“What are you saying?” Brian’s voice floated up.
“I figured it out!” Min shouted gleefully. “Come up and see the facts for yourself. Science wins!”
It was at that precise moment that three small, gray pebbles skittled across the wooden floor like tiny mice. One landed against the side of Min’s sneaker, another against Jayid’s flip-flop, and the third jumped right inside Derrick’s sock. For a moment they stared at each other, slack jawed.
“Are those—are those from the ghost children?” Derrick asked, looking around wildly.
“Never mind!” Min yelled down to the basement. “We’ll text you the answer later!”
And then, as fast as their legs could pump, the three of them flew out of the Scary Place for the last time.
For the solution to this story, please turn here.
Ottonetics
by Peter Lerangis
It is a universal truth that a kid wandering in Central Park after dark is going to die.
Well, so says my mom, Harriet Beers. To her, New York City is a wasteland of crime and devastation, with evil behind every maple tree. So when I walk back from my friend Lizzie’s house through the park after sunset, I don’t tell her.
Which explains why at 8:07 p.m. on a cold Wednesday last October, I was alone in the park’s secluded Ramble section when the shriek came.
It made my knees buckle. It sounded like a tiny child in great pain.
I looked around for help. But the park at night is basically 840 acres of silence in a city of nine million people. All I saw were streetlights, branches, and distant amber windows on Central Park West.
I heard the screech again and realized it was from above. My eyes darted up a hill, where the shadow of the Belvedere Castle loomed. Was a baby stuck up there? Or some owl or cat?
“RrrrrrEEEEEE . . . EEEE . . . kakakakakakaaaaKEEEE!”
I wasn’t going to climb and rescue it. There are people in NYC who do that kind of thing. As I fumbled in my pocket for my phone, my toe banged against the tip of a rock, and I hurtled downward, face-first. I reached out, but my left eyebrow hit the hard-packed dirt. I don’t know if I screamed, because I couldn’t hear myself.
“KakakakakakaaaaKEEEE!” The screech came again.
Then something was looming over me. A shadow. Its head was lumpy, and it had thick arms. I tried to scramble away, but I felt its gnarled fingers grip my shoulders and pull me to my feet.
This time I know I screamed, because my attacker recoiled. It wasn’t a thing. It was a man. As his head jerked away, the lamplight revealed two wide-set eyes, soiled cheeks, and a grimace. I’d seen this guy before in the park, shuffling aimlessly. Right now, he looked like he’d eat me if he weren’t completely toothless. “Why you yell like that?” he grumbled.
I pointed toward the sound. “Because of that! The noise!”
He gripped my jaw and angled me toward the light. “Raccoons. In tree.”
“Wait. That’s what raccoons sound like?”
“Depends on what they are doing.” He examined the side of my face intently. “Looks bad, hijo.”
He pulled me toward a park bench. On it was an open sleeping bag, several plastic bags, and a jar of peanut butter. A sky-blue wooden box stood nearby, about three feet tall, with four wheels at the bottom and a push handle like a laundry cart. A colorful landscape had been painted in the front, with the words “Otto Geheimnis: Ottonetics for Life” underneath. I figured the box contained this guy’s whole life, and the bench was his home.
As he reached into the box, I struggled to get away. But he held tight, yanking me down onto the bench. “Please. Sit. Don’t move.”
Letting go, he pulled out a plastic bag from the box and dumped onto the bench some Band-Aids, a pack of cotton balls, and some random bottles. The next moment he was daubing my face with alcohol. I flinched, but the touch felt soothing. His eyes were emerald-colored, set deeply under bushy gray eyebrows, and his thick hands moved gently as he bandaged my cut. “Better,” he said with a nod.
“Thanks,” I said. “Sorry I screamed in your ear.”
He let out a hoarse laugh. Then he gave me a long look, like he was deciding whether to tell me something. “I am Hernando,” he finally said. “I do something for you. Now you do for me.”
He pulled a thick paperback book from his box:
OTTONETICS!
Solving Life’s Puzzles
by Otto Geheimnis
“Take this, then go home,” he said. “Read it closely.”
“Um, thanks.” I didn’t want this thing, but Hernando looked like he’d cry if I said no. I put it in my pack and then stuck out my hand. “Jake Beers.”
But his back was to me, and he was already unrolling his sleeping bag.
“I know,” he replied.
Harriet’s eyes shot sharp bolts of shame as she yelled, and her big stack of hair moved like a wind-blown rosebush. “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU WALKED ACROSS THE PARK BY YOURSELF?”
“It’s all right, the park is empty at that hour!” I protested.
“THAT’S THE POINT! That’s what makes it dangerous! That homeless guy wasn’t nobody.” She reached toward my Band-Aid. “Look at this. He stabbed you?”
“I fell,” I said. “He gave me this Band-Aid. He’s nice. He paints landscapes.”
“SO DID JACK THE RIPPER!” Harriet thundered.
“Really?”
“I don’t know! He could have.” With a deep sigh, she turned away and pulled open the fridge. “Are you hungry? I made tempeh with Martian seasoning.”
Here’s what you need to know about Harriet. She once sang and danced in three Broadway shows, but she gave that up when she adopted me. When I ask about my birth parents, she says I was abandoned by a half woman–half selkie, but my baby gills eventually fell off. She wears 1970s clothing, and her hair looks like an alien life form, but she doesn’t care about fashion or what people think. She never throws stuff out, including my kindergarten clay sculptures and invisible-ink Valentine’s day cards. Most tenants in our building seem confused when they meet her in the hallway, as if they’d just happened upon a wayward yak. All of which makes me love her even more.
Martian seasoning means whatever spices are left in the cupboard. “No, thanks,” I said.
“What’s this?” she asked, pulling the paperback from my backpack.
“A book by Otto Gesundheit,” I said. “Hernando gave it to me. The guy in the park.”
“Otto Geheimnis,” she corrected me. “The founder of the Ottonetics cult. Happiness through puzzles. ‘You can’t be cross if you do crosswords . . .’”
“That’s actually one of his sayings? You’ve read him?”
“No. But Norman has. Wait till he finds out Ottonetics has reached the homeless community!”
She shuffled over to a landline that hangs on our kitchen wall. Harriet met Norman Kaufmann the same week she adopted me. They talk on the phone about forty times a day. He’s slow, serious, and nearly hairless, which makes him the opposite of Harriet. Both of them yell into the phone when they speak.
“NORMAN? . . . YES, IT’S ME, WHO ELSE DO YOU THINK IT COULD BE?”
I went to get some ice cream but noticed a bookmark sticking out of Solving Life’s Puzzles.
I opened to that page. The bookmark was actually an old photo, facedown. Someone had scribbled on the back in ink that had become faded and splotchy. I held it down, which is hard for me to do, because I was born with camptodactyly, a pinky that can’t straighten out.
For H—
A gift for the most gifted man I know, who travels like a zephyr and observes like a falcon. And within this gift, another for our beloved J—when he is ready. You of all people will know when. And eventually, through these words, he will know why.
Yours,
OG
H, I figured, was Hernando, and OG had to be Otto Geheimnis.
“Is that a note written by the author, bubi?” Harriet called from the phone. “Avoi
d fingerprints! It might be worth something!”
As Harriet went back to yelling at Norman, I turned the photo over. And I nearly dropped my spoon.
In the image, a little boy was looking up, offering the photographer a bagel with cream cheese wrapped in wax paper.
I don’t know who took the photo.
But the little boy was me.
I ran to my bedroom and texted my friend Lizzie about what had happened. I attached a screenshot of the note on the back of the photo.
Lizzie instantly Facetimed me back. “Dude. You’re creeping me out. ‘For our beloved J—when he is ready . . . Yours, OG’? You were attacked by a famous author in the Ramble?”
“No, not the author. A homeless guy.”
“Was it Hernando?” Lizzie said. “The South American painter dude?”
“Wait. You know his name?”
“Everyone knows him. In the morning all the dog walkers flock around him. He’s like Santa Claus. He loves their dogs. It’s a big party.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” I said.
“Duh. Why would you? I have to walk across the park to get to school. You already live on the Upper West Side.” Lizzie exhaled dramatically. “OK, so Hernando’s been carrying around a photo of you—tucked in a book by a famous author, with a note on the back to Hernando from the author, referencing you.”
“He references J,” I pointed out.
“But it’s a picture of you. Who else could it be?” Lizzie’s eyes grew wide. “Jake. Does he look like you?”
“Hernando?”
“The author!” Lizzie said.
“Like, is he my long-lost dad, who gave me up for adoption?” (Lizzie thinks everyone is my lost-lost dad.)
“Well? You’re always talking about trying to find your real, non-selkie parents!”
I held the book open to the back flap. Otto Geheimnis had a gray beard, thick glasses, and baggy eyes. As I pointed the phone toward it, Lizzie said, “I’m trying to imagine you at age ninety-five. It’s too hard. Any other clues? Messages? Photos?”
I held the phone with one hand and flipped through the book with the other. The pages had yellowed, but they weren’t marked up—until the end, where two blank pages had been scribbled on. I showed Lizzie the first.
“Um . . . I’m guessing Otto was studying for the Russian translation?”
“I think it’s Greek,” I said.
The next page was also blank, except for two lines on top:
Warm milk
2C
“OK, it’s something,” Lizzie said. “We’ll need to do some research on this guy.”
Our conversation was interrupted by a knock on the door. “Gotta go, Lizzie.”
I quickly clicked off and slipped the photo/note into my shirt pocket. The door opened to reveal a short old guy in a rumpled tweed jacket. A curtain of stringy white hair hung to his shoulder on the left side of his head, in a massive comb-over fail. He smiled at me through smudged glasses. “How’s the boy?”
“Hey, Mr. Kaufmann, I think you’re supposed to knock and then wait for an answer. But come in. I’m fine.” I smiled but glanced back at my phone, where I was already beginning a search on Otto Geheimnis.
Before Norman could answer, Harriet bustled in behind him. “So sorry, honey, I told Norman not to bother you. But you know him. He cares so much . . .”
I was tuning them out, intent on my phone’s screen:
Otto Geheimnis (1921–2015), German-born writer, puzzle expert, psychologist. Founder of the Ottonetics Life-style Philosophy (OLP). At its peak in 1974, OLP’s chapters were estimated at nearly a million. But they dwindled dramatically in 1991 after a New York Week exposé discovered Geheimnis had lived in Argentina as a cabaret singer named El Canario (the Canary), spawning rumors he was among a group of Nazi officers who had escaped to that country after World War II. . . .
“They weren’t rumors,” Norman said.
His voice startled me. I hadn’t realized he was looking over my shoulder. “How do you know?”
“Keep reading,” Norman said. “Preferably aloud.”
I cleared my throat and recited: “Geheimnis left no known family upon his death in 2015. His effects consisted mostly of notebooks full of crossword puzzles. But hidden among them was a handwritten inventory list, leading to a trove of artworks stolen by the Nazis from Jewish families in Germany and Poland. The note claimed Geheimnis intended to return them to their rightful heirs but chose to stay silent, fearing unjust imprisonment due to what he called ‘false rumors’ about his Nazi past. Although most items have now been restored, a few are still missing, including the famous Fabergé egg containing the Arkady Diamond, worth approximately thirty million dollars.”
At those last three words, Harriet fanned herself with a newspaper and sat at the edge of the desk.
She put her arm around Norman’s shoulder. He was wiping his eyes of tears. “Sorry. This is why I came over so quickly. I’m a lawyer. Semi-retired. My firm is involved in finding looted material from the war. I’m not interested in Geheimnis because of crossword puzzles. I entered the legal field because of what happened to my parents in Poland.”
Harriet smiled at me. “The Kaufmanns,” she explained, “were the owners of the Fabergé egg.”
This was freaky.
Otto Geheimnis, the famous writer, was a Nazi disguised as a singer called the Canary, who happened to steal from Norman’s parents and many years later wrote me a note, to be delivered to me by a homeless Santa Claus named Hernando.
“For our beloved J—when he is ready. . . . And eventually, through these words, he will know why.”
I leafed through the book, hoping to get clues. Geheimnis was all about codes. The age of a tree is encoded in the number of rings. The age of the universe in photons. Even love and friendship could be revealed by solving codes.
At least that’s how Norman explained it. But none of that explained the note.
When I got to the doodles at the end of the book, Harriet cried out, “Aha! Look at that—‘Warm milk, 2C’! The most sensible thing we’ve read. I’ll heat up some milk. We’ll all have a good sleep.”
Norman chuckled. “Warm milk to see what, darling?”
That was when the solution hit me. “That’s it!” I shouted. “2C is a code for to see!”
They both stared at me. My mind raced. The blank page reminded me of another blank page I once gave to Harriet. “Remember my Valentine’s day card from third grade?”
“Of course, Jakey,” she replied. “It’s on my dresser. It said ‘I love you with all my—’”
“I wrote it in lemon juice. Invisible! You had to run a hot iron over it. The heat scorched the juice, so it got brown and you could read it. Like ink.”
“You think Geheimnis wrote in lemon juice?” Norman asked.
“Not lemon juice—milk. The technique works with different liquids. He’s hinting we should warm the milk . . . to see something!”
“The boy’s a genius . . .” In a minute Harriet was holding a hot iron over the book. She carefully pressed it on the page, then lifted:
Caswell Connor, residing on Tenth Street,
boldly handles my current placements,
assuring the arrival of my most important of hidden, snared eggs.
I rest now.
You act.
Know I am smiling.
Norman fell back, clutching the wall. I thought he was having a heart attack. “Oh . . .”
Harriet touched his arm. “Bubi, your blood pressure.”
“I—I know that name,” Norman said. “Caswell Connor was Papa’s lawyer. Connor owned a brownstone on Tenth Street.”
“Wait, your dad’s lawyer was hiding the Fabergé egg for Otto?” I asked. “That makes no sense. Connor represented your family, right? Why would he hide an egg he was supposed to find?”
“The sneak,” Norman hissed. “Papa said he didn’t trust him. Now I know why.” To me, Norman had always seemed l
ike a kind of cartoon character. But he was serious now, shaking as if he were going to explode. “I will track down that treasure if I have to seek out every Connor descendant.”
“Maybe if you talk nicely to them,” Harriet said, following Norman as he stormed out of the room.
I felt for him. But I also couldn’t figure out why this would have happened. And why Otto would want me to know it.
The best way I could help was to learn about Caswell Connor. I did a quick search and came up with some historical info, but not much. He had died in 1987 and I found nothing about a diamond or a Fabergé egg.
Not even a hint that the man had committed a crime.
Hernando stared at the note I had decoded. It was a bright, warm Saturday morning, just too early for the dog walkers.
“Cas . . . well . . .” Hernando drawled. “This is not familiar.”
Lizzie was with me, wearing a plaid Sherlock Holmes–style hat, with a brim in the front and back. Because Lizzie is Lizzie. “Am I correct, sir,” she said, “that you were an acquaintance of one Otto Gehem—Gehamm—”
“Geheimnis,” I said.
“Yes,” Hernando replied softly. “In Argentina, Otto employed my father on a cattle ranch. Otto paid my parents well. But I was not such a good son. Or husband. I got involved in crime and ran away. I was so ashamed. I could not find work. I was in the snow, in a park, almost frozen to death, when Otto found me. He helped me over the years, but things have not been easy. I live here. I have friends. I’m happy.”
“Wow . . .” Lizzie said.
So there was a connection between Otto and Hernando. But that didn’t explain the connection between Otto and me.
“So . . . Hernando . . .” I said, “after you gave me the book, I found a photo. Of me. And on the back was a note . . .”
“From Otto, yes.” Hernando nodded, his eyes moistening. “I have been keeping watch over you since I got to New York. By the time Otto found out where you were, he was very sick. He wanted me to give this to you . . . when you were no longer a child.”
“Aha!” Lizzie shouted. “So Otto is Jake’s lost-long father! Or . . . grandfather.”
“No,” Hernando replied. “He is neither.”
Super Puzzletastic Mysteries Page 21