VIOLET EYES

by Nicole Luiken

  Mike and I exchanged glances. I believed Leona. “All right, we’ll do it. But you have to take care of our other problem.” I spoke in code for the benefit of any hidden listeners and held Leona’s gaze, willing her to understand.

  She held her hands in front of her face as if holding a camera and depressed an invisible shutter. “Gotcha.”

  Message received. On to the next order of business. “What’s the first clue?”

  She looked blank.

  “Treasure hunts always have clues,” I said. My mother had made up hunts for my birthday. Things like, Go seven paces north, then twice that number west, and look under the white rock. Somehow I doubted that Dr. Frankenstein’s clues would be so easy to follow. “Didn’t he say anything else?”

  Leona shook her head. “No.”

  I glanced at my watch: 10:43. “Are you sure he didn’t say anything else, Leona? Anything at all?”

  She shook her head in despair.

  “Did he do anything?”

  “No, he—” She paused, frowning. “He stuck something to the door.”

  Mike was at the door in an instant, using the same lightning reflexes he’d used on the badminton court. I could feel my own adrenaline pumping. He peeled something off the door. “It’s a yellow sticky note.”

  “What does it say?” I crowded closer and looked for myself. The sticky note didn’t say anything; it had a pattern of arrows drawn on it pointing diagonally up. “Put it back on the door exactly where it was.”

  He did so, and I traced the path of the arrow up to the ceiling and discovered another arrow-covered sticky note. This one pointed to the right.

  Mike and I followed the arrows quickly as they zigzagged around the room and then out the door and into the hallway. The next one led to the elevator and pointed at the level three button. I was afraid the elevator would be rigged or wouldn’t work, but it delivered us to the correct floor without demanding a security key.

  The trail finally came to a halt in a bathroom, stuck to a toilet seat. The last sticky note didn’t have an arrow. It said: “You’ve just wasted four minutes following a red herringbone.”

  I took a closer look at the stickies and felt sick to my stomach. The pattern was herringbone, not arrows. “That cheater. That sniveling—”

  “We don’t have time for that,” Mike snapped, his anger directed at Dr. Frankenstein, not me. “Of course, he set traps. He doesn’t want us to win. Think. If the clue isn’t the arrows, it must be the medium, the yellow sticky note itself. Where do you find yellow stickies?”

  “In a drugstore.” I was determined not to rush ahead of myself this time. “Or anyone’s desk.”

  “A drugstore,” Mike said. “He’ll want to spread the hunt all over town to cost us traveling time.”

  We sprinted down the hallway, back to the waiting elevator. Mike hit L for Lobby. We had a smooth ride up, and we raced for the front doors. They stood open and unlocked—unguarded. The hairs prickled on the back of my neck, but no one stopped us, and we pushed through the glass double doors into the night.

  It was cold out; a breeze frisked and nipped around us. Today was the first of November; we were lucky there wasn’t any snow. All the streetlights were on, but most of the houses were dark. Even the ones with lit windows were silent. No TVs playing, no shadows behind the drawn curtains, no laughter, no traffic.

  A ghost town.

  We were in Chinchaga. My guess had been correct. Mike and I swung right, following the riverbank. The park where Mike and I had first met was only a block away.

  We ran hard, speaking in compressed sentences.

  “Look out for a car.”

  “He’ll cheat.”

  But we found no car innocently abandoned on the street with keys dangling from the ignition, and knowing Dr. Frankenstein would cheat was no help. He still had Vincent. We still had to go after him and hope that we were smarter in the end than he was.

  I didn’t feel smart. The drugstore was just one guess out of possible dozens. A yellow sticky note might mean gold glue, for all I knew. The office desk theory could be right, but there were a lot of offices.

  We ran, turning onto Main Street, the highway through town. Most of the businesses were on First Avenue, but the drugstore squatted halfway down Main Street, between the town hall and a flower shop.

  Most of the hunt would probably take place here. There were too many strangers’ houses to search. If Dr. Frankenstein was being even slightly fair—and I thought his pride would demand it—he had limited himself to three dozen businesses around the core and a few other public places like the hospital or the school.

  Mike jerked at the drugstore door. It was locked. He kicked at the glass, meaning to break it.

  I thought of Mike punching through the window, cutting an artery and bleeding to death on the pavement. Leona’s leg was broken. No one would come.

  Mike put his shoulder to the door, crashing against it. Without looking at my watch, I knew it was about five minutes to eleven. One hour left and God knows how many clues to come.

  “Wait!” There was one car on the street, a black Chevrolet. I tried all the doors. The third one opened. I swarmed through into the driver’s seat. The keys were in the ignition. God bless model towns with no crime.

  The engine turned over, and I backed up illegally. Mike leaped out of the way, and I aimed the black hood at the drugstore doors, smashing them open.

  I succeeded better than I had intended, and for a second I thought the whole building would come down around me in a torrent of bricks. Without waiting to see if it would or not, I backed up again, put the car in Park, and jumped out.

  Mike was already running through the twisted doorframe. He flicked on the lights, and we headed for the aisle with paper and pens and other office supplies.

  I found the Post-it notes in the center of the aisle, next to boxes of size 10 business envelopes. We tore through the sticky notes frantically, but they were all still wrapped in plastic, crinkly and undisturbed.

  Dead end. Dr. Frankenstein would be grinning. Laughing. He had a sick sense of humor.

  “Post-it notes,” I said. “Post-it, not yellow stickies.”

  Mike understood at once. We didn’t even speak as we ran out of the drugstore, knocking down magazine stands and not pausing. We jumped into the car, Mike driving this time, and whipped over half a block to the post office.

  The post office doors could be accessed only by steps; it was impossible to drive a car up them. “Don’t be locked, don’t be locked,” I chanted.

  The doors were open. I pushed through, into a room with rows of locked silver boxes. No white note, no yellow stickies, only another set of doors. Locked this time. You could pick up your mail anytime at night, but the rest of the building was shut tighter than a drum.

  Mike smacked his hand against the thick glass in frustration. “We need another battering ram.”

  “Maybe there’s a back door,” I said, already pushing back outside.

  Mike caught me on the steps. In the yellow sodium light his grin was manic and reckless. “How about the parcel drop?”

  It was a steel drawer, not a slot, designed to accommodate bulky parcels, but it was too small for a human being. A thirteen-year-old gymnast might have fit through it but not me. “Impossible.”

  Mike put his foot in the drawer and stood on it, steadying himself against the ceiling. Screeeeech! His weight bent the metal down out of the way.

  I didn’t give myself time to think about it, just stuck my head inside and started squirming through, collecting bruises like stamps. Mike boosted me, and I accidentally kicked him in the chest before falling inside. I tucked into a somersault to protect my head, but the room wasn’t very big, and my legs crunched against a wall.

  It was very dark, and it took me another minute to fight my way out of the back room, past the front counter to the doors. Fumbling along the wall brought illumination. I unlocked the dead bolt and let Mike in.

  �
�You take the back, I’ll take the front,” Mike said, already ducking under the counter, moving toward the cash register and the parcel scale. “Look for a weapon while you’re at it.”

  I went past him, into the back, where the open postal boxes gaped. Stacks of mail were piled along the counter, ready for sorting.

  Should we search the bag? No, that would take ages.

  Or should we search the boxes? Most of them contained mail.

  My gaze sharpened. Written on tape over each slot was a name and number. Dr. Frankenstein would think it humorous to address the note to us.

  Three rows down and two columns over from the right I found it: box 601, Michelangelo. It contained three flyers, two large envelopes, and a letter from M. Shelley.

  Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. I ripped it open. “Mike, come here.”

  He read the letter over my shoulder. It was a poem. Of sorts.

  ‘Twas nighttime and the rotten kids

  Did sweat and tremble in the draft.

  All loosened were their bowels, And the clever genius laughed.

  Beware the ticking clock, my foe,

  The hands that glide, the arms that sweep.

  Beware the seventh sin and tend

  The crafty fat old creep.

  As before, the words were just insults, window dressing. The form was the clue.

  “It reminds me of something,” I said. “Some other poem I’ve read. In English class, maybe. Especially that one line, ‘Beware the ticking clock, my foe.’”

  “‘The jaws that bite, the claws that catch,’” Mike said abruptly.

  I looked at him in surprise as he pulled me out of the room. “‘’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe,’” he quoted. “Lewis Carroll. ‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son.’ The next clue has to be in the library somewhere.”

  My watch said 11:20. No time to stop and argue other theories about toilets (bowels) and clocks. We could only gamble, grinding away from the curb in the still-running Chevy, doing an evil two-point turn in the middle of the road. Race to the library.

  “Which one? School or public?” I yelled, screeching to a stop at the junction with Main Street. Left or right?

  “Wait a second,” Mike said. “This is wrong. The treasure hunt is another test, just like the others. It’s a demonstration for Dr. Frankenstein’s customers, a sales pitch. They’ll be ready to take delivery as soon as we prove ourselves.”

  “I know,” I said. I’d known as soon as Leona mentioned companies and foreign powers bidding on Renaissance children. “So which way, school or public?”

  “You knew?” Mike echoed. “If you knew, what are we doing here?”

  “Public library,” I decided, turning right. “He’d use a different clue for the school.” I floored the accelerator, driving up the street. “It doesn’t matter,” I told Mike. “Leona’s working on the customers—we can deal with them later. It’s Dr. Frankenstein we have to beat now. Do you want him to win?”

  “No. But—”

  We reached the library. I didn’t bother to get out and check the library doors—the good doctor would have made sure they were locked—I drove straight through, bumping to a halt against some interior steps.

  I threw open my door and got out of the car. Mike swore but followed me. He said no more about the customers—he knew as well as I that they were likely watching us right now via satellite, that all the clue spots would be bugged.

  Mike headed for the children’s section and the C’s while I tried the card catalog. It would be just like Dr. Frankenstein to hide the clue there instead of in the pages of the book.

  “Carroll, Lewis. Use for Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge.” I flipped through the cards: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Hunting of the Snark, Through the Looking-Glass. No “Jabberwocky.”

  Ten feet away from me Mike was tossing children’s books on the floor, the same titles I’d named. He shook his head; he hadn’t found anything either.

  “‘Jabberwocky’” was a poem. Maybe it was in a collection of poems. I sprinted over to the index tables and the poetry index, looked it up with shaking fingers. “Beware the ticking clock, my foe.” Dead ends, dead ends, dead ends.

  “‘Jabberwocky’” the entry read. “Poem by Lewis Carroll in Chapter One of Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.” “‘Jabberwocky’ is in one of the books.” I shouted the title to Mike.

  He snatched the book up off the floor and began pawing frantically through the illustrations. “The poem’s in mirror writing.”

  I was on my feet. “The bathroom.” The only mirror in a library.

  Mike started to follow, but I stopped him. “No. Keep reading in case this is a dead end. Have you checked the inside pocket?”

  I hadn’t been in the library often enough to know where the bathrooms were. It took me another sixty seconds—“the hands that glide”—before I found them in the basement. Ladies and Gentlemen.

  Nothing behind either mirror. Nothing scratched on the surface. Nothing in the toilet bowls.

  “The arms that sweep.”

  Back upstairs, I shook my head at Mike’s expression. “Find anything? What does the poem mean?”

  “I don’t know. Humpty Dumpty’s explaining it to Alice, but it doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s a nonsense poem. Carroll made up words by packing two words into one. ‘Slithy’ means ‘lithe’ and ‘slimy’” He turned several pages, skimming. “No good. She talks to the White King next.”

  “Humpty Dumpty knows, but we don’t. ‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.’ That’s a big help.”

  “Mother Goose?” Mike suggested, just as I said, “Eggs. The grocery store.”

  Two possible solutions again, and maybe both were wrong. “Grab the books,” I said. “You can read them in the car.”

  The grocery store sounded right to me. Dr. Frankenstein’s level of humor.

  “‘Simple Simon,’ Tour and Twenty Blackbirds,’ ‘Jack and Jill,’” Mike muttered as I screeched around the corner. “This is stupid,” he complained, slamming the book shut. “I don’t understand why we’re doing this. If it’s a demonstration, Dr. Frankenstein won’t kill Vincent.”

  “Oh, yes, he will.” The car bumped over a curb. “Remember the missing aircar? Dr. Frankenstein killed an innocent guard just to draw off the military. If we lose the treasure hunt in front of his customers, we have no value and Dr. Frankenstein will kill Vincent.” In the I.G.A. parking lot I banged into an abandoned shopping cart. It got hooked on the fender and dragged along after us, squealing.

  “And if we win?” Mike asked, bracing himself against the dashboard.

  “Dr. Frankenstein will kill us anyhow to prove that he can.” I rammed through the double doors of the supermarket, finally dislodging the cart from the car bumper.

  The hood of the car crumpled, and Mike and I were thrown forward against our seat belts. I had a bad feeling about the noise the engine was making, but there was no time to look at it.

  Without pause, we got out of the car and went inside. Some dim lights were on at the back of the store, so we didn’t bother searching for switches. We just ran hell-bent past the produce section, past the cracker and cereal aisle toward the milk and eggs.

  I knew the layout from shopping trips for my mother and turned without looking into aisle 7.

  My right foot slipped, and I went down in a greasy skid on my hands and knees. Wet goo coated my hands; I tried to push myself up and slipped back down, skinning my elbow. Something crackled underneath my knee.

  Mike had managed to keep from stepping in the goo, warned by my fall. Disgust bunched up his face. “It’s egg yolk. Raw eggs.” He gave me a hand up: without it I would have fallen again.

  The entire aisle was a runny mess of slimy eggs from end to end, sprinkled here and there with broken eggshells.

  The g
oo started to dry and harden on my jeans; I could feel egg white in my hair, on my arms up to the elbow. I was furious with myself for not having been more cautious.

  One side of the aisle held freezers full of waffles and pastry; on the other side were the eggs, cheese, and milk. I put one foot into the low cheese bin that ran the length of the aisle, intending to avoid the egg-slick floor.

  “Wait!” Mike pointed, and I saw that Dr. Frankenstein had been very clever indeed.

  Sitting on the very top shelf halfway down the aisle was a single egg. A face and a suit had been drawn on it with a black marker. Humpty Dumpty—balanced on the very edge of the top shelf.

  The threat was obvious. If we jostled the shelves and the egg fell, we might lose the clue. “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.”

  We would have to do this the hard way.

  We waded out into the broken eggs.

  Even watching where I placed my feet, I fell once more and got pulled down another time trying to hold Mike up, sliding and squishing, like comic movie villains foiled by a kid and a bag of marbles. But it wasn’t funny, and we weren’t the villains.

  The soles of my shoes were so coated with egg that it became easier to skate than walk. We made it safely to the center of the aisle and Humpty.

  Mike jumped up and plucked the egg from its perch as if blocking a basketball shot. He lost his balance on the landing, quickly tossing the egg to me before he crashed.

  I caught it, didn’t crush it, studied it carefully.

  “Well?” Mike hauled himself up again.

  “There’s something written on it.” I turned the egg toward the paltry light source and saw letters running along Humpty’s belt. We would never have been able to reconstruct the shell if Humpty had fallen. The clue read, “leap off the cliff leap off the cliff’

  CHAPTER 18

  “LET ME SEE.”

  I gave the egg to Mike for him to pore over. The words circled in my head just as they circled Humpty Dumpty’s body.