks to those campaign materials, and Director Saffron, Camp Vermeer’s respected owner, had also been impressed. She’d called Shiny David, a life-size sculpture I’d constructed from dozens of broken mirror pieces on a welded wire frame, “a mixed-media sensation.” She’d even liked the T-shirts David and I had created by allowing our classmates to fire real, live paintballs at us. If I remembered right, she’d used the word “ingenious.”

  Toby grunted his agreement. “And I hope it’s not much farther.”

  I sincerely hoped that, too, but when we rounded the next bend, we didn’t catch a glimpse of Camp Vermeer, just another stretch of winding road. Not ten feet in front of us, it dipped down into a gully that currently looked more like a creek with so much water gushing through it. I might not have known much about the great outdoors, but anyone who’d played in gutters knew it didn’t take a lot of water to make objects float downstream.

  I sent Toby a sideways glance. “You think we can get across?”

  “Doubtful,” he replied. When he tried to shift into reverse, the truck’s gears shrieked in complaint, and we rolled forward, not backward.

  Toby and I weren’t natural screamers, but that didn’t mean my heart couldn’t pound out of control. While he pumped the brake, I braced myself against the dashboard and tried to remember how to breathe. Luckily, the truck only skidded a few feet before it crashed into a boulder on the far side of the road.

  For a long time, we just sat there, catching up on breaths we’d missed. Finally, Toby asked, “Okay?”

  I patted myself down. “All body parts accounted for.” I glanced at him. “What about you?”

  “I’m fine,” he said curtly, though he would have said that even if his femur had been sticking out of his thigh. I knew what femurs were thanks to Toby’s Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist (which I’d been sneaking peeks at since I was nine). “But the truck’s seen better days.”

  I tested my door, which was now wedged against the boulder. “Are we really stuck?” I asked.

  Toby looked around. “For now.”

  “Well, then, we’d better ditch the truck.” There was no way one measly boulder was going to keep me from Camp Vermeer. “I’ve got some ponchos in the back.”

  I’d planned on using them for the Jackson Pollock workshop, but sometimes you had to improvise. Rain pelted my face as I wrestled open the back window and burrowed under the tarp. It smelled like moldy plastic and was wetter than something waterproof had a right to be, but I’d crawl under a thousand tarps that smelled like moldy plastic to get to Camp Vermeer. When I emerged a few minutes later with a pair of matching ponchos, I felt nothing but triumphant.

  He glanced at the ponchos, then at the water pouring down the windshield. “You really want to go out
there?”

  “Well, we can’t stay here,” I said. “I didn’t know we might get stuck, so I only brought one pack of Corn Nuts.”

  He nodded toward the gully. “How do we get across that?”

  I stuck out my chin. “We jump.” I wasn’t familiar with flash floods, but since Toby wasn’t, either, I could afford a little overconfidence.

  He considered that, then shrugged. “I guess we won’t last long on Corn Nuts.” After unfolding his poncho, he pulled it over his head.

  I unfolded mine, too. Now that we were definitely going out there, I had to admit that I was nervous. I glanced back at the tarp, stalling. “Should we bring my stuff or leave it here?”

  “Leave it here,” Toby replied. “I’ll come back for it later.”

  He glanced up at the clouds—You can’t keep raining forever, his grim expression seemed to say—then pushed open his door and slowly slid out of the truck. I slithered out behind him. I’d barely taken a step before my shoes were caked with mud, but at least the rest of me was dry. The last thing I wanted to do was waltz into Camp Vermeer, which was half-boys and half-girls, with wet clothes and soggy hair.

  “This way,” Toby said as he skidded down the shoulder to the gully. He gestured toward the logs that had wedged themselves between the boulder and the gully’s other bank. “We’ll cross the water on these logs. If you feel yourself start to slip, try to grab those branches over there.”

  He pointed at a low-lying limb that bowed over the road, and I couldn’t help but gulp. I was tall, but not that tall. If I started to slip, I’d have a better chance of suddenly learning how to fly than of grabbing that limb. I slid one toe onto the logs, but before I could take the plunge (metaphorically speaking), Toby grabbed hold of my arm.

  “Maybe you should let me go first.”

  I yanked my toe back. “Be my guest.”

  After adjusting his poncho, Toby climbed onto the thickest log, which didn’t even tremble. Slowly, very slowly, he pushed his front foot forward, then dragged his back foot behind it. I stuck both hands on my hips as I watched him inch his way across. It was going to take forever at this rate. But he did reach the other side, so I guess his patience paid off.

  “Your turn,” he said quietly.

  I took a deep breath. If Toby could make it across, then I was sure that I could, too. I licked my lips, then clambered up onto the log that hadn’t even quaked for Toby. It sat slightly higher than the others, so it wasn’t as slippery as I’d expected, but it also wasn’t as stable. Toby’s crossing must have weakened it.

  Luckily, I had tricky feet.

  I didn’t wait for it to settle, just raced across the makeshift bridge, curling the soles of my broken-in shoes around the bumpy, grumpy log. If there was one thing I’d picked up from seven years of fencing lessons, it was that footwork was the most important part. I was one hop, skip, and a jump away from the other bank when my toe caught on a knot. My arms pinwheeled spectacularly, and before I knew it, I was plunging into the creek.

  But I never hit the water. Somehow, a branch had snagged my poncho, leaving me high and (somewhat) dry.

  Toby grabbed me by my collar and dragged me over to his side. “Esther,” he said softly. He never talked in exclamation points, but I could tell that he was worried. He got quieter when he was nervous.

  “I’m fine,” I said through gritted teeth, wiggling my toes experimentally. “But I think I just lost a toenail.”

  Usually, he liked to sketch non-life-threatening injuries for posterity, but since he didn’t have his sketchbook, Toby thumped me on the back. I immediately felt better. When he headed up the road, I didn’t hesitate to follow.

  As we trudged up the muddy road, I remembered this story I’d once heard about a kid who climbed a mountain by placing his feet in his dad’s footprints, but Toby’s footprints didn’t stick around long enough for me to fill them. As soon as he lifted his foot, the mud swallowed the outline of his shoe. It must have been doing the same thing to my footprints, but I was too tired to check. It was taking everything I had to keep myself moving forward.

  When we reached the next bend in the road, there was no Camp Vermeer, but there was a sign:

  CAMP ARCHIMEDES 1/2 MILE

  “Camp Archimedes?” I blurted. “It’s supposed to be Camp Vermeer.”

  Toby wiped the rain out of his eyes. “Maybe they just changed the name.”

  That didn’t sound likely to me, but I was too worn out to challenge him. “Maybe,” I admitted. “And at least we know it’s only another two thousand, six hundred”—I paused to calculate—“and forty feet, right?”

  Toby arched an eyebrow.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Let’s just think of it as half a mile.”

  Except a half mile in thick mud was a heck of a lot different than on a level track. By the time a fence came into sight, it felt like centuries had passed. I was so wet that I’d forgotten what it felt like to be dry. The poncho was less of a rain deflector than a sweat holder-inner.

  “Come on,” Toby said when I nearly tripped over a tree root. I wasn’t usually so clumsy, but then, I wasn’t usually so wet. “Looks like we’re nearly there.”

  Except “there” didn’t look much like the photos on the website. There were supposed to be a bunch of cabins, but there was just one lodge instead. And it was the biggest lodge I’d ever seen. If Harry Potter had been a lumberjack, this place could have been Hogwarts. It was shaped like a backward L and thirty or forty feet tall, with a steep roof, gabled windows, and an oak door with iron hinges. The sign that spanned the driveway said CAMP ARCHIMEDES again.

  “This isn’t right,” I mumbled.

  “What’s not right?” he asked.

  “That,” I said emphatically as I motioned toward the lodge. “It’s not supposed to be so … big. And there’s supposed to be a mural.”

  Toby smoothed his beard. “We’re standing in front of a log castle and you’re griping?” he replied.

  I scowled down at my shoes. I guess he had a point. But if they didn’t have that Jackson Pollock workshop, I was going to ask for a refund.

  We were halfway up the walk that connected the road to the lodge when the door flew open with a bang and a woman materialized on the porch. Director Saffron’s photo hadn’t been on the website, but I’d been picturing her as a free spirit, a female version of Toby. As it turned out, “free” and “spirit” were two of the last words I would have used to describe this slick-haired, high-heeled woman.

  “May I help you?” she asked primly. She was trying not to shout, but the thunder made that hard.

  I pointed a thumb at my chest. “My name is Esther Lambert, and this is my stepdad, Toby Renfro. He’s here to drop me off.”

  “Esther Lambert?” she replied. “I don’t have a camper by that name.”

  I forced myself not to snort. Did she really have the list of campers memorized? Apparently, the camp was a lot less well-attended than I’d been led to believe. I was about to say so, too, when the door opened again and a pack of scrunch-faced boys appeared. You would have thought they’d never seen the sun from the way they were blinking.

  The woman cleared her throat. “Perhaps you’d like to come inside,” she said as she stepped out of the way. “You look positively saturated.”

  Positively saturated? Who stuck those two words together?

  “Thank you,” Toby huffed as he plodded up the steps.

  But I wasn’t giving in without a fight. “This is Camp Vermeer, isn’t it?”

  The woman shook her head. “Oh, no, it’s Camp Archimedes, home of the world-famous Crazy Cryptography course. Didn’t you see the signs?”

  “But it used to be Camp Vermeer.” When she didn’t react, I added, “And it’s still an art camp, right?”

  “An art camp?” she replied. If she hadn’t said “positively saturated,” I might have thought she was a parrot. “Oh, dear, this is quite the predicament.”

  Adrenaline coursed through my
veins. “What do you mean, ‘oh, dear’?”

  The woman pursed her lips. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I’m afraid Camp Archimedes is, in fact, a math camp.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Her words rang in my ears like the deep thrum of a gong. I’d ended up at a math camp? Did math camps even exist?

  The woman waved us into the lodge. “Please make yourselves comfortable.”

  “But I don’t want to come in.” I stumbled back instinctively. “I’m not supposed to even be here.”

  The woman flashed her teeth, not quite a grin or a grimace. “Well, you are here, so that’s that.”

  “Esther,” Toby said.

  He only said my name in italics when I was pushing the limits of his patience (which was usually limitless), but I pretended not to notice. “I bet Camp Vermeer is over there.” I motioned vaguely up the road. “It’s just past that dead tree, right?”

  She motioned back the way we’d come. “You see that mountain through those trees?”

  The road provided enough of a break that I could catch a glimpse of a distant summit. Thanks to the pouring rain, it looked fuzzy and washed-out—it could have been a cloud as easily as it was a mountain—but I nodded anyway.

  “Camp Vermeer is over there,” she said (smugly, if you asked me). She pulled down a map on a roller; I recognized the interstate but not any of the numbered mountains. “We like to call that one Mount Seven. We like to call this one Mount Ten.”

  I sucked a sharp breath through my teeth. “You mean we went up the wrong mountain?”

  She nodded ruefully. “And the drive back down this mountain would take at least several hours, and that’s in the best of weather.”

  I fought the urge to glare at Toby. It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t know northeast from southwest.

  Or maybe it was.

  The woman stepped out of the way. “Are you ready to come in?”

  I didn’t nod exactly, but then, I didn’t have to. Without another word, the woman shooed the other kids back into the gloomy lodge. They were waiting for us in a half circle when we finally emerged into the common room’s dim glow. We just stood there dripping, and they just stood there gawking. We would have made a great still life.