The Whites of Their Eyes

by Andrew Clements

  “Great!” said Robert. “So, do you think the janitor’s room is unlocked? And if it’s not open, do you have the key? I’ve got to look around in there.”

  “How come?” asked Jill.

  “I was thinking some more about Lyman’s alarm system.”

  “Yeah, what about it?” she said.

  “You see, if there’s a—”

  Ben knew this feeling. It was like reaching for a race buoy out on the bay, only to have Robert come speeding in and steal all his wind. He felt like he needed to take charge.

  “Okay, okay,” Ben said, cutting Robert off, “let’s just go see if the door’s open instead of wasting time talking. Come on.”

  The door was locked, but Ben had all the other keys, and it only took a minute or so to find the right one.

  The second he was in, Robert began walking slowly around the edge of the large room, examining the wall near the floor.

  “Those door sensors? They’re tiny, with tiny batteries and even smaller antennas. So there has to be something more powerful acting as a relay. I’ve got a pretty good idea about that, but whatever it is, it’s probably plugged in, because it would have to be turned on all the time, ready to pick up a signal from one of the sensors. Also, batteries can lose power after a day or so, and this is a long weekend. And since this room is Lyman’s home base in the school, the relay unit’s probably in here. So we have to check out every electrical outlet and power strip in the room.”

  “All right, then,” Ben said, “everybody look around.” He wanted to be the one giving the orders.

  Seconds later Jill called out, “Found something!”

  Robert and Ben hurried over. A dark gray cord was plugged into a wall outlet behind the workbench. The cord ran upward, snaked onto the back edge of the bench, and ended at a six-outlet power strip, also dark gray.

  Ben reached out to move some of the clutter concealing it, and Robert grabbed his arm. “Don’t touch anything!”

  Ben yanked his arm away. Gerritt was really getting on his nerves.

  But he understood what Robert was thinking: If this was part of Lyman’s alarm setup, it needed to look undisturbed.

  Two small black transformers were plugged into the power strip. The thin black cord from each transformer led to a rumpled stack of blue shop rags near the end of the bench closest to the loading dock.

  Robert carefully peeled back half the stack of rags. “Yup,” he said, “just like I thought.”

  One of the cords ran into a slim black box about the size of a TV remote. A row of red LED lights flicked on and off in sequence—left to right, then back again, a constant wave of tiny blinks. Two silver wires about an inch long stuck up from the oblong box, one at each end.

  Robert pointed at the wires. “Antennas. One of them probably picks up the signal from a door sensor. Then the processor in the box decodes which door the signal came from, and then the other antenna sends that information to this.”

  Lifting up one last shop rag, Robert revealed an ordinary-looking cell phone. It was flipped open and the small LCD screen was dimmed, showing only the time stamp—7:43 p.m.

  “So,” Ben said, “a sensor sends a blip, the box decodes it, sends a signal that wakes up that phone, then the phone dials a preprogrammed number, and the information zips to Lyman. Sweet and simple.”

  “Yeah . . . ,” Robert said. “I would have explained it better, but that’s basically it.”

  Ben nodded wisely, staring at the blinking red lights, trying to think of something else to say, something that sounded really smart.

  He couldn’t think of a thing—nothing at all.

  Then he had a sudden, terrible realization: I’m faking it!

  And he was, completely. He was acting like he’d had this whole thing figured out from the start. And he really hadn’t. None of this stuff would have ever occurred to him, not in a million years.

  So, what? Am I trying to win some big contest here? A game of Who’s the Smartest?

  Ben’s next thought was even worse.

  Agghh! I’ve turned into Gerritt—I really have!

  He felt embarrassed, like he’d just been caught in a total lie. He even felt himself starting to blush.

  Ben glanced at Jill—she was looking right at him, a puzzled expression on her face.

  She knows too! Jill knows that I’m trying to out-Robert Robert!

  The horror of that idea snapped Ben’s mind into total clarity. He realized instantly that there was only one possible way out of this mess.

  Ben looked Robert full in the face and gave him an honest smile, no pretending. “This is amazing, Gerritt—really, just incredible!”

  His compliment took Robert by surprise. Flustered and clearly pleased, he mumbled, “Um . . . thanks a lot.”

  But Robert’s humility attack ended quickly.

  “Well, if you think that stuff is cool, check this out!” He pulled a phone from his back pocket. “Do you know what this is?”

  “Duh,” said Jill. “Could it be . . . a cell phone?”

  Robert ignored her sarcasm. “I knew you wouldn’t know. It’s not a regular cell phone—it’s a ghost phone. I was pretty sure we’d find a phone in here, so I went to CVS this afternoon, and they had a whole rack of prepaid phones—no plans to buy, no credit cards, no ID needed. I took this one up to the register and bought it, just like that—nine dollars and ninety-four cents—which includes twenty minutes of talk, plus texting. I can walk into a store and buy more minutes with cash anytime I want. And if I text or call somebody, no one can trace who the call is from. Pretty cool, huh?”

  Jill looked at Robert blankly. “And the purpose is . . . ?”

  Robert grinned and looked at Ben. “How about you, Pratt? See where I’m going with this?”

  “Not a clue,” Ben said cheerfully. He was actually looking forward to being amazed again.

  Robert laughed, enjoying his own show. “Okay, watch carefully.”

  He pushed a little catch on the back of his new phone and popped out the battery. Inside the battery compartment, he moved a small metal band to one side and lifted out a thin green-and-gold wafer.

  “You must know what this is, right?”

  Jill nodded. “That’s a SIM card—it’s the phone’s memory.”

  “Yes,” Robert said, “but you only get half credit. Because even with its SIM card removed, there’s still some memory in the electronics of the phone itself—and that’s important.”

  He picked up Lyman’s phone from the pile of rags and unplugged the power cord.

  “Hey!” said Ben. “Won’t Lyman know?”

  Robert held out the phone. “See the display? Just the time. If it’s not showing a phone number, it can’t send a signal.”

  In five seconds he had shut it down and removed the battery and the SIM card from Lyman’s phone as well.

  “Now, this is the beautiful part.” He fiddled with the phone pieces and punched buttons as he talked. “I plug Lyman’s SIM card into my ghost phone . . . I put my battery back in, then turn on the phone . . . okay. Now, I access my menu, and I tell it to copy all of Lyman’s information into my phone’s internal memory . . . and, it’s starting . . . halfway there . . . and all done! Whatever he had on his phone, it’s now on mine! Now I shut my phone down . . . battery out, then Lyman’s SIM goes back into his phone, then his battery . . . I turn it on, plug it back in, put it down, cover everything up again . . . and it’s like we’ve never been here! Then my SIM goes back into the ghost phone . . . then the battery . . . then we close it up and turn it on. And now, we can take our time and look through my phone and see all of Lyman’s numbers and contacts. And if we decide to make any calls to his contacts, no one will know who called. Now, of course, we might not have any new data at all. If I was Lyman, I’d have hidden a ghost phone here in the workroom—with nothing on the SIM card except one other dead-end number. Of course, it’s entirely possible that Lyman’s not as smart as me.”

  “Um . .
. ,” said Jill, “I think that should be ‘as smart as I.’”

  “What? Oh . . . right, as smart as I am.” Robert smiled, unruffled by the grammar correction. “So, you guys have any questions before we take a look at the captured data?”

  Ben was surprised that Jill seemed to be looking for faults at this moment—but then again, when Robert went full-on about how wonderful he was, it could be pretty awful . . . maybe he was just more used to dealing with it. At any rate, Ben wanted to give Gerritt full credit for some terrific thinking.

  “That is just fantastic!” said Ben, and he let the compliment hang in the air a moment. “However, right now, it’s almost eight o’clock. How about we use our time here in the building to look for the next safeguard—does that make sense?”

  “Sure,” Robert said, and Jill nodded.

  So Ben said, “Great. Gerritt, I can’t wait to see what was on Lyman’s phone, but could you look through all of it on your own later, and maybe make up a list of whatever was there? Then we can really study it and see if there’s a way to use it.”

  “Sure,” said Robert, “that’ll work. No problem.”

  “Great—really, that whole phone thing? Totally amazing.” Ben was already walking. “Pull the workroom door shut, okay, Jill? Now, if we get over into the north stairwell, I can show you what I was doing there last night—before Lyman interrupted me. I want to see what you guys think.”

  It was very dark inside the north stairwell, and Ben and Jill turned on the small flashlights they’d brought.

  “Hey,” said Robert, “can you two maybe share a flashlight? I didn’t bring one.”

  Ben resisted the temptation to say something about how some people maybe weren’t quite as smart as they seemed to be—something he definitely would have said a day ago. The competition thing was a bad habit. “Sure—here,” and he handed Robert his flashlight.

  Ben counted up to the seventeenth tread, and then asked Jill and Robert to examine it. They did, and each came to the same conclusion he had—there was nothing odd about it.

  Then, starting over again from the first landing, they counted up another seventeen treads, which put them near the middle of the flight that began on the second floor. Again, there was nothing unusual about that seventeenth tread.

  “You know, we’ve actually got to look at every single step above the first seventeenth,” Robert observed, “’cause, really, you can start counting up seventeen treads from almost anywhere—if you get what I mean.”

  Jill and Ben agreed, so that’s what they did. It took them almost twenty minutes to examine every possible seventeenth tread from the first floor up to the third. Then they all walked around to the south stairwell and repeated the whole long process again.

  Ben found that he liked having all three of them there hunting together—so much more fun than trying to do this alone in the middle of the night. And Robert was just plain smart—Ben had no problem admitting that to himself. Jill had made a good call, bringing him onboard . . . not that he wasn’t still annoying. . . .

  But I suppose I can be annoying too, he thought.

  Anyway, it felt like having Robert around was probably going to work.

  After finding nothing in the south stairwell, they all walked through the third-floor hallway back to the north stairwell. Ben followed Jill, and they started down.

  “Hey, guys?” Robert called.

  Ben and Jill looked up from the flight below him. He was standing still, three steps down from the third-floor landing, his head cocked slightly to one side. “I think I just figured something out.”

  Jill looked at Ben, and he read her face: Oh boy, here he goes again. But they both smiled a little and shrugged. After all, Gerritt had had some pretty amazing ideas so far.

  Besides, they both knew it really didn’t matter whether they wanted to hear what he had to say or not.

  Robert was going to tell them anyway.

  CHAPTER 7

  Recount

  “We’ve been going at this all wrong, I’m sure of it!”

  Ben and Jill walked up to where Robert was. He stood above them like a professor in a lecture hall, ready to give his presentation.

  “The clue says, ‘After four times four, tread up one more.’ Now, based on how I think the captain chose his words in the first clue, and supported by the actual solution you two worked out, the words of this clue suggest to me that we are in the right area—I’m almost positive we’re supposed to be hunting here in the stairwells. But we are not supposed to be counting steps. We should be counting”—and Robert paused dramatically—“these!”

  He ran his hand back and forth across four or five balusters, the wooden posts holding up the handrail. He looked like he was playing a harp.

  Ben did the math out loud. “Four times four balusters, that would mean going up eight steps, then ‘tread up one more’ to the ninth step. So we’re looking for the seventeenth baluster—or possibly the eighteenth, which would also be on tread number nine! Let’s go!”

  It was a miracle no one died during the race down to the first floor.

  Jill got there first. “Look,” she said to Ben, “you’ve got to adjust for this.”

  They hadn’t counted on the large support at the end of the railing—which meant that the first step only had one baluster.

  Robert narrowed his eyes. “I think Captain Oakes would have included the newel post as one of the first sixteen—anyone want to bet?”

  Ben grinned and shook his head. “Not me.” He’d become a true believer. Robert really was a genius, or at the very least, he had an amazing gift for spotting little details, the stuff that really mattered . . . maybe that was what being a genius meant. But Ben didn’t really care. At that moment, he was ready to take out a full-page ad in the Boston Globe:

  ROBERT GERRITT IS A GENIUS!

  Jill didn’t want to bet against Robert either. She’d already followed him back up to the ninth step.

  Using the end of Ben’s flashlight, Robert started tapping on the balusters—first the one closest to the edge of step number nine, then the one at the back, then three or four on the other steps above and below.

  “Hear the difference?” he whispered excitedly.

  He tapped each piece of wood again. All but one made a deep, solid thunk. The rear baluster on step nine sounded different—it made a higher tone, more of a plink, and there was a tiny buzz, a vibration.

  Jill said, “Try turning it.”

  Robert looked at Ben. “Should I?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Well . . . which way should I twist? I don’t want to break anything.”

  Ben shrugged. “Try counterclockwise—righty-tighty, lefty-loosey, that’s how things usually work. Just go easy in case something starts to crack.”

  “Hold this,” Robert said to Jill, and he handed her Ben’s flashlight.

  He gripped the narrowest parts of the baluster, one hand near the railing and the other down close to the tread. “Here goes . . . ,” and he took a deep breath.

  Ben saw Robert’s arm muscles tense, saw his knuckles turn white. He began breathing again, and his face went bright red as he strained.

  “I can feel . . . some give . . . but it’s not . . . turning.”

  “Let me help,” said Jill. She set her flashlight down and reached between Robert’s arms, grabbing the rounded center of the baluster with both hands.

  “Me too!” Ben hurried up and got a grip just above and below Robert’s hands. “Okay, on the count of three—one, two, turn!”

  Ben felt a little movement. “Give it all you’ve got!”

  Robert grunted with effort and Jill made a high-pitched “Mmmmmmmmm!”

  Almost laughing, Ben let out a long “YaaaaaaahhhhHHHH!”

  As their battle cries hit a wild crescendo, the baluster twisted ninety degrees—kanonk!

  “All right!” They laughed and slapped high fives all around.

  Then Ben held up his hand. “But . . . wh
at just happened, like, what did that do?”

  “Well,” Robert said, “if my theory’s correct, we need to look below—can I use one of the lights again?”

  They hurried down to the stairwell floor. Robert aimed a flashlight back past the newel post, lighting up the paneled woodwork of the wall running alongside the staircase.

  “I never noticed this area before, did you, Ben?”

  “Nope, not really.”

  Ben shined his flashlight up at the twisted baluster on step nine, then brought the beam straight down. “Hey!”

  Robert said, “I see it too!”

  Jill stepped forward and put her hand onto the woodwork where the two flashlight beams met. “There’s a crack . . . and it runs all the way down to the point.” She dropped to her knees. “And if I can get my fingers around the end here . . .”

  She gripped the edges of the wood and pulled. Silently, two sections of the paneling swung outward as a single unit, a large triangular door.

  “That is awesome!” whispered Robert.

  Ben was already at the opening, his camera aimed back into the area under the steps. A sharp, acrid smell hit his nostrils, but he ignored it and snapped a picture. The flash temporarily blinded him, but he aimed again and took another shot, changing the angle.

  “I always take photos—,” he began, but Robert cut him off.

  “Right—documentation, placement of artifacts, site integrity—I get it.”

  “Shhh!” Jill whispered. “Did you hear that?”

  Ben crouched down and looked into the opening, but his eyes were still flash-blind. Then he heard it too. And he knew what it was.

  Jill peered over his shoulder.

  “It’s a rat, a rat!”

  She backed away and flattened herself against the wall.

  Ben shined his light into the opening. Just two feet away a large Norway rat stood halfway up on its hind legs, eyes reflecting red, ears and whiskers twitching. It didn’t seem particularly concerned about the visitors.